Reissues
Descansos, Past
JimFox's Descansos, Past, written in April 2004 in memory of composer-performer John Kuhlman, who died a few years earlier, was premiered in Los Angeles (by the same musicians who are heard on the present CD), June 2004, as part of a series of concer…
Fade
In three connected sections, Rick Cox's Fade offers a series of harmonic “moments” of various densities and complexities and timbres and lengths. Throughout the work, these moments, like elements in a mobile, are in a constant state of changing persp…
Long Night
Kyle Gann's Long Night is exquisitely drifting, ever-unfolding music for three pianos that sometimes play independently and at other times in synchronization with one another. Gann calls this “the most successful piece from my early, Brian-Eno-influe…
Just Another Asshole
Just Another Asshole was an influential and now-legendary mixed-media publication series edited by Barbara Ess from 1978 to 1987. The submission process was open and collaborative, and each issue was produced in a different format (e.g., limited-edit…
Top Ten: 2008-2018
Edition of 200. 550 pages, LP size. Top Ten: 2008-2018 is the second volume in James Hoff’s Top Ten series. In almost every issue since April 1998, Artforum has asked an individual from the art world to compile a top ten list of their favorite recent…
Top Ten: 1998-2008
Edition of 200. 440 pages, LP size. Top Ten: 1998–2008 is a new edition of the long-out-of-print publication by James Hoff. In almost every issue since April 1998, Artforum has asked an individual from the art world to compile a top ten list of their…
From Shelter
Steve Peters's from Shelter is music written in 1997 for choreographer Lane Lucas’s dance/theater work Shelter, which deals with “the concept of metamorphosis, and the way connections between people can bring us to a greater awareness of our place in…
A Temperament For Angels
Michael Jon Fink's A Temperament for Angels (written in 1989 and fully revised for this recording in 2003) combines equal measures of beauty and grit in a powerful, kaleidoscopic, elusively shaped textural music that is compelling from its first quie…
Los Tigres De Marte
Frequently shifting focus as its harmonies melt one into another, this swirling piece finds its wildly branching roots touching on many styles of music—from Delius and Debussy to bop to techno. Los Tigres de Marte is sometimes lush and enveloping, so…
The City The Wind Swept Away
The quiet rumbling of trombones and the soft keening of strings haunt the piano’s slow stream of notes. A mosaic, a tapestry. Rich harmonies and simple triads come and go, like the ever-changing, yet ever-similar, landscapes one passes while driving …
The Complete 10-Inch Series From Cold Blue
Back by popular demand (and available for the first time on CD), this boxed set of three CDs collects all the music released on a popular series of 10-inch vinyl records that were put out by Cold Blue in the early 1980s. During the Cold Blue label’s …
An Hour Out Of Desert Center
Chas Smith's An Hour Out of Desert Center is scored for pedal steel guitars, composer-designed-and-built crotales and sound sculptures, zithers, and a 1948 Bigsby lap guitar (a one-of-a-kind instrument that was owned by famed steel player Joaquin Mur…
Awakening At The Inn Of The Birds
Continents of City and Love and Tidal, written 20 years apart, are both arch-form pieces scored for two pianos, synthesizer, string quartet, and double bass. They both feature expanding piano lines that intersect and compliment individually expanding…
Four Voice Canons
Over the past 25 years, Larry Polansky has been composing a series of fascinating mensuration canons (a formal concept dating back to the Renaissance) that run a sonic gamut from wildly boisterous (#6) to serenely introverted (#17, Guitar Canon). Thi…
The Light That Fills The World
These three works exist amid an undeniable esthetic spirit of the times—the embracing of pre-compositional principles and structural processes in the service of a highly personal artistic statement. However, John Luther Adams’s recent work tends to t…
Adams / Cox / Fink / Fox
This album presents four noted West Coast composers—three from Southern California and one from Fairbanks, Alaska—writing haunting, generally quiet, sometimes lyric, occasionally pensive music for clarinet and bass clarinet accompanied by either stri…
L'Incantesimo della Soglia
Avant-garde and experimental musics are intrinsically connected to community, collectivism, support, and collaboration. Audiences and artists, stretching to every corner of the globe, continuously rely on each other to push into ever more ambitious r…
Cold Blue
Back by popular demand (and available for the first time as a CD), this essential collection of West Coast new music—an anthology known simply as Cold Blue—is a classic. Originally issued on vinyl in 1984, shortly before the demise of the old Cold Bl…
Aluminum Overcast
Chas Smith's six-movement set of variations that comprise Aluminum Overcast play with the listener’s sense of time—the perceived pace and the clock pace at which musical events take place—as they slowly progress, the spare advancing to the dense.The …
Maria Falling Away
This CD brings together six of Rick Cox’s elegantly sparse, dark, sensuous, vaguely desolate soundscapes in which emotions seem to bubble just below cool surfaces (tracing a history of his work from 1990 through 2001). Most of these pieces display Co…