Reissues
Musicautomatica
2024 stock The long awaited CD edition of our first vinyl release ever (2003), will finally give a wider audience the opportunity to listen to some of the most intense compositions of this visionary and uncompromising composer. Minimalist before the Minimalists, pioneer of Computer Music, founder of the Studio of Phonology of Florence, visual artist and hacker ahead of his time. This was Pietro Grossi, a larger-than-life Italian composer who questioned the concept of musical authorship and the i…
Venus in Cancer
The 1969 guitar classic, remastered from the original tapes. With new reflections by Will Ackerman, Max Ochs, Steffan Basho-Junghans, and Pete Townshend. "Robbie Basho released Venus in Cancer in 1969 on the Blue Thumb label. After five albums for the Takoma label in the '60s, Basho had cemented his reputation alongside John Fahey and Leo Kottke as one of the most brilliant guitarists of his generation. His wide range of musical influences from around the globe set him apart from other blues-bas…
Une anthologie poétique
An awesome edition by the well-known artist and 'Une anthologie poétique' with 'RH l'optophonétiste' by Isabelle Maunet+ CD with 'RLQS poème en trois cascades' (1947), 'Interview avec les lettristes' (1946), 'Sound-rel' (1919). These works rotate around the notion of synaesthesia, both in the sense of a harmony between the senses, and also, so to speak, in preparation for new sensory environments, of which there were more to come during the twentieth century. In contrast to the alleged revelatio…
The Sound Of Being Alive
Whitehouse remind us what it’s all about with a remastered collection of classics spanning 1998 - 2007: “Look up, look all around you, dump the fucking rubbish, and rise up. Listen to the sound of being alive...” Assuming that you’ve never heard of them, Whitehouse are thee arch, original power noise unit formed around William Bennett (vocals, electronics, percussion) and Philip Best (vocals, electronics) who met in London around 1982, and the pair would go on to establish one of the most notor…
Birthdeath Experience
Official reissue of the 1st Whitehouse album, originally released on the Come Organisation in 1980. Includes William Bennett's original LP design. Includes the warning: "Extreme electronic music: please acquire with due caution." "The place it all began: the seminal first album by Whitehouse. Even to this day, it is a remarkable piece of work created entirely with tone generators and EDP Wasps, and lyrically full of what would be their uncompromising trademark irony. It would prove instrumental …
Halogen
a very nice reissue of the 1994 studio album recorded by Steve Albini in Chicago and featuring colour artwork by Trevor Brown. One of their few truly 'minimal' and 'meditative' is i can say so...
a sounding of sources
Malcolm Goldstein has been labeled an “improviser” and a “composer-violinist” (or merely a violinist). What this CD once and for all shows is that he is indeed those things, but encompassing them all is the fact that, profoundly, he is a composer. As he points out, “At the core of Baroque music was the integration of composition and improvisation,” and Goldstein brings the perspective and focus of a seasoned performer to this undertaking. In this way his music represents a further evolution of t…
Music For Keyboard 1935-1948 / The Early Years
This double-CD set combines two of the key titles of Columbia Records's
legendary "Music of Our Time" series curated by David Behrman. Jeanne
Kirstein's recording of Cage's early keyboard works remains a touchstone
of Cagean interpretation notwithstanding the passage of time. Christian
Wolff recalls, "I remember Cage saying that Jeanne Kirstein's playing
caught the spirit in which the pieces were written at the time he wrote
them-a kind of simple excitement and enthusiasm (also, surely, ou…
Vladimir Ussachevsky: Electronic and Acoustic Works 1957- 1972
This composer portrait features six of his pioneering works in the medium as well as two of his choral works, an aspect of his output that was just as important to him. The final two works on this CD make extensive use of the human voice. The first of these, Three Scenes from The Creation, is based on texts from Ovid’s Metamorphosis and the Akkadian creation epic Enuma Elish, telling the story of the primordial gods and their struggle to create order out of chaos. The recorded choral tracks were…
Earle Brown: Selected Works 1952- 1965
This long-awaited reissue of the CRI recording of Earle Brown’s (1926–2002) music is the best overview of his seminal early works. “It is obviously a great pleasure for me that Cri is re-releasing its 1974 recording of my work, and an even greater pleasure that I am able to add to the repertoire. The performance of Times Five and Novara still seem very fine representations of the works and are performed brilliantly by the Dutch musicians. December 1952 as realized by the late, brilliant pianist …
George Antheil: Piano Concerto No. 2
The Piano Concerto No. 2 is an experiment in classical form. The work contains the same sudden juxtapositions and abrupt contrasts of mood as his futurist music. But the excesses of his recent Ballet mécanique are compensated for by an almost spare, baroque orchestration and motifs that draw on Bach as much as on Stravinsky. In three movements, Antheil employs a more restrained but still exuberant style. The beautifully meditative slow movement is followed by a virtuosic and compelling toccata. …
Live 1975-1979
Heldon's Live recordings in Paris 1975 to 1979. Disc 1: "Live Electronic Guerilla," live 1976 (featuring: Richard Pinhas (g, moog), Patrick Gauthier (mini-moog, moog bass), Francois Auger (drums). Disc 2: "Well And Alive In France," live 1979 (featuring: R. Pinhas, P. Roussel, F. Auger)." This 3CD set is a special reissue of two previous Captain Trip releases that were issued separately: Live Electronik Guerilla (CT 550CD) and Well And Alive In France (CT 551/52CD). A terrific electronic powerdr…
Pioneers of Electronic Music
In 1950, the Columbia University Music Department requisitioned a tape recorder to use in teaching and for recording concerts. In 1951, the first tape recorder arrived, an Ampex 400, and Vladimir Ussachevsky, then a junior faculty member, was assigned a job that no one else wanted: the care of the tape recorder. This job was to have important consequences for Ussachevsky and the medium he developed. Electronic music was born. Over the next ten years, Ussachevsky and his collaborators established…
Chamber And Gamelan Works
Lou Harrison believed fervently in music’s power to create cultural bridges. To this end he applied his prodigious skills and creative energies to creating syncretic works that link diverse musical languages. Faulted at times for his eclecticism, Harrison responded with a vibrant defense of hybridity, cultivating a musical multiculturalism long before that term—or even the concept—held the currency it now enjoys. Harrison’s major contributions to twentieth-century American music lie in three mai…
Unjust Malaise
This three-disc set marks the first appearance on disc of the music of the African-American composer Julius Eastman (1940–1990), who died sixteen years ago under unexplained circumstances and whose musical legacy was thought lost. This comprehensive and definitive document, which comprises almost all of Eastman’s signature works, will undoubtedly be a revelation for those who have thus far been unable to hear his work. Eastman was an energizing underground figure, one whose forms are clear, whos…
Wind Shadows
The music on these CDs takes us into a new realm of music making, one that Alvin Lucier has defined for us and one that demands that we start to listen anew. His work has been more often described in terms of science than of art as if it were a series of quasi-scientific experiments, but to put the emphasis here is to miss the point, for its purpose is never “explanatory” (the goal of science) but, like all art, “revelatory.” This is not to suggest that the composer has some spiritual agenda in …
The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 4
Meticulously remastered from the original mono master tapes! The Bewitched was Harry Partch’s first work solely intended for dance (and mime-dance at that; he was not overly enamored in his lifetime of so-called “modern dance”). Drawing heavily from his deep affection for the music-theatrical performance traditions of Greek theater, as well as those from Africa, Bali, and Chinese opera, Partch conceived of a contemporary American music ritual-theater where musicians not only play, but also funct…
The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 3
The four works on this newly remastered CD are eloquent testimony to Harry Partch’s aesthetic of corporeality. The music he composed for The Dreamer That Remains, for Rotate the Body in All Its Planes, for Windsong, and for Water! Water!, was intended as only one component in the total artistic experience. In these works music joins with drama, with film, with dance, even with gymnastics, as integral parts of the composer’s vision..New World's The Harry Partch Collection, Vol. 3, as was the CRI …
The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 2
Harry Partch’s compositions of the 1940s have remained until recently an unwritten chapter in the history of American music. And yet it was these very pieces—the collection of four works he would later collectively entitle The Wayward—that brought him to the attention of the New York musical world. His concert of these pieces for the League of Composers established for him a small but permanent reputation as a musical maverick who had wandered off well-worn tracks and had developed a sort of lat…
The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 1
This newly remastered reissue marks a welcome return to the catalog of the first volume of the classic 4-CD collection that was formerly available on the CRI label. The works recorded on this disc span the first six years of what Harry Partch (1901–1974), slightly tongue-in-cheek, called the “third period” of his creative life. They show him moving away from the obsession with “the intrinsic music of spoken words” that had characterized his earlier output (the vocal works of 1930–33 and 1941–45)…