Music with Changing Parts
Founding work of minimalism, Music with Changing Parts is a piece with free instrumentation. The musicians choose which part to play among the 8 staves of the score. At each indicated cue, the musicians can change part, which produces an abrupt change of instrumentation. While the music is based on a melodic material limited to a few notes that are repeated in patterns that expand or contract, the changes in orchestration refresh the listening experience by producing sonic contrasts. These tec…
Slåtter På Kontrabass
*2025 stock. 300 copies limited edition* Håkon Thelin is a generation-defining double bassist whose exuberant musicality and high-level technique have been heard in a wide array of album releases and concert performances over the past 25 years. Known both as an interpreter of contemporary music, where the notes resemble mathematical equations with both 8 and 9 unknowns, the musically omnivorous three-headed troll Poing with Frode Haltli and Rolf-Erik Nystrøm, and as a composer of both solo and e…
Nozomi
Pianist Masako Ohta and trumpet player Matthias Lindermayr are back on Squama with 'Nozomi', the follow-up to their 2022 debut 'MMMMH'.The Japanese title, which translates to ‘hope’, felt fitting, as the album was conceived during a time of personal loss for Ohta, during and after which music proved itself as a beacon of hope.
The music on Nozomi unfolds gently, with Lindermayr’s airy tone and lyrical playing being wrapped in Ohta’s chordal backing that moves from tender to tense and back over t…
SOVT
'SOVT' is an album containing one 55-minute piece, written for piano by Sarah Hennies in 2017. SOVT stands for Semi-Occluded Vocal Tract which refers to vocal exercises that strengthens the voice by helping the vocal cords vibrate more efficiently. One may practice SOVT exercises by singing with a straw in the mouth which regulates air pressure and reduces strain on the vocal folds. Hennies encountered these exercises in a class on so-called “voice feminization” for transgender women which also …
Wunderkammer
*100 copies limited edition*
Elena D'Alò: fluteCosimo Fiaschi: soprano saxophoneLuca Venitucci: accordion, objectsSarvin Asa: celloGabriele Pagliano: prepared double bassNicholas Remondino: percussion, objectsFrancesco Toninelli: percussion, objects
Lacinia
Returning to Die Schachtel with his forth full-length with the label, the Genoa born, Bologna based, guitarist and electroacoustic composer, Stefano Pilia, delivers “Lacinia”, a new, immersive cycle of compositions, delving deeper into the realm of metaphysical, spiritual, and divine meaning, weaving astounding arrangements of sonority from a palette of synths, strings, brass, organ, various electroacoustic instruments, and percussion. Resting at a refined intersection of the acoustic and electr…
Dioramas
*350 copies limited edition* On Andrew Chalk's 2025 album for An'archives, 'Dioramas,' he returns to the art of the miniaturist, after the long-form exploration of 2024's 'Songs Of The Sea.' It's an appropriate mode of address given the title - each of these fifteen pieces indeed feels like a replica of a specific scene, rendered in miniature. As with much of Chalk's music, they set out to explore humble terrain, a thread of melody in slow motion, or a weave of texture, sometimes in aquatic repo…
Belt of Orion
Belt of Orion by Stockholm-based Isak Edberg is the composer’s second solo release on XKatedral, and his first to focus solely on instrumental music in the form of two pieces of extended duration for solo piano.
Sakamoto (On Guitar)
Jonathan Bockelmann is a classical guitarist and composer based in Munich who first made waves in 2023 with his debut album ‘Childish Mind’. His entry into composing were arrangements he had made of pieces by Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. Some of these have been released digitally in three editions and are now available on vinyl for the first time. The record comes in high quality packaging with an embossed art print and features both some of Sakamoto’s lesser-known works like the ‘Suite f…
A Root Or Mirror, Blossom, Madder, Cracks; Together
"[..] With Rebecca Bruton’s piece, the melody/ harmony is transmuted into something psychedelic by manifesting its essential indivisibility from the shifting textures of the music as a whole. There’s often an ephemeral virtuosity to this music, an intricate (sometimes opaque, sometimes disorientingly transparent), florid weave of sound. But this virtuosity doesn’t assert dramatic effects; there are gestures here, but they’re the movements of sounding bodies, not the quasi-meaningful gesticulatio…
Goebbels/Glass/Radigue
*2024 stock* Erwan Keravec's 4th opus devoted to contemporary music, Goebbels/Glass/Radigue features a trio of contemporary music maestros. Evocative, minimal or sensitive, 3 very different ways of imagining music. Heiner Goebbels places the bagpipes in the mountains, then abruptly in an industrial landscape, all the while quoting Bach, while Philip Glass' music uses the repetition of 5 notes served by continuous breathing. Finally, Eliane Radigue brings the instrument closer to intimacy.
8 Sonneurs pour Philip Glass
"My reasons for writing pieces are often very surprising.... Two Pages, you'll recall, is a unison. Someone asked me if I was trying to follow the evolution of music history and if, then, my next piece would follow that logic and be fifths. So I wrote Music In Fifths. All movement is parallel, so I had to do one with contrary motion. After Music In Contrary Motion came its opposite, Music In Similar Motion. It was all very simple. In 1969, nobody knew me or really cared what I could write, so I …
In C | 20 Sonneurs
*2024 stock* It's quite unusual for me to take on an existing piece. Since I've been interested in contemporary music, I've devoted myself to commissioning new pieces. This time, it's a bit different. I wanted to extend the ringers' quartet into a form reminiscent of a bagad. In C (1964) consists of 53 ordered patterns. The musicians repeat them freely and move on to the next. Terry Riley simply explains that each musician must be neither too far behind nor too far ahead of the others. This grea…
Transits: Volume 1
Big tip! American percussionist and composer Michael Ranta is a legendary figure who has worked with some of the most significant names of 20th century music but despite this and impressive body of work of his own, he has remained an obscure figure....
Important Records and is pleased to present Transits: Volume 1 the first in a series of releases by composer/percussionist Sarah Hennies documenting never before heard chamber works mostly composed in the 1970s while Ranta was living in Taiwan.
B…
Within
Ainon, a Helsinki-based ensemble founded by cellist-composer Aino Juutilainen, returns on We Jazz with their second album, out 6th September. On Within, the four-piece plays music influenced by jazz, contemporary music and classical music, all morphed together into a highly inspired musical vision that echoes the legacy of the likes of Abdul Wadud and Jimmy Giuffre. The music of Ainon might be best described as "avantgarde chamber jazz", with original compositions and the individual voices of th…
Rewild
"Rewild is an effort to make visceral the relationship between our own lives and the manifold periodicities of deep time. Inspired by the perspectives and timescales of nonhuman beings and distant orders of magnitude in the universe of life, Rewild seeks new strata in musical parameters, exploring the uncanny zones at which pitch becomes rhythm, harmonic interval becomes beating rate, and timbres morph over time. Like a giant body or ecosystem slowly breathing, Rewild’s constantly transforming s…
Reminiscenze
Reminiscenze: vague and distant memory, nearly lost in oblivion. Form and structure of the past to which the author refers consciously or unconsciously. The pieces aim to translate the sound quality of the voices of Renaissance music into acoustic saxophones through the use of multiphonics. The structure of the composition Reminiscenze is based on In te domine speravi by an anonymous composer, Miserere mei Deus by Fabrizio Dentice and Per non dir ch'io moia by Michelangelo Rossi. The material of…
Polytempo Music
Other Minds is pleased to present Polytempo Music, a new recording by American composer Brian Baumbusch with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Polytempo Music draws influence from Indonesian gamelan music and minimalism, with their interlocking rhythms, stable harmonies, and kaleidoscopic instrumental colors. Conceptually, it also owes a debt to Conlon Nancarrow's rhythmic experiments. Building on those foundations, Baumbusch invites us to explore an advanced heterophony—multiple ins…
another
Composed by Stefan Thut in 2021Written for Joseph Kudirka's collection of music for music boxlater the score has been read in various other ways
Side a was recorded by Jaike Stambach in Berlin in May 2022.Joseph Kudirka: music box
Side b was recorded by Stefan Thut in Solothurn in May 2023Cristián Alvear: guitarChristian Kobi: soprano saxophoneJoseph Kudirka: synthesizerStefan Thut: celloMara Winter: flute
Distant Fragments
With "Distant Fragments", Camilo Mendez presents an album of solos and duos that showcase his most intimate and reflective works, creating a rich sound tapestry. While Mechanical Resonance I: Iridescent Resonance explores cloud luminescence through prepared violin and viola, Five Fragments deals with the themes of variation and polyphony. Cancion de la Distancia, on the other hand, reflects the fleeting nature of memory and time, inspired by Arturo’s poetry. Recorded by Roberto Alonso, Linus Fun…