Solar One/The Watts Towers
Other Minds is excited to bring you an EP of two archival works from Bay Area composer Charles Boone. Both pieces take their inspiration and titles from man-made landmarks across California. Solar One from a monumental power station near the desert city of Barstow, The Watts Towers from Simon Rodia’s outsider art masterpiece in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. In much of his work, the composer seeks to create sonic landscapes that are simultaneously static and dynamic. Certain elements, ha…
Diamanda Galás
Long out of print, Diamanda Galás' incendiary 1984-released second album is available once more, remastered by Brooklyn's Heba Kadry
The Plains At Gordium
The Plains at Gordium was composed from June to August 2004 and is dedicated to Charlotta Kotik. The incentive to compose the piece came from a percussion group in Brno, Czech Republic, who asked me for a piece of music. Not being a commission-disciplined composer, I wrote a piece for six percussionists, while the Czech group, DAMA-DAMA had only four members and could not perform it. The size of the piece also defies the scale of a standard percussion piece, 1,290 measures over a 108-page score.…
Hieroglyphs
Temporary Super Offer! "‘Hieroglyph’ is a word that history has gradually prised away from its linguistic roots as the Greek term for sacred carvings. Over time it came to be associated principally with the enigmatic symbols found in Egyptian burial sites and because these symbols resisted translation for so many centuries the word hieroglyph became a synonym for incomprehensibility. It was the discovery of an artefact – the socalled ‚Rosetta Stone‘, containing both hieroglyphs and parallel text…
Because a circle is not enough
music for bowed string instruments consists mostly of music composed by Malcolm Goldstein (b. 1936) between 2018 and 2019 while living in Montréal, Québec. The impulse to compose this series came from Goldstein’s experience as a teacher and performer of Béla Bartók’s 44 Duos for Two Violins (1931). Whereas Bartók’s series features a clear progression to the pieces, gradually increasing in technical and musical complexity from beginning to end, music for bowed string instruments has no such seque…
3 String Quartets
Starting with his music of the 1960s and early 1970s, with works such as For 1, 2 or 3 People (1964), the Prose Collection (1968–71), and Changing the System (1974), Christian Wolff (b. 1934) quietly re-invented chamber music. He created music in which the activities of the performers— timing, cueing, assembling and selecting materials—were foregrounded. Although to some extent these activities were always a part of classical music, Wolff opened them up for creative decision-making by the musici…
Musica Nuvolosa
Tip! After its reading of Julius Eastman's Feminine, released in 2021, the Ensemble 0 revisit the repertoires of Pauline Oliveros and György Ligeti from another angle. From the works of Oliveros, they exhumed a deeply meditative piece for accordion and voice, giving it a new life in the form of vaporous, cloud-riding chamber music. With Ligeti, the piano radicalism of the Musica Ricercata miniatures crops up again in a new and as yet unreleased orchestration.
Things That Didn’t Work the First Time
With each composition, Annesley Black embarks courageously on a new experiment with an open future; while at the beginning of the compositional process the material can still mean many things, it gradually ceases to do so. And at some point, all ambiguities are cleared up: the piece stands. The paths that have led to this point are ultimately paradoxical: they are “immensely labyrinthine and completely logical at the same time” (Black). In their own unique way, the pieces gathered on this CD pre…
Ultima Thule
One could take Wolfram Schurig's Ultima Thule for five ensembles, a work whose mere instrumentation in-vokes that utopian place which, according to the composer, should automatically be the goal of any authentic artistic activity, as a motto for Wolfram Schurig‘s entire compositional œuvre. In ancient Greece, the name Thule referred to the northern-most part of the world, whose accessibility and actual existence, however, remained uncertain. Since Virgil, th…
Approdi 1, Avanguardie Musicali a Napoli - Volume I
Approdi is a cultural operation involving thirteen composers and numerous other artists from heterogeneous segments of the Neapolitan visual arts. The guest composers of the first volume are Carlo Vignaturo, Enzo Amato, Max Fuschetto, Girolamo De Simone, Giusto Pappacena, Piero Viti, Vito Ranucci, Gabriele Montagano, Patrizio Marrone, Enrico Iannaccone, Alessandro Petrosino, Carlo Mormile and Gaetano Panariello. The album was then joined by the poet Luca Buonaguidi, with a lyric for the late com…
Symphony No 106
Documenting a reunion of Musica Elettronica Viva's founders Frederic Rzewski (piano and vocals), Richard Teitelbaum (keyboards and computer) and Alvin Curran (keyboards, computer and shofar) at the 32nd International Festival Of Current Music in Victoriaville, Canada in 2016.
Occam XXV
In 2018 experimental festival Organ Reframed commissioned Éliane Radigue to write her first work for organ, 'Occam Ocean XXV'. Radigue worked closely with organist Frédéric Blondy at the Église Saint Merry in Paris before transferring the piece to Union Chapel for its premiere at Organ Reframed on 13 October 2018. The recording on this compact disc was made at a private session at Union Chapel on 8 January 2020. 'Occam XXV' inaugurates the very special record series of works exclusively commissi…
Concerto Pour Violoncelle / Photoptosis / Tratto II
2022 Stock * With the legendary “Studio Reihe Neuer Musik” series, Wergo created a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the Sixties of the past century already. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the label now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality on CD for the first time.
The "Studio Reihe” starts with a CD with works by Bernd Alois Zimmermann. His complex “pluralistic” style fuses past, present and future into a musical unit of the h…
Momente - Version 1965
* 2022 Stock * With the legendary “Studio Reihe Neuer Musik” series, Wergo created a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the Sixties of the past century already. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, the label now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality on CD for the first time."Studio Reihe” now continues with a work by Karlheinz Stockhausen: His “Momente” [Moments] for soprano, four choral groups, and thirteen instrumentalists have not …
Pulse Music
*CD gatefold wallet with tip in booklet* Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuire’s Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europe’s angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock seria…
Live im Haus des Rundfunks
The story of six soulmate musicians meeting at the intersection of classical composition, pop, electronic and minimal music begins in 2016 with their celebrated performance at the Cologne Philharmonie. After follow-up performances at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn as well as the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Gregor Schwellenbach, Daniel Brandt, John Kameel Farah, Paul Frick, Erol Sarp and Kai Schuhmacher made a guest appearance at the invitation of Radio Berlin Brandenburg in the iconic Haus des Rundfunks…
How Lonely Sits The City?
Great new piece from the Swedish composer, working as fruitfully as ever with his ensemble Skogen. Mysterious, dream-like and melancholic. Another gem.
Together on the Way
A concert-length work for pipe organ, piano and percussion, created by the composer and the GBSR Duo (Siwan Rhys and George Barton) at the recent Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Wonderfully brooding music, beautifully played.
Adjacent Sound
Four pieces from the Argentine composer, whose unique soundworld is well described by the title of the first piece: ‘The Construction of an Imaginary Acoustic Space’. Compelling, disconcerting music from a very interesting composer, performed by the New European Ensemble, Ensemble Modelo62, Francesco Dillon and Teodora Stepančić.
Discreet Angel
Three works written over 25 years ago by a virtually unknown Canadian composer. The pieces were originally performed just once or twice, but have recently re-emerged and sound extraordinarily contemporary. New recordings by Apartment House and Cristian Alvear, as well as one historic recording by the composer himself. Brilliant stuff.