Musing And Reminiscence
Ezra Sims (1928-2015) was known mainly as a composer of microtonal music. Surrounded by world-class performers who championed his music, he produced a large number of chamber and solo, choral, and two orchestral works. With his unwavering commitment to his unique vision, he made an enormous contribution to modern music. This retrospective spans his entire career, almost fifty years of compositional activity, and is an excellent introduction to his very distinctive sound world. Sims’s lyricism an…
Sonatas
Lejaren Hiller (1924-1994) is, understandably, best known for his computer-assisted compositions and works utilizing electronics. The three pieces included in this collection span a crucial fifteen-year period in Hiller's career. The first was written two years before Quartet No. 4 for Strings, The ILLIAC Suite. The second work was written three years into his time as a music professor at the University of Illinois, while the final sonata in this collection was written during his second year at …
Outlines of the Night
Elusive and illusory, Age Veeroos’ music captures a unique tension between focus and ambiguity. The album "Outlines of the Night" presents compositions in which, for example, violin and electronics, as in Schattenseele, evoke corresponding sensations of a “shadow soul” through obsessive, circling motifs. In Keha for bass clarinet, physical and biological processes are musically embodied, oscillating between registers. Fantasia “A Threadbare Chant” and Ma olen suur kuu su silmapiiril further demo…
Duo, Fives, Quintet, Trio
Born in Michigan but for most of his life a true Californian, Robert Erickson (1917-1997) had a reputation as a maverick. His musical path was never a straight line, nor, really, a line at all but a landscape, with ranges of features rather than mere points of interest. He was a profound and original musical thinker who embraced the expressive possibilities of all music, from the Western classics and moderns of his own early education to Indian and Balinese traditions and all manner of contempor…
Clusters: American Piano Explorations
Rory Cowal is a distinctive pianist, one who draws liberally on classical chops, ample experience with improvisation, and a predilection for the new and uncharted. This makes him especially attractive to composers who wish to blur the boundaries between traditional styles and genres. A musical adventurer at heart, Cowal seems drawn to challenging and unusual projects. The eight pieces on this CD reflect this willingness to experiment, to not just play the same old (now canonic) warhorses of the …
Schtyx
"All his life, my father played the trombone and sang; just before he died, he became a music critic. He said "Chords, yes Alvin, but it needs more melody." SCHTYX was the answer. It opens with a dotted quarter at 50. From the start, implications appear and never cease. They remain open for business like a river. The melody, first thought terminal, is recycled on a child's buzz saw, but then reappears as a mensch. Ten minutes later, it turns up a 5/4 Waltz scrutinized by a group of unemployed ha…
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…
Sounded Voice, Voiced Sound
In the heart of 21st-century Japan, Yu Kuwabara emerges as a composer of remarkable versatility and resilience. Inspired by Japanese mythology, Buddhist chants, and Edo songs, Kuwabara explores the energy of the Japanese language through her compositions. Her works, such as Bai and Dharani and Toward the Brink of Water Or the Verge of Dusk, blend Western classical influences with traditional Japanese elements. Kuwabara’s research in traditional arts fuels her innovative approach, capturing the f…
Near Distant
Near Distant by Michelle Lou explores the intricate interplay of stasis, time and perception. Lou’s compositions challenge conventional interpretations, presenting music as a constantly evolving landscape. Through “static” or “stasis-variation” she reveals the complexity within seemingly unchanging sounds, inviting listeners to explore subtle transformations in pitch, timbre and dynamics. This album embodies Lou’s unique approach, emphasizing our active role in perceiving and transforming the in…
Zensolence
"Zensolence" embodies the auditory canvas of Osmo Tapio Räihälä, a synaesthetic composer who transforms the visual into the musical. For Räihälä, art forms transcend their mediums and speak a universal language through diverse expressions. His experience of colours, shapes and textures in music is reflected in this eclectic album, where the traditional meets the innovative. Räihälä draws inspiration from the abstract and translates it into a musical lexicon that is as diverse as it is distinctiv…
To Byzantium and Beyond
The album is inspired by the poetry of William Butler Yeats, in particular his work Sailing to Byzantium. The main composition, which features five recorder sizes from tenor to garklein, explores themes of time and transcendence, depicting a journey to an imaginary Byzantium where the poet is transformed into a golden bird. The four movements correspond to stanzas in Yeats’ poem, with recurring elements such as a lyrical refrain and a gyre reflecting the poet’s themes. The trajectory of the piec…
Paul Hindemith, Alfred Schnittke, Anna Gourari, Markus Poschner, Orchestra Della Svizzera Italiana Lugano
Paul Hindemith / Alfred SchnittkeAfter three acclaimed solo piano programmes for the label, here Anna Gourari widens the instrumental spectrum with the Lugano-based Orchestra della Svizzera italiana under Markus Poschner’s direction in striking performances of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra and Paul Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments. Gourari’s pianistic command is one of “virtuoso polish and with flawless action”, to quote the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, and her holistic, wide-reaching grasp of…
…we return to ground…
Other Minds is pleased to present …we return to ground…, a new recording by Irish composer Karen Power and Quiet Music Ensemble. This double CD features three of Power’s large-scale pieces pairing natural sounds with musical instruments, written for and with Quiet Music Ensemble over an 8-year period. Beginning with instruments of ice in 2015, Power's experience of pairing natural sounds with musical instruments has evolved into a transformative body of work. Her approach to composition, creatin…
In Glow of Like Seclusion
Samuel Andreyev’s music is incredibly varied, from the sparse resonance of the Sonata da Camera, the ‘cartoon music’ – as the composer puts it -of Vérifications, characterised by primary colours and strong instrumental timbres; the Sextet in Two Parts which in contrast focuses on minute timbral shadings; and of course the cantata for solo voice and ensemble which is the title track of the album.
Performed by Ensemble Proton Bern, conducted by Luigi Gaggero with the magical soprano voice of Peyee…
With love
Georgia Denham (b.1997) draws on anecdotal experience to create her music. She studied with Andrew Hamilton at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and now with Richard Causton at the University of Cambridge for her PhD. She lives with her husband, a theoretical computer scientist, and their many beloved plants. “This collection of chamber music from 2018–2022 wakes scores I thought were long since sleeping, where I first learned to write the delicate sounds I loved. With music written during my studi…
Supports & Surfaces
Paolo Griffin is a composer and curator based in Toronto/Tkarón:to whose music has been described as placing “… the listener in a kind of sonic microgravity” (PANM360) and as “…uncompromising and thoroughly engrossing.” (LvT). Paolo’s work involves ongoing research about the sounding and perception of microtonal rational intonation (Just Intonation) combined with a rigorous, process-based approach to sonic form and structure. The work he creates explores the creation of colour/shading/densities …
Ricercari for rainy days
Eden Lonsdale is a composer of acoustic music living and working between London and Berlin. His music focuses on exploring the various ways that movement and stasis can co- exist, as well as the inter-connectedness of harmony, timbre, melody and rhythm. Often using very limited materials, his dense and immersive sound-worlds attempt to draw the ear into the smallest details and hope to inspire the listener’s self-guided exploration into the music’s manifold layers. The three pieces from this alb…
The Nordheim Tapes
*2024 stock* Arne Nordheim might not be the best known early electronic music composer, but with this fabulously presented double disc of work it should help his music achieve at least a little wider recognition. He might be best known (at least outside his native Norway) for the discs on Rune Grammofon, but here we get some of his earliest tape work from the 1960s, possibly his most interesting period, at least to me. As a die hard Radiophonic Workshop enthusiast this collection seems to come f…
Dystophilia
Dystophilia: A fascination with the rate of societal decline. An unravelling of order as it careens into a dystopian AI future where melodies pile helter-skelter over phrases, genres melt seamlessly into one another, metal textures crash into chamber-like enclaves, forms teeter on the edge of collapse, violent rhythms transform into ghostly voices, and spiralling polyphonies end in jazz riffs or pop songs.
The music of this album from MC Maguire’s apocalyptic aural imagination, is poured into tw…
Kinesis, Vol. 2
In 2021, the Galan Trio – an epic classical piano trio hailing from Athens – built a bridge from Greece to the USA in the form of ten new works for piano, violin, and cello from composers based in the Southeast and Northeast. The project, aptly named Kinesis, met with such acclaim that their odyssey now continues with another phase: twelve commissioned works covering the Midwest and South Central states. Praised by Fanfare magazine for the “open ears and flexibility they display in so many idiom…