Geister
This double album with compositions from the last two decades offers an insight into the diverse musical soundscape of Joël-François Durand. From Mirror Land (2005) to Geister, schwebende Geister... (2020), Durand’s work shows a unique development characterised by his use of microtonality. The poetic dialogues of the Fernando Pessoa-inspired Quatuor à cordes No. 2: Cantar de Amigo (2020) and Durand’s ongoing exploration of microtonal spaces in La descente de l’ange (2022) reveal a dynamic and tr…
Khôra
The cycle Khôra, featuring saxophone quartet and microtonal accordion, explores the dynamic interplay between sound, philosophy, and space. Inspired by Plato’s Timaeus and Jacques Derrida’s reinterpretation of Khôra, the nine pieces challenge traditional notions of time and space. Performers from the SIGMA Project and accordionist Iñaki Alberdi create a fluid, immersive experience that goes beyond linear hierarchies. Capturing the essence of an ever-changing world, the album reflects Ernst Bloch…
Musica Automata
From the composer, Leonardo Barbadoro, comes “Musica Automata”, an engrossing foray into the expressive possibilities of electronics and robotics implemented by an acoustic instrumentation, culminating as a genre-blurring excursion into the outer reaches of experimentalism. Created with entirely digital source material, rendered by the Gent based Logos association's orchestra of automated, robotic instruments - percussion, woodwind, brass, organ, and numerous unconventional instruments - this st…
Slow Roads
'Slow Roads' is an album of eight pieces written by Hague-based Serbian composer Ivan Vukosavljević between 2019 and 2022, for solo 1/4 comma meantone organ. All eight pieces were recorded in 2022 on five different historic organs, dating from the early 16th to mid-17th centuries, located in medieval churches scattered throughout the countryside of the northern Netherlands. Each piece was adapted for a specific organ, as they vary considerably in their disposition. All eight pieces are written i…
A Basement Suite
“Even without detecting in the figure of the refugee or exile the emblematic figure of our time, the loosening of the bonds with a place of origin is no longer rewarded by a search for a promised land. The loss of a deep-rootedness that would provide an identity is no longer perceived as a lack that needs to be filled. We strangers in our own land, and conversely we feel at home everywhere.”Mario Perniola, Ritual Thinking (tr. Massimo Verdicchio)The Italian philosopher Mario Perniola, in his 200…
Second Room
Limted LP edition. Second Room is Martin Taxt’s second album in a series of works investigating possible relations between music and architecture. In this work written for alto saxophone, two microtonal tubas, double bass, church organ, hand bells and modular synthesizers he is inspired by the Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, and his ideas on different concepts of living. In a lecture at the Harvard University in 2011, Fujimoto sets up a comparison between the nest and the cave, as two fundament…
Irida Records: Hybrid Musics from Texas and Beyond, 1979–1986
An incredible set of vinyl reissues explores the unfolding sonic fiction of Texan composer Jerry Hunt and others affiliated with his Irida label.
Roger Reynolds at 85, Vol 1: String Quartets
This release documents Roger Reynolds’ most recent string quartets in composer supervised first recordings by the acclaimed JACK Quartet. “Flight”, commissioned by Jack Quartet, arose from a collaborative process lasting almost five years. Its four movements reflect upon the stages of humanity’s aspirations for flight. Of “not forgotten” Reynolds writes: “As the years pass, one notices that certain elements in one’s days have unusual persistence in the mind. Such elements may involve individua…
Maim (Water)
Maim, a major piece in Chaya Czernowin’s œuvre, is a large scale, 50-minute orchestral tryptch with 5 soloists. The 5 soloists are include regular interpreters of her music: Rico Gubler, tubax (a hybrid of a saxophone & tuba); Peter Veale, oboe & musette; John Mark Harris, piano & harpsichord; Seth Josel, guitars; Mary Oliver, viola. Maim, “water” in Hebrew, is the metaphor which dominates the piece. Elementary forms of water appear throughout Maim, musically translated. Scattered droplets — ar…
Afatsim
** 2021 Stock ** Born in Israel, composer Chaya Czernowin has lived in Germany, Japan and the U.S. Her teachers included Dieter Schnebel, Joan Tower, Brian Ferneyhough and Roger Reynolds. Czernowin’s sound occupies a unique world. Often many instruments are used to become one “composite” instrument. Time is slowed down, so that the slow flow of sound enables one to perceive the smallest details of a texture or a sound. The resulting music can feel fluid, dense or agitated, at times echoing that …
Surface Tension
** 2021 Stock ** What do you get when Erik Satie meets Anton Webern for a cup of tea in England? These delightful miniatures of Howard Skempton might just be it. With their distinctly English vocabulary, witty turns, and spare yet memorable melodies, Surface Tension offers a survey of Skempton’s music in solo through quintet settings from the 1970s through the 90s. Born in Chester, England in 1947, Skempton moved to London to study with Cornelius Cardew in 1967. There, with Cardew, he co-founded…
The Seventh Seed
** 2021 Stock ** Hilda Paredes is among the foremost younger-generation Mexican composers. Schooled in London where she now lives, Paredes studied with Harrison Birtwistle, Franco Donatoni and Peter Maxwell-Davies. Receiving a commission from the Arts Council of Great Britain for a chamber opera and working together with British poet Karen Whiteson, Paredes composed The Seventh Seed centered around the Persephone legend with allusions to Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Throu…
Pietra e Oggetto
A sparse and subtle jungle comprises the pieces that make up "Pietra e Oggetto". It is subtle, as such it remains in the memory. Thanks to the device of silence, which is like the air in between things, it allows time for what we have heard to imprint on our acoustic sketchpad. Like closing your eyes to preserve a memory and then moving on to the next. We feel a certain privilege in listening to these undecidable environments; these composite and hybrid objects filled with synthetic biodiversity…
Rise, Follow
* Edition of 200 * A composition for two bass Renaissance flutes. Performed by Mara Winter and Johanna Bartz. Rise, follow is a dialogue of long tones played by two bass Renaissance flutes, featuring subtle but persistent changes over the duration of one hour. It is performed in one sitting without interruption. The composition adopts the principle of instrumental ‘consort-style’ playing in Europe during the 16th century: a family of similarly pitched and constructed instruments performing polyp…
Anabasi
* Edition of 200 * In what might appear to be a paradox of logic, much of the history of avant-garde music - from Eric Satie, John Cage, and Morton Feldman, through the minimalists, post-minimalists, and beyond - has presented new forms radicalism through remarkable, self-imposed constraint. Sometimes structural, others tonal, temporal, or a combination of any of the three, these limitations and focus not only place demands of focus and attentiveness on the listeners, drawing the ear toward subt…
Shade / Gradient
**425 copies, 3-color letterpressed jacket with large 20-page booklet containing the full score and a lengthy interview with the composer** Catherine Lamb’s work is characterized by an insistence on what she calls the “interaction of tone”. Precisely tuned intervals, played slowly at subtle volumes, blend and generate a host of difference and combination tones, phasing, beating and aural illusions. Her ensemble and orchestral compositions have been performed in grand halls and d.i.y. spaces alik…
Rivages sur l'antipode
* 250 copies, hand numbered * Composed on a special request from ini.itu, “Rivages sur l'antipode” (shores on the opposite side of the earth) is his first vinyl LP and is based on similar archival material as the one used by Francisco López in his stunning “untitled #228”. Nonetheless, D'incise (aka Laurent Peter) has achieved radically different results, combining digitally-processed textures, microsamples and humming harmonics rippling out over broken rhythms. He has collaged the least obvious…
Entanglements in the orthopedic sensorium
Vinyl Lp, edition of 300 copies. The work of the Berlin-based composer Andrew Pekler has been been documented in various releases for labels such as ~scape, Staubgold and Kranky. When asked by Giuseppe Ielasi for some material to be released on Schoolmap Records, Pekler immediately considered the possibility of taking the many unused music fragments that had been collecting cyber-dust on various hard drives and bringing them into some kind of order. Raw sketches, orphaned sounds, finished pieces…
Canti Del Capricorno
Original copy, the title of Scelsi's song cycle possibly refers to the fact that the sign of the Capricorn corresponds with an area of the Earth stretching from India to South America and includes, most significantly, the Amazon. The Amazon, as Scelsi noted, is a place where a pre-historic human culture survives. Scelsi's Songs (19) of the Capricorn, reduce the concept of "song" to poetically loaded vocal utterances imaginatively recalling the conditions of music and language in humankind's dist…
Giacinto Scelsi
**Comes in glossy gatefold sleeve with 20-page booklet ** Features 6 works by the influential Italian avant-gardist of the 20th century, dating from 1961-1990. Pranam I (for voice, 12 instruments and tape, 1972); Anagamin. Celui qui choisit de revenir ou pas (for 12 strings, 1965); Quattro pezzi su una nota sola (for chamber orchestra, 1959); Quartetto n. 4, (1964); Okanagon (Tam Tam and double bass, 1968); Quartetto n. 2 (1961). "For Giacinto Scelsi, music was above all a manifestation of the e…