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George Antheil was not only always ahead of his time; he was also an alert contemporary and ready to take in all artistic trends of the first half of the 20th century. There was hardly a kind of music he wasn't aware of, hardly a madness he didn't take part in, and hardly a scandal he missed, or missed to cause. All his personal entanglements are certainly reflected in his compositions – and we wouldn't expect any less from him; but his continuing reputation as a genuinely unique character is ne…
It's hard to go wrong with Fela Kuti's work from the 1970s, and LIVE!, which features the Afrobeat innovator backed by his powerhouse band Africa '70 and ex-Cream drummer Ginger Baker, is no exception. Like all of Fela's recordings from the era, LIVE! consists of just a few tracks, each of which approximates or exceeds the ten minute mark. Yet the arrangements are so dynamic on these tracks, the criss-crossing polyrhythms so absorbing, and Fela's incantatory vocals so entrancing that the long ru…
If you'd like to hear what might remain, and might survive, of the popular common musical property, these two works by the Salzburg composer Clemens Gadenstätter will give you some essential clues. "Akkor(d/t)anz" is based on the character of Romantic piano music manifested by monumental chords. The explosion of the chord is followed by pulsations derived from differentiated perceptions of its details. The "dance" of chords in accordance with new formations of the original chord demands an energ…
Both Sostenuto and Dal niente were composed for the clarinetist Eduard Brunner. “As in the earlier Ausklang for piano and orchestra, the musical material is determined by the interplay of the experiences of resonance on the one hand and motion on the other. Both aspects of sound encounter one another in the conception of structure as a multiply ambivalent ‘arpeggio’, i.e. as a process of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction – experienced in temporal succession – which is conveyed both…
The second cello concerto, entitled: Y: la fiesta está en pleno apogeo – And: The feast is in full progress (1993), is based on a poem by the Chuvash poet Gennadi Aigi. The vision of a raging mass of people awaiting the last Judgment is transformed into music by the composer with gripping, immediate, expressive force, free of graphic patterns. A moment of glory not for Gubaidulina only, but for David Geringas on cello, too. And as a bonus on this CD: Diez Preludios –Ten Preludes for Cello, in Vl…
Collecting two of Fela Kuti's finest mid-1970s albums onto one disc, CONFUSION/GENTLEMAN presents the revered Nigerian Afro-pop renegade in the midst of an early career stride. Released in '73, GENTLEMAN consists of the latter three out of this set's four tracks, and is particularly notable since it marks the fiery performer's studio debut on the saxophone. Never one to shy away from challenges, Kuti offers up an impassioned sax solo at the beginning of the extended title song (even though he ha…
Hirotomo Hasegawa : ichiriki, voice, loops. Shizuo Uchida : bass, ichigen, loops. Debut album by a new improvisation group consisting of Hirotomo Hasegawa and Shizuo Uchida. Both have a leather-bound folder full of underground back-story. Hasegawa was the lead singer of seminal early eighties Japanese punk hardcore group Aburadako (Greasy Octopus), while Uchida was a long-term member of Haino's Nijiumu medieval dream-drone unit. The group's instrumentation is highly unorthodox, placing Uchida's …
Meerkat is a kind of Italian underground big band. Here we find Adriano Zanni (Punck), Matteo Uggeri (Hue), Luca Sigurtà, Luca Bergero (Fhievel), Davide Valecchi (Aal), Andrea Ferraris (Ics), Fabio Selvafiorita, Paolo Ippoliti (Logoplasm), Laura Lovreglio (Logoplasm) and Andrea Marutti (Amon, Never Known). If you have been paying attention in the last few years, you may recognize these names as Italy's finest in the fields of ambient, electronics, microsound, post guitar - well, anything but tru…
Superb introduction to a largely unknown avant-garde composer/instrument builder; one of the most important ReR releases in a while. The music of little known East European composer Ernö Kiraly has finally been preserved -- a collection of original works that will impress and amaze all students of contemporary classical/electroacoustic composition, along with those who have only recently discovered the sound worlds of Pierre Henry and Harry Partch. Kiraly's experimental music stems from two sour…
In the early 1970s Feldman increasingly turned his attention to works for orchestra, in most cases combined with a solo instrument, like Piano and Orchestra (1975). One aspect that was important to him in all of these works was a research into sound, an "unceasing effort to create, by way of exclusion and integration, by operating with colored projection surfaces and various spatial levels, a kind of self-supporting structure elastic enough to take up the exactly fixed initial impulse and contin…
An attempt to convert Brussels' sonic reality into music. Mutated environmental sound materials gathered in Brussels, remixes of interviews with inhabitants and extracts of installations are flanked with atmospheric compositions made with sounds from other cities and countries.
“It seems most important to me not to stop being a connoisseur; I freely confess that I would rather be considered a hedonist than an analyst.” This statement by Luis de Pablo is reflected in his music; not in violent yet superficial currents of sound but in finely differentiated sound as de Pablo’s Las Orillas (1990) demonstrates: “The composition is very linear, particularly in the slower parts. The orchestration has therefore been planned especially thoroughly such that each voice has a meani…
Today, the piano concertos by Béla Bartók are regarded as works of classic modernism and are considered suitable even for conservative audiences. Musica Viva, the concert series for contemporary music in Munich, included the piano concertos in their program back in 1957, a time when it was by no means a matter of course to hear this music in established concert halls. The man at the piano was one of the greatest of his trade: Géza Anda, a fervent and uncompromising advocate of Bartók's oeuvre, w…
The sonata originated in the Baroque as a small, one-movement form, which nevertheless already contained the core of the sonata to be later developed and composed in elaborate detail by the Viennese Classics. In his Sonatas and Interludes John Cage stuck to the concise, one-movement form, thus establishing a link to Scarlatti and Bach's preludes as well as to Chopin's Préludes and Satie's piano pieces. Other than many of his later, freer works, these small but complex gems are fixed and noted do…
In cooperation with IEM Graz and musikprotokoll 2005 (steirischer herbst, ORF). Excursion into the Middle Ages: Klaus Lang’s latest composition breathes new life into Gregorian chant more than a thousand years old. One hears the traditional sequence of the mass movements, but newly composed material gives it a new interpretation. Klaus Lang does not wish to evoke images in his listeners but rather empty and impoverish their minds.
Restocked, special discounted price: one of his best and 'more affordable' release, Demetrio Stratos live in 1979 with Lucio "Violino" Fabbri (PFM violin player).The amazing research of Stratos brings many suggestions of unexplored fields of research that are still to be studied such as the particularly stimulating and innovative pre-eminence of the meaning over the meant, and the ritual value of the voice.[12] His research into the field of phonetics (Articulatory phonetics, Acoustic phonetics,…
The second CD of col legno's Wien Modern Edition is dedicated to Luciano Berio, who throughout his life kept on searching for new sounds, and new instrumental and orchestral organizing principles in his work. His Sequences for solo instruments are among the most important landmarks in recent music; later on, Berio decided to "comment" on some of these notoriously complex solo works from an orchestral perspective. Chemins and Chemins IIb are adaptations of the Sequences for harp and viola. "The b…
Steve Reich, one of the foremost composers of our time and an important 'first generation' minimalist composer has performed at The Kitchen Center for the Arts many times during his career. The Kitchen, an interdisciplinary organization known for its commitment to experimental work, has an archive of audio and video recordings that cover its three-decade existence. Orange Mountain Music in collaboration with The Kitchen's curators has found several wonderful recordings and among them are these m…
Perhaps this collaboration was destined to happen, and we’re overjoyed that it is happening here! Tampere, Finland’s Uton (Jani Hirvonen) and Taranto, Italy’s Valerio Cosi (who is ½ of Pulga after all) are two of the most creative and most prolific musicians working in experimental music at the moment, and on Käärmeenkääntopiiri, Uton and Valerio have mastered a sound that combines elements of psychedelia, free jazz, krautrock, environmental sounds, drones and more for an ecstatic listening expe…
An opera? An anti-opera? A monodrama? Whatever it may be: Neither (1977) marks the meeting of the kindred artistic souls of Samuel Beckett and Morton Feldman.