New & Notable Classical Albums

191012141518

Comments

  • edited June 2017
        
    - "The album’s title derives from the mould-breaking work of Edgard Varèse. Composed in Paris between 1929 and 1931, Ionisation was written for 13 players (reduced here to six in an arrangement) and melded a huge array of instruments from all the percussion families – whether made of wood, metal, skin or plastic – into a single sound, striated with shimmering detail.

    The remainder of the album gathers up 20th-century American classics, several of them written in the wake of Ionisation. Henry Cowell composed Pulse in 1939, Lou Harrison’s The Song of Quetzalcoatl and John Cage’s Third Construction both date from 1941 and the Toccata by Carlos Chávez from 1942. Each has its own, muscular idiom, and each uses the available, kaleidoscopic variety of instruments in its own original way. The polymetric structure of Pulse or Third Construction, the use of Asian instruments, the focus on sounds from beyond the classical sphere, and the oscillating rhythms that seem to imitate the freedom of improvisation all appear to be precursors of developments that gained recognition during the 1970s and 1980s, and especially in the work of Minimalist composers such as Steve Reich, for whom Music for Pieces of Wood (1974) was another breakthrough piece, making rhythmically complex music from the simplest possible means. Indeed, rebellion from established European norms of structure and harmony is a signal characteristic of every work on the album.

    Over the last 20 years, the Tetraktis Ensemble has made a name for itself in Italy and abroad as a percussion group of particular virtuosity, playing a diverse repertoire that embraces the classical universe (Bartók, Cherubini, Stravinsky), jazz and pop.

    This fascinating programme brings together some of the most iconic percussion music by Varèse, Reich, Cowell, Chávez, Harrison and Cage, written in the 30's and 40's of the 20th century.
    The composers on this disc share their American identity, deriving their inspiration from such diverse sources as medieval music, African culture, astrophysics, Latin-American and Mexican music.
    The Italian ensemble Tetraktis is one of the most innovating and ground-breaking percussion groups of today. They work closely together with contemporary composers and freely adopt influences from other musical cultures like Rock, Pop, Jazz and Dance. They regularly perform in festivals all over the world."
    - Brilliant Classics




    John Cage: Third Construction

  •   
    Composers: Michael Harrison, John Cage, Donnacha Dennehy
    Performers: Sophia Subbayya Vastek, Michael Harrison, Nitin Mitta, Megan Schubert

    Pianist Sophia Subbayya Vastek lives in the intersections – struggling to know her different cultural backgrounds, reveling in the questions, embracing the space between music now and before, and living squarely in the crosshairs of her wildest and most intimate emotional selves. Histories, her debut album, lives there.

    With Sophia’s Indian heritage as a starting point, Histories is an exploration of, and homage to, the idea of our individual stories – those that make up our whole self, and which are unseen and unknown by others. These stories are often painful, and often beautiful.

    Included on Histories are the first studio recordings of two works by Michael Harrison, both recorded on a piano in just intonation. The first, Jaunpuri, is a composition based on a traditional Indian raga and rare, old vocal composition. The work combines Western compositional structures, notation, and harmony with the basic structures and materials of Indian classical music, including raga (a melodic archetype), tala (rhythmic cycle), bandish (fixed melodic composition), gamak (melodic embellishments), and taan (virtuosic riffs).

    Harrison’s other work, Hijaz Prelude, combines modal harmonies in raga Hijaz Bhairav (also known as the Hijaz mode in Arabic music) with a Western, arpeggiated keyboard figuration. 

    In between the works by Michael Harrison lies John Cage, who provides the spiritual glue, and Donnacha Dennehy’s pulsing Stainless Staining – an expansion of the overtone series for piano and backing tape. In Dennehy’s work, the repetitive structures and rhythms have the effect of creating a high-energy mantra, one that might be sung or spoken with the most ecstatic of convictions.

    In many ways, Histories is an exploration of a personal grief, but it’s also a kind of ‘call to prayer’. Each track is a marker and the space between, the thread and continuing narrative.  Everyone has stories.  Histories marks and honors them.

    Baltimore-based Vastek, is a well-traveled performer and visual artist. With composer David Ibbett, she is a co-founder of Music of Reality, a multi-disciplinary series that connects the world of scientific discovery and research with musicians and artists.


    Sophia Subbayya Vastek

     

    - Innova Recordings

  • edited June 2017
      
    Music for Saxophones, Percussion and Harry Partch Instruments

    Blue Notes and Other Clashes (2016) by Steven Mackey (b. 1956)
    PRISM Quartet and Sō Percussion

    Future Lilacs (2016) by Ken Ueno (b. 1970)
    PRISM Quartet, Partch, Derek Johnson, Stratis Minakakis

    Skiagrafies (2016) by Stratis Minakakis (b. 1979)
    PRISM Quartet, Partch, Stratis Minakakis

    - "We have developed some pretty sophisticated ways of using language to describe music. But music remains such a slippery, elusive thing that we often find ourselves approaching it sideways—through a kind of linguistic sleight of hand. We use the language of the eye to describe this language of the ear: the names of major musical movements were taken from the visual arts (Classicism, Romanticism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Minimalism). And the metaphor of color has been used, to great effect, to talk about music for centuries, at least. In fact, the ancient classical music traditions of India are built on this metaphor: the word “raga” literally means “color.”

    When the PRISM Quartet decided to commission a body of work built around the idea of musical colors, it seemed a natural next step for a group that has already created a substantial and diverse repertoire of music built around the almost infinitely variable sounds of the saxophone family. The sax has a long tradition in classical music, and rock, and even South Indian music; but its most famous players have been jazz musicians—from Coleman Hawkins to Charlie Parker to John Coltrane—whose sound was built around the so-called “blue” notes that are part of the fabric of jazz. So the members of the quartet had a deep connection with the idea of tone colors. But that wasn’t the Color Theory moment of genius. No, that came when PRISM decided to ask composers Steven Mackey, Ken Ueno, and Stratis Minakakis to write for the combination of saxophone quartet and percussion. There is no more kaleidoscopic palette in the instrumental world than in the percussion section—where over the years composers have placed such sonic oddities as bird calls, a record player, automobile parts, and the piano.

    Color Theory pairs PRISM with two percussion-based ensembles: Sō Percussion, the New York-based quartet whose definition of “percussion” is liberal enough to include teacups, twigs, and fuzz; and Partch, the California-based ensemble that plays mid-20th century instruments designed by Harry Partch, whose 42-note-to-the-octave tuning system operates with a completely different sonic palette."

    —John Schaefer at XAS Records / PRISM Quartet


    http://thelogjournal.com/2017/04/14/album-review-prism-quartet-color-theory/

    http://provparksconservancy.org/4831-2/



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    Composers: Donnacha Dennehy, Annie Gosfield, Judd Greenstein, Ted Hearne,
    David Lang, Missy Mazzoli, and Caroline Shaw

    - "The Jasper String Quartet has spent a decade performing premier works old and new at top concert halls around the world, but for the creation of Unbound, they looked close to home for inspiration. With an equal mix of men and women, the members of the Quartet sought to create an album that represents themselves and their community. Using Judd Greenstein’s “Four on the Floor” as a centerpiece — a virtuosic, dynamic piece that requires togetherness and spirit to perform — the Quartet built a collection of moving, post-genre, and technically impressive works by male and female composers close to their generation. An album for and reflective of right now, Unbound is unbound by convention, yet retains the performance quality expected of a traditional classically trained string quartet. 

    Releasing Unbound on both New Amsterdam Records and Sono Luminus is an extension of the album’s ideals. New Amsterdam is celebrated for its commitment to releasing expertly performed post-genre music, and Sono Luminus is praised for its meticulous recording process that pulls the best performances out of its groups. Unbound captures the spirit of both labels, and the spirit of the Jasper String Quartet."

    - Sono Luminus / New Amsterdam  -  Emusic


    Jasper String Quartet


  •  
    Composers: Zosha Di Castri, Jocelyn Morlock
    Nicole Lizée, John Estacio
     Life Reflected is a stunningly original live experience: a celebration of youth, promise and courage, revealed in the compelling and diverse portraits of four exceptional Canadian women: Alice Munro, Amanda Todd, Roberta Bondar and Rita Joe. Alexander Shelley, Music Director of Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, brought together four remarkable Canadian composers to collaborate with Creative Producer and Director, Donna Feore, and an ensemble of extraordinary performers to create this unique symphonic experience. Life Reflected’s four musical works immerse audiences within a 3D environment featuring photography, motion picture and graphic design, projected on screens surrounding the orchestra. This creative landscape and the accompanying visuals were created and adapted by artistic partner, the innovative Montreal visual design company Normal. This recoding showcases the music from this multi-discipline, multi-media collaboration. The NAC Orchestra was formed at the creation of Canada’s National Arts Centre in 1969 and gives over 100 performances a year with world renowned artists. It is noted for the passion and clarity of its performances and recordings, its ground-breaking teaching and outreach programs, and nurturing of Canadian creativity.
    - Naxos Direct  -  Groupe Analekta, Inc


    Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra
    Classical Voice North America
    (Track by track description)
  • edited June 2017

     

    Nikola Lutz: Saxophone, Teodoro Anzelotti: Accordeon, Ensemble Phoenix Basel,

    Nina Janssen-Deinzer: Clarinet, Isao Nakamura; Drums,

    Mam.Manufaktur Für Aktuelle Musik

    Ying Wang: Electronics

    Shaped equally by her roots in China as well as European influences, Ying Wang, with her struggle for an individual musical language, embodies in an exemplary way the challenges of finding a point of balance between two cultures. Ying Wang mediates between the two cultures. She has achieved quite personal solutions in her works, integrating dramatic impulses and meditative sensual sonorities. She regards as especially fruitful the transferring of techniques for the creation of electronic sounds to acoustical instruments.

    Restriction and freedom are important criteria in "Wave in D", where Wang, out of extremely limited tonal material, draws a rich assemblage of differentiated sound colors from the possibilities of the traditional instrument and the electronics.

    In "Tun Tu" baritone saxophone and electronic sounds interact and come together in an imaginary sound landscape. The distorted sounds of the instrument, embedded in a cosmos of mysterious electronic colorations, seem at first almost improvisatory, but "Tun Tu" is rigorously organized.
    In "Coffee & Tea" Ying Wang reflects on contrasts between the cultures of Asia and Europe and uses coffee and tea as metaphors.

    - Wergo


    Ying Wang

    - was born in Shanghai. She studied at Shanghai Conservatory of Music and Cologne Conservatory of Music and Dance (Hochschule für Musik und Tanz Köln). 2011 she got the “Konzert-Examen”-degree there. 2010 she completed a master degree in contemporary music at the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts (Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Frankfurt). 2012 she was selected for the “Cursus de Composition et d’Informatique Musicale” in IRCAM Paris.

    To name but a few she collaborated with Markus Stenz, Brad Lubman, Marcus Creed, Muhai Tang, Dmitri Slobodeniouk, Camilla Hoitenga, Ensemble Phoenix Basel, Deutsche Radio Philharmonie, Gürzenich Orchester, Brandeburger Symphoniker, Giessen Philharmonische Orchester, Avanti Orchester Helsinki, Ensemble Phonix Basel, Lucerne Festival Academy Ensemble, Norrbotten – Neo Ensemble, Ensemble Resonanz, Tokyo Sinfonietta. . . . .


  • edited June 2017
    New from the always interesting Sub Rosa Early Electronic Series:

    Bülent Arel's (1919 Turkey - 1990 USA) work occupies a special place in the history
     of electronic music because one thing is certain: Arel's work is still fresh, groundbreaking, and it seems always to look out for
    the next adventure in sound.

    Bülent Arel was a Turkish-born American composer of electronic and contemporary classical music. He was also a devoted teacher, a sculptor, and a painter. From 1940 until 1947 Arel studied composition, piano, and 20th century classical music at the Ankara Conservatory. In 1959 Arel came to the U.S. on a grant by the Rockefeller Foundation to work at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. By that time the center had just started out under its director Vladimir Ussachevsky.
    During Arel's work in Princeton he also met Edgard Varèse with whom in 1962 he worked on the electronic sections of Varèse's 'Déserts'. Frank Zappa lists Arel as a key influence. Today's electronic music - may it be by Autechre's 'Confield', Aphex Twin's 'Selected Ambient Works Vol. II', or Squarepusher's 'Do you know Squarepusher' - builds upon a solid foundation which Bülent Arel helped to pave.
    - Sub Rosa


    - Must be exerpt 1 and 2
  •   
    Music composed by Nicholas Chase, performed by
     Robin Lorentz and Nicholas Chase.
    Bhajan is the general term for any Hindu devotional song, typically sung, with a strong melodic component. The piece is deeply influenced by Indian raga and the soundscapes of Chase’s Arab heritage while intentionally remaining rooted in a Western classical vocabulary. It explores concepts of free tempo and melodic non-structure layered with fusions of musical genre, ethnicity and instrumentation. Performed in four continuous sections, Bhajan has an organic ebb and flow guided by an elusive yet inherent sense of logic. A live duet between the violinist, Robin Lorentz, and the composer, Nicholas Chase on electronics and computer, the music propels ever forward as the violinist interacts with the synthesized and processed sounds occurring around her.
    . . . "The meditative, unhurried tone of the material is evident from the beginning of “Bindu” (Sanskrit for "point"), which features Lorentz hewing to a single pitch (Eb) and repeatedly voicing the note as a locus of orientation for Chase's effusive effects. Even when the violin recedes the pitch remains as a suspended echo, the ghostly residue of the instrument kept alive by the faint sine wave and undulating warbles of the painterly synth flourishes. As restrained as the material might generally be, it's also marked by insistence, particularly in the insect-like incessantness with which the violin attacks the note repetitions. A single pitch is also adhered to in the second part “Drsti” ("focused gaze" or "concentrated intention") though this time the note's lower (D4, or D above middle C) and deviations away from the pitch are generated when the computer takes the violin's strokes and turns them into shadow melodies that arise in tandem with the violin. During such passages, the sounds undulate meslismatically, rendering the connection between Chase's composition and Indian music all the more pronounced. Straying from the one-pitch idea, “Japa” ("repetition") introduces a haunting theme that the computer and violin return to over and over, its presentation different each time but the familiar melody always declaring itself clearly, after which the last, titular section of the work arrives, a comparatively plaintive chorale whose string expressions are offset by the pitch-shifting swoop of the computer accompaniment" . . .
    - Cold Blue Music - Emusic


    Nicholas Chase
  • Excellent news from one of the members of Our Brother The Native
    - Recommended to fans of Johann Johannsson.

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    Chaz Knapp - Withheld

    Alex Wand - Flute
    Casey Dean Hudlow - Clarinet, Bass Clarinet
    Chaz Knapp - Organ, Piano, Noise
    Claire Chenette - Oboe
    Jacob Hiser - Violin
    Melissa Irwin - Cello

    Out on a label called Varied Frequencies
    A small label focusing on short run artifacts found in space by Chaz Knapp, Alexandria Knapp and a few close friends.
  • edited August 2017
     
    Paola Prestini
     - "An astrophysicist searches for his wife in the stars. As the cosmos unfolds, the birth, life, and death of a star trace the couples loss of their child. With stunning images from the Hubble Space telescope, the space-inspired cantata culminates in a five-minute virtual reality film that launches the audience into an immersive voyage through the universe. Starring Nathan Gunn and Jessica Rivera. Written by Royce Vavrek, Film by Eliza McNitt, conducted by Julian Wachner. Through his narration, New York Times best-selling author and eminent astrophysicist Dr. Mario Livio explains the larger celestial implications at stake, placing the characters’ story within the grand scheme of the cosmos.

    In a final gesture, this family-friendly performance incorporates virtual reality cardboard headsets, simulating an immersive voyage through the universe, expertly created by The Endless Collective, a leading VR FX firm, with a 360-degree soundscape developed by Arup, the global leaders in acoustic and sound design. This mesmerizing live experience, co-produced by VisionIntoArt/National Sawdust, Beth Morrison Projects and Arup, reflects Livio’s poignant themes and the powerful realization that humans discovered, explore, and continue to expand the understanding of the universe, and man’s place in it.

    Commissioned by Jill Steinberg. Original commission by Bay Chamber Concerts for A New Frontier 2013. The Hubble Cantata is supported in part by generous individual donors, Time Warner Inc. in collaboration with 150, an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

    - http://paolaprestini.com/projects/the-hubble-cantata/

    - Vision Into Art   - http://visionintoart.com/projects/the-hubble-cantata/

    -   https://van-us.atavist.com/cosmos

    - More Paolo Prestini at Emusers


  •  
    Either/Or:
    Russell Greenberg, percussion; David Shively, cimbalom; Dan Lippel, acoustic guitar; Taka Kigawa, piano; Jennifer Choi, violin; John Popham, cello
    Keeril Makan (b. 1972) composed his longest instrumental work to date, Letting Time Circle Through Us (2013), on commission for the New York City-based ensemble Either/Or, with whose musicians Makan has worked intimately over the course of many years and on several projects. The larger trajectory of Makan's musical explorations has not been a linear one, so this close collaboration was invaluable in arriving at the final recorded realization of the project.

    A near-constant in Makan's work is his use of the power of expectation and disruption via the establishment, continuation, variation, and interruption of musical cycles, whatever their content. Repetition and recurrence, periodicity - whether of rhythm or of complete musical fragments - change things, are capable of completely upending the listener's expectation of the syntax and flow of an idea, and thus of its expressive significance within a piece. Related to this are parallels between musical periodicity and the cycles we experience in life - sunrise/sunset, the phases of the moon, the seasons, and other, including perhaps more personal patterns - that are reflected explicitly in Indian and Indonesian musical traditions.

    These patterns or recurrence are acknowledged, at least obliquely, in Letting Time Circle Through Us, Makan's most direct and extended engagement with cyclic structures and periodicity. To quote his brief description of the piece, "The friction between two contrasting types of music creates the emotional journey of Letting Time Circle Through Us. From the foundation of a single note, stable music emerges that repeats throughout the piece. Between these repetitions, singular, novel musical events occur which contrast with the initial stability. Over time, these singular events darken, while the repetitions of the opening music strain to move past the stressful interruptions. Eventually the desire for a return to stability merges with the reality of continual change, and the tension of the piece dissipates."
    - New World Records.


    Keeril Makan


    Either/Or Ensemble
    - More Keeril Makan at Emusers here and here
  •  
    Either/Or:
    Russell Greenberg, percussion; David Shively, cimbalom; Dan Lippel, acoustic guitar; Taka Kigawa, piano; Jennifer Choi, violin; John Popham, cello
    Oh yes! nice one @Brighternow. How did you know that I had £1.36 left of my balance this month (and this was 42p for 47 minutes of captivating music)? Love that cimbalom sound. I really should check out more Either / Or and dig deeper than I have into the New World Records catalogue.
  • edited August 2017
    djh said:
    Oh yes! nice one @Brighternow. How did you know that I had £1.36 left of my balance this month (and this was 42p for 47 minutes of captivating music)? Love that cimbalom sound. I really should check out more Either / Or and dig deeper than I have into the New World Records catalogue.
    Heh ! . Well, I didn't . . .
    I've been digging ever since the massive NW and NWCRI drop in 2009 on Amie Street.
    - New World is steady on Emusic with something like 1 album per month.

    I've found out that Mode Records is active on Emusic. The catalogue is dramatically reduced, but there's some new "postmigration" albums (as well as some misplaced), such as:

    Joan La Barbara is a long recognized pioneer of extended vocal techniques and champion of new music. She emerged from the New York Downtown scene to perform in the ensembles of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, including the premiere of Glass' "Einstein on the Beach." Composer/Vocalist Joan La Barbara has created a rich body of experimental works, many initially produced on analog tape. This collection includes a first release of the award-winning CYCLONE plus two LP reissues offered here remixed to her original surround concept: as lightning comes, in flashes explores a vast array of La Barbara's signature extended vocal techniques; Autumn Signal is a rare example of the composer's work with Buchla synthesizer for spatialization as well as modification of vocals. 96khz/24-bit transfers were made from the original multi-track analog tapes. New stereo and surround mixes were then created under the supervision of the composer. On the Bluray edition: The stereo soundtrack is presented in uncompressed 24-bit PCM audio. The surround versions are presented in 24-bit 5.1 Surround Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio..
    - HBDirect
    "as lightning comes, in flashes" [1981] Mixed media performance environment with 7 singers, 5 dancers, stereo tape, 8-channel tape, electronics, video and costumes. Premiere: February 28, 1981 at Contemporary Music Festival '81, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. Performers- Voices: Joan La Barbara, Sharon Krofina, Elizabeth Lindenfeld, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Annebarbe Kau, Kim MacInnes, Guy Ornduno; Dancers: Maria Talamantes, Susanna Steg, Anne Sotelo, Sarah Bergman; Electronics: Hal Dalby, John Faverman, Rand Steiger, George ("Skip") Brunner, Steve Bilow. Recorded with Joan La Barbara doing all vocals on LP of the same name: "as lightning comes, in flashes", Wizard Records RVW2283, LP released 1983. Note: new surround-sound mix will be included on Mode Records dvd and cd recording "The Early Immersive Music of Joan La Barbara", release date in 2017.





  • edited November 2017
    Newish,

      
    Pioneer of contemporary harp practice and performance Zeena Parkins’ new LP Three Harps, Tuning Forks & Electronics will be released by Good Child Music January 27th, 2017. A sought-after collaborator, Zeena Parkins has worked with Björk, John Zorn, Nels Cline, Yoko Ono, Matmos, So Percussion, and Thurston Moore among many others.  As a bandleader and solo artist, she has released a staggering catalog stretching back to the early eighties.

    Her latest work, Three Harps, Tuning Forks & Electronics, represents a return to her most essential form, while extending her unique voice and musical language into the world of concert music. A translation of the music written for her 2008 collaboration with choreographer Neil Greenberg entitled Really Queer Dance With Harps, Three Harps transforms her original improvised score into a stand alone, composed piece anchored in Zeena’s pioneering use of “extended technique.” Utilizing the entire apparatus of the harp and various objects to create and process sound, Zeena and two additional harpists elicit a tangible sense of movement from their unusual processes, resulting in a harp record unquestionably like no other.

    Three Harps, Tuning Forks & Electronics was co-produced by Zeena Parkins and Lawson White (David Lang, John Zorn, Gil Scott-Heron, Bryce Dessner, Alarm Will Sound, So Percussion, Victoire / Glenn Kotche) and will be released digitally, on CD, and Vinyl January 27th, 2017 by Brooklyn label Good Child Music. Three Harps is slated to be the first in a series of releases by Zeena Parkins on the label.

    - Good Child Music

    - Emusic

    http://www.zeenaparkins.com/

  • edited August 2017
     
    Genevieve Cross – Flute
    Rachel Lewallen – Tenor Saxophone
    Luke Damrosch – Vibraphone
    J. P. A. Falzone – Vibraphone, Hohner Cembalet, Rhodes Piano
    Francesca Caruso, Florence Wallis – Violin
    Christopher Sadlers – Contrabass
    Noah Fields – Viola
    The music of The Providence Research Ensemble drifts past the listener like clouds in late afternoon. Laden with vintage keyboards, strings, woodwind, and vibraphone,
    the début release of J. P. A. Falzone and The Providence Research Ensemble draws together a selection of pieces written over a three year period. Though the pieces themselves are informed by such heady approaches as change-ringing, power law distributions, and simultaneous variation, the resulting texture is lighthearted and evocatively cinematic.
    - Emusic
    https://infrequentseams.com/

    Providence Research Ensemble
    is a musical lab of sorts for Rhode Island New Music composer James Falzone.

    It’s been three years since composer James Falzone created the Providence Research Ensemble, but he still has trouble categorizing the group. They’re not classical, he says, because they don’t really play classical music. Experimental doesn’t quite sound right, either, although some of their performances certainly sound that way.

    “I write systems-based music,” he says, before jovially launching into specifics about structure, mathematics, and how his compositions are adaptable depending on which players are in the room. “There’s actually something called Systems Music, but that’s really a British thing and we’re not that, either.” He settles on New Music, a term generally applied to the border-pushing fringes of contemporary classical composition.

    As the name suggests, Providence Research Ensemble is largely a lab for Falzone to figure out his own work. “What’s wonderful about the group,” he says, “is that it’s friends of mine coming together in an informal, convivial way to perform music that might not otherwise be performed.” He loves the performance side of music, which isn’t the case for many composers.

    “It’s so easy to sound overblown,” Falzone says, laughing. “There’s nothing I hate more than the image of the composer that comes from romantic music. I like some of the music, but that tortured genius image…”

    In 2016, Falzone was awarded one of the RISD Museum’s inaugural fellowships, a paid honor that allowed him to research museum collections and also perform regularly in its grand European painting gallery. (One memorably odd performance featured cello, trombone, two basses, and Falzone on an electroacoustic instrument called the Cembaphon.)

    - Take Magazine


    J. P. A. Falzone

  •   
    Aisha Orazbayeva and Naomi Sato link up for this richly textured reading of John Cage´s Two4, a late work from the composer's series of Number Pieces.

    Steady, crystalline tones emanate from Naomi Sato’s shō - a Japanese wind instrument associated with gagaku court music, and one of the few non-Western instruments that Cage wrote explicitly for. In contrast, Orazbayeva brings out the violin’s fragile grain with the soft scraping of horsehair and the interplay of upper partials.

    Like all of Cage´s work from the early 1950s onwards, the Number Pieces were composed using chance procedures, in an attempt to free music from the composerly impulse to order and fixity.

    The Number Pieces occupied Cage throughout the last six years of his life, and are marked by the use of time brackets: simple fragments of music with timings indicating when, in the overall composition, they should begin and end. In Two4 (as in the majority of the series) these timings are flexible, to be determined by the musician either in performance or, again, through chance procedures.

    In Two4, the fragments are often no more than a single note. The interaction of sounds becomes highly unpredictable: at some points violin and shō mesh in a kind of brief unity, while elsewhere they seem to drift serenely past, or through, each other. Throughout, sounds spill out like ink on blotting paper, surrounded by pregnant silence.
    - SN Variations - Emusic
  • Gorgeous stuff from Michael Pisaro:


    • Bass Clarinet, Contrabass Clarinet – Kristine Tjøgersen
    • Composed By – Michael Pisaro
    • Performer [Performed By], Electric Guitar [Godin And Moog Electric Guitars], Piano [Bowed Piano], Tape [Field Recordings] – Håkon Stene
    Håkon Stene and Kristine Tjøgersen announce a new album with music by Michael Pisaro due for release on June 6, 2017

    Imagine a breath that goes on forever; where everything is different yet everything the same. ‘asleep, street, pipes, tones’ is a remarkably beautiful electro-acoustic work by the eminent composer Michael Pisaro (born 1961, Buffalo, New York), whose seventeen short movements – organised according to the four groupings indicated by the title – last in total for just over one hour. Interpreted in this recording with great precision and delicacy by Håkon Stene and Kristine Tjøgersen, it presents us with a partially frozen sound world where small, even infinitesimal shifts of emphasis in an otherwise glacial rate of change appear to take on the dramatic status of major events. Observing the oscillations of sound waves as the piece’s file plays out, one might see a long flat plain suddenly interrupted by vertiginous skyscraper peaks before the shimmer of reverberation decays and we’re flat out on the plateau again, as if a mysterious metropolis of mile-high buildings intersected a vast expanse of sea-level swamp.

    The intensity of these sudden, transfiguring peaks – like a brief glimpse of colour or figuration seen against an abstract monochrome ground – is strikingly apparent, and one learns to regard them as a kind of gift from the composer to the listener, although there’s a different type of pleasure to be had from the steady, sustaining drones that form the figure’s ground. As the critic Ben Ratcliff wrote in The New York Times: "Michael Pisaro likes his music to develop as a slow-motion force, with adjustments of tone and pitch and instrumentation so long-brewing that you lose your awareness of the player’s hand and the composer’s will." Once we grow accustomed to the slow duration and rate of change, our ears begin to notice more and more detail, like eyes growing used to the dark and discovering new constellations in the night sky. And as the music begins to work on us, we in turn start to work on it, decoding more and more information as each listening-minute passes, or the experience is repeated by playing the piece again, and the associations we bring to it continue to deepen. In simpler words, it’s trippy.

    In time, as with prolonged exposure to the comparable, process-based works of artists James Turrell or Bill Viola, who also deal with both the minutiae of subjective perception and the big stuff of existential questions in their practice, we might think that all of human life is here: birth, existence, death, even the mystic stew of gases cooling to form the universe itself. This enlarged sense that one is engaging with something really profound is reinforced by the links between Michael Pisaro’s particular interests in the organisation of sound and what we might know about the music and philosophy of other cultures, especially the transcendent sense of time we encounter through the role of the tamboura drone in classical Indian music.

    By placing the listener at the very centre of his work ("What would it mean to experience the world primarily through listening?”, he writes in the notes to accompany this recording), Michael Pisaro is making the processes of how we receive and apprehend sound and music, his effective subject. Similarly, his interpreters in ‘Asleep, Street, Pipes, Tones' are given a degree of freedom that goes far beyond the normal boundaries separating composer and performer, becoming co-creators of what he describes as “a new realisation of the piece made for and with Håkon.”

    - Hubro

    Michael Pisaro at Emusers

    Håkon Stene at Emusers


  •    
    For, about, and of Robert Millikan

    When Ann and Bob were typical California kids filling notebooks with musical sketches (including ideas for their magnum opus: Millikan’s Symphony), little did they realize how that would eventually turn out. Ann never stopped composing and her brother Bob became a major epidemiologist, vet, violinist, and rowing enthusiast. When he died at the age of 55 it was time to bring all those threads together in one musical homage.

    Ann Millikan’s Millikan Symphony — recorded here by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, directed by Gil Rose with Jennifer Curtis as violin soloist — is more than a loving tribute to her sibling; it is a research project in its own right, worthy of its brilliant dedicatee. Each movement focuses on one aspect of Dr. Robert Millikan’s life: science, animals, rowing, and violin. As a scientist, “Dr. Millikan and his colleagues conducted three waves of this country’s groundbreaking longitudinal study of breast cancer in African-American and Caucasian women,” said Shelley Earp, MD, director of UNC Lineberger. “Through the Carolina Breast Cancer Study (CBCS), he sought to understand the complex reasons for poor breast cancer outcomes in African-American women. His seminal findings, published in 100 papers, have changed the face of breast cancer disparities research.” 

    The opening movement of Ann’s symphony, Science, models the molecular genetic battle going on in a breast cancer tumor. The second pastoral movement, Animals, pays tribute to his years in veterinary medicine and his life as an avid outdoorsman. Rowing, the third movement, brings the rhythms and splashes of a boat race (specifically the Millikan Cup race founded in his honor since he had been faculty advisor to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill Crew) to life in orchestral terms. The extensive finale, Violin, amounts to an elegiac violin concerto in its own right and is a fitting conclusion to a life cut all too short.The symphony may be heard without detailed knowledge of the stories behind the sounds but is all the richer when the listener appreciates the community effort behind the collaboration, Ann’s passionate work with microscopes and stopwatches to dig deeper, and the impressive human all-rounder that gave rise to such an outpouring.

    St. Paul-based Ann Millikan’s music has been described as “tonally challenging yet emotionally involving” (Joseph Woodard, LA Times), “packed with propellant polyrhythmic textures” (New Sounds, WNYC), and “characterized by high energy and a quirky inventiveness that defies easy categorization...Her scoring is clean and transparent and her felicities of orchestration are among the most attractive elements in her work.” (Stephen Eddins, All Music). Ann Millikan composes concert music for orchestra, chamber ensembles and choir, opera, and experimental and interdisciplinary projects involving installation, theatre and dance. Rhythmic vitality is a powerful force in her music, stemming from previous years playing jazz, African and Brazilian music.

    Known for her collaborative projects that connect deeply with community – story, history, and culture are often an impetus behind her work.

    - Innova Recordings

    http://www.millikansymphony.com/


    Ann Millikan


  • "The scariest music you will hear throughout your entire life. Period"

    Performed By: Chorus and Symphony Orchestra of the National Philharmonic, Warsaw
    Tenor: Kazimierz Pustelak - Soprano: Stefania Woytowicz
    Bass: Bernard Ładysz - Chorus Master: Jozef Bok
    Conductor: Andrzej Markowski
    - "Unnerving, intense, bloodcurdling, sinister, dramatic – the music of “Kosmogonia” features Penderecki’s famous, unorthodox instrumental techniques, and some of the darkest music ever composed.

    Hailed by The Guardian as “Poland’s greatest living composer”, Krzysztof Penderecki is the maestro behind the unforgettable, disturbing music on The Shining (including ‘De Natura Sonoris No. 2’, featured here). A complex tapestry of sound with striking use of pizzicato and flexatone, with aggressive barrages from brass and percussion, dissonant woodwind chords, spoken and hissing sounds, fervent strings, swirling organ, climactic choral and solo vocals.

    Krzysztof Penderecki’s unique music has featured in films such as: The Shining, The Exorcist, Children Of Men, The People Under The Stairs, Shutter Island, and many more.

    Thanks to the estate of Krzysztof Penderecki, Cold Spring are honoured to present this masterpiece in digital format for the first time since the 1974 vinyl release. Sympathetically remastered for CD by Denis Blackham and Martin Bowes."
    - Cold Spring - Emusic

    Krzysztof Penderecki

    (born November 23, 1933, Debica, Poland), outstanding Polish composer of his generation whose novel and masterful treatment of orchestration won worldwide acclaim.

    Penderecki studied composition at the Superior School of Music in Kraków (graduated 1958) and subsequently became a professor there. He first drew attention in 1959 at the third Warsaw Festival of Contemporary Music, where his Strophes for soprano, speaker, and 10 instruments was performed. The following year was marked by the performances of both Anaklasis and the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima for 52 strings. The Threnody illustrates Penderecki’s skilled and refined treatment of instruments, making use of quarter-tone clusters (close groupings of notes a quarter step apart), glissandi (slides), whistling harmonics (faint, eerie tones produced by partial string vibrations), and other extraordinary effects. The techniques used in Threnody were extended to his vocal work Dimensions in Time (1961) and his operas The Devils of Loudun (1968) and Paradise Lost (1978).

    Penderecki’s Psalms of David (1958) and Stabat Mater (1962) reflect a simple, linear trend (letting interwoven melodic lines predominate and determine harmonies) in his composition. The Stabat Mater combines traditional and experimental elements and led to his other well-known masterpiece, the St. Luke Passion (1963–66). In form, the latter work resembles a Baroque passion, such as those by Johann Sebastian Bach, and Penderecki makes use of traditional forms such as the passacaglia (a variation form), a chantlike freedom of metre, and a 12-tone row (ordering of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale) based on the motif B♭-A-C-B (in German notation, B-A-C-H) in homage to Bach.

    Penderecki’s Canon for 52 strings (1962) made use of polyphonic techniques (based on interwoven melodies) known to Renaissance composers. Yet he also made some use of the techniques of aleatory (chance) music, percussive vocal articulation, nontraditional musical notation, and other devices that stamped him as a leader of the European avant-garde. His later works include the two-part Utrenja (1969–71; Morning Prayer), Magnificat (1973–74), Polish Requiem (1980–2005), Cello Concerto No. 2 (1982; Grammy Award, 1998), the opera Ubu Rex (1990–91), and the choral work Phaedra (2002).

    In addition to composing steadily, Penderecki taught composition and conducted. His collected essays, an interview, and other writings were published in Labyrinth of Time: Five Addresses for the End of the Millennium (1998). In 2004 he received the Japan Art Association’s Praemium Imperiale prize for music.

  • Oh goodness! I haven't heard that Penderecki album in decades.
    It was a favorite that used to ooze out of my bedroom in the mid-70s.
    I'll have to revisit it.
  • rostasi said:
    Oh goodness! I haven't heard that Penderecki album in decades.
    It was a favorite that used to ooze out of my bedroom in the mid-70s.
    I'll have to revisit it.
    A fairly intense bedroom then?
  • Often had family members comment loudly and/or slam my door closed when I played stuff - not because it was always loud, but usually because it was "weird."
  •   
    Eighth Blackbird founding cellist and co-Artistic Director Nick Photinos
     will release his debut solo recording, Petits Artéfactson August 25 through
    New Amsterdam Records.

    "The album brings together never-before-recorded works from some of the most acclaimed names in new music — David Lang, Andrew Norman, Bryce Dessner, David T. Little — but also a newer generation of groundbreaking composers like Angélica Negrón, Florent Ghys, Molly Joyce, and Pascal Le Boeuf, who are quickly gaining notoriety as well. The music ranges from quirky and hilarious to profound and ethereal, and the pieces create worlds and context far outweighing their length. The music is enlightened with the help of Photinos’s favorite collaborators, pianist Vicki Ray and percussionist Doug Perkins. Perkins also serves as the album's producer, with Todd Reynolds and Pascal Le Boeuf as co-producers. . . ."
    - New Amsterdam - Emusic

    NICK PHOTINOS

  • edited October 2017
     

    Metatron was composed as part of Eliot Britton’s doctoral dissertation at McGill a couple of years ago, and it has now happily been recorded by Montreal-based quartet Architek Percussion. This music is the result of a very purposeful collision of two different sound worlds: the kaleidoscopic sounds of Architek’s drums, cymbals, other percussive instruments and synthesizers are woven together with recorded samples of old vinyl, mostly jazz and swing music. Britton has deftly integrated these two sources, not only exploiting the obvious sonic dissonances between them, but also finding surprising ways to bring them into harmony with each other.

    The liner notes say that Britton was partly inspired by memories of destroying his childhood piano with a chainsaw, an experience that led him to reflect on the relationships between technology, history, and our musical lives. At times the pummelling power of the percussion certainly feels like it is annihilating the sampled music, but Britton also reserves sparser passages for the samples to stand on their own, offering brief glimpses of earlier musical aesthetics between the percussion and electronics.

    Metatron is a thrilling record, though perhaps not one for all occasions. Bristling with a youthful energy and fearlessness, at times it reaches the same rhythmic intensity as techno, making it a record that is more likely to give you a jolt than soothe you.
    - The Whole Note.

    -"After the Second World War my grandparents dragged a used 1902 upright piano down the road and installed it in their living room. This is the first instrument I can remember. My grandmother’s collection of yellowing song sheets sat in the piano bench my entire life with watercolour illustrations of well-dressed couples dance across each page, beaming out at the reader, overflowing with sentimentality for a dance culture that was slipping away. A beautiful memory, but eventually the piano had to go, and it would go by chainsaw.

    When she died, I inherited my grandmother’s musical materials. Beloved music cuts a path through format, technology, and time, an idea that planted the seeds for Metatron. A more fully formed concept came from my 95 year old grandfather. During one visit I was greeted in the garage by a dull chainsaw and a stripped down piano. “Finish the job,” he said. With grim determination and a dull tool, I dismembered my first musical experiences, thinking of the strange place technology holds in our lives."

    Eliot Britton

    - ActuellesCD / Ambiances Magnétiques - Emusic


    Eliot Britton

    - (b.1983) - composer, sound artist - has marked his place in the ever changing musical climate with a unique musical aesthetic. Each of his compositions expresses his diverse musical experience, including that of sound designer, producer, orchestral and jazz performer, DJ, and audio technician. By drawing on these sound worlds as well as others, Eliot Britton's work is as unique as he is an individual. His compositions have been heard by audiences across Canada and internationally.

    Eliot Britton is currently pursuing graduate studies in composition at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University. There he holds the position of composer in residence for the McGill Contemporary Music Ensemble with the Digital Composition Studio. Prior to his work at McGill, Eliot Britton graduated with a B.Mus from the University of Manitoba, and was also conferred with certification from the Precursor Productions School of Electronic Music. Throughout his studies, Eliot Britton has won numerous awards and scholarships. Recent accolades include the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Scholarship (SSHRC), winner of the Winnipeg New Music Festival's Young Composers' Competition, and the Margaret H. Tyler Award in music.

    While select performances of his work include the CCMW Toronto, McGill CME in Montreal, Winnipeg New Music Festival, the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, the Winnipeg Fringe Festival, and the Pazzia Performing Arts Collective in Edinburgh, Eliot Britton continues to evolve musically. He will be pursuing a doctoral thesis on the relationship between acoustic instrument performance and interactive computer-based live electronics.


    Architek Percussion



  • edited September 2017
     "Time, silence, light, reflection, and transcendence"
    Performers: 
    - "Time, silence, light, reflection, and transcendence are all explored in Jane Antonia Cornish’s new album, Into Silence. A breathless fragility on the precipice of liminal space imbues the album’s six over-arching linear meditations; each work an inquiry into the transitory beauty of the unknown, through self-reflection and the conscious reorientation of perspective. These hallmarks of Cornish’s aesthetic experience, along with the exquisitely balanced unfolding of her material, all contribute to a highly expressive and brave musical narrative that is unafraid, and, once heard, cannot be unheard.

    The six works featured here are not only unified conceptually, but also through their instrumentation; each features a subset of an aggregate ensemble of violin, piano, four ‘cellos, and electronics. Throughout, Cornish brilliantly uses a carefully planned unveiling of instrumental sonorities to actuate and propel the over-arching design of the album’s broader narrative. 

    Memory of Time (solo violin and four cellos) explores a distant nocturnal pathos as the solo violin’s expressive presence floats, suspended, over the ‘cello ensemble’s irrevocable sighs. The titular Into Silence I incorporates piano and electronics into the sonic tableaux of the proceeding work, reorienting the seemingly unappeased yearning of the introductory material with a tender earthbound comfort. Scattered Light, scored for ‘cello alone, expounds an unbridled moment of cadenza-like virtuosity. As the harmonic rhythm increases and intensifies the work concludes in an evaporated calmness. Elegia returns to the sound-world and material of the album’s opening work (Memory of Time), now examined through the aperture of elegiac reflexivity. A meditation on solitude, Into Silence II, for piano solo, probes some of the album’s most inner-directed moments of isolation. Luminescence (scored for solo ‘cello, three ‘cellos, and electronics) is a culmination of the entire album’s exploration of liminality. The electronic component returns with an exquisite and arresting subtly of hushed empyrean filigree. A solo cello momentarily transforms the sighing motif of the opening into a hopeful upward reach towards transcendence. The work ends in deliquesce silence, and the album concludes with a return of the opening motif, exemplifying the elegant notion that silence is the path to transformation."

    - Innova Recordings.

    Jane Antonia Cornish is a British Academy Award winning composer who grew up in England and lives in New York City. In the world of film scoring, Cornish composed the music for many films, including the drama “Fireflies in the Garden”, starring Julia Roberts, Ryan Reynolds and Willem Dafoe. . . .


  •  
    George Lewis (b. 1952) combines an astonishing level of creativity with trenchant critiques of many traditional conceptions about experimental music. The four compositions on this album reference a wide range of ideas, from rhetoric in Ancient Rome to actor network theory, and the album's eponymous composition finds its grounding in the concept of the "assemblage," (or agencement in French) a pragmatic, material, non-teleological approach to composition.

    Among the album's compositions, Mnemosis (2012) and Hexis (2013) foreground repetition, and feature hypnotic patterns with striking sonic surfaces. Mnemosis, scored for flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, piano, and a percussionist, features repeated cells of dissonant interlocking lines that take shape as elaborate, even baroque loops. The overall impression is one of a clock with several hands turning unpredictably in different directions, triggering an oddball circus of sounds, recurring asynchronously, sometimes raucously. Hexis (2013) appears as something of a slightly smaller and shorter sequel to Mnemosis, and is scored for the same band of instruments, but without viola.

    By comparison with Hexis and Mnemosis,   Assemblage (2013) is more energetic, even chaotic. Written for a 9-piece version of Ensemble Dal Niente, Lewis describes  Assemblage  as having a feeling of pushing ahead all the time, "or turning a wheel." It can give the impression of an urban crowd bustling in every direction. Or a rising and falling activity of bouncing against the interior of a box that nonetheless manages to contain a certain sense of entropy. 

    The unpredictable interplay between human and material agencies is an explicit theme of the piano and violin duo, The Mangle of Practice (2014). It explores how practical relationships, decisions, and mediations structurally disfigure the elements in a given situation. Over the course of minutes, one hears episodes of internally consistent materials that are set in motion like windup toys, until a cut occurs, and a new sonic palette unfolds. It gives the impression of a single sonic object with over a dozen sides, being gradually flipped from one side to the next.

    - New World Records.

    George Lewis


    Ensemble Dal Niente

  • Thanks for the New World Records reminder @Brighternow. I'd overlooked this treat, which in the UK works out at £3.36 for over 4 1/2 hours of fun.



  • edited October 2017
    ^^^ Your'e welcome . . . and thanks ^^^

    Celebration (2014) is a work for computer-controlled pipe organ commissioned by and created for the spectacular church Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík, which with its height of 73 metres is one of Iceland’s tallest buildings. Construction on the church began in 1945 and was not completed until 41 years later in 1986. The church is named for the Icelandic poet and priest Hallgrímur Pétursson (1614-1674), who with his 50 ‘Passion Hymns’ based on the Passion of Christ is internationally acclaimed and remembered as one of the greatest poets in the history of Iceland. It was in connection with the quatercentenary of the birth of Hallgrímur that the work Celebration was commissioned and performed.

    In the work Siegel integrates characteristics from this special place in several ways: firstly, the huge organ of the church is the only instrument we hear. The instru-ment, which is from 1992, has a height of 15 metres and a weight of 25 tons, four manuals, 72 stops and 5275 pipes. In the work we hear fragments of six Icelandic hymns with melodies known from Hallgrímur’s ‘Passion Hymns’, all of which are in the regular musical repertoire at services or other rituals in the church. The recording we hear on the CD is of course also from the church. Siegel chose to record it at night so that the risk of interference from traffic noise or sounds from the visitors to the church would be as small as possible. In the present recording it is therefore not the place’s specific social and functional characteristics that are integrated; instead the place is used in a music-historical context and as an instrument for the composition; a composition that may well refer to extra-musical layers, but which in itself also cultivates and challenges the abstraction of the music. After the recording Siegel has explained: “But the work is very much also intended for public performance. The first performance was for example held in the daylight hours, the day after the recording. The two ‘performances’ were very diffe-rent, as the music is composed anew each time. In this respect the CD release is a docu-mentation of a single version or an example of a work that can have infinitely many versions.”

    - Much more fascinating stuff at - Dacapo Records.


    Wayne Siegel was born in Los Angeles in 1953. From 1971 to 1974 he studied composition and philosophy at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). After three years at UCSB he decided to complete his Bachelor of Arts degree while studying with Per Nørgård in Aarhus, Denmark. After receiving his degree in composition from the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, Wayne Siegel chose to remain in Denmark and work as a freelance composer.

    Since 1986 Wayne Siegel has been director of DIEM (The Danish Institute of Electronic Music) in Aarhus and is an enthusiastic promoter of Danish electronic music. In 1994 he chaired the 19th International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) in Aarhus. In 2003 DIEM became part of the Royal Academy of Music in Aarhus, and Siegel was appointed professor of electronic music - the first Danish professor of electronic music.

    Wayne Siegel has composed music for many Danish and international orchestras and ensembles, including the American Kronos String Quartet, which often works with acoustic intruments and electronic techniques.

    Wayne Siegel's music has deep roots in American music. During his child-hood he was influenced first by American folk music and later by blues and avant-garde rock, especially Frank Zappa. Other important influences include Steve Reich, György Ligeti and American minimalism, a genre with which Siegel is often associated. Early influences from more popular genres have become increasingly apparent in his music, which may explain why Siegel's work often seems more accessible than much contemporary music.

    Computers and other electronic musical instruments are commonly used in Siegel's work. He has composed a number of works that mix acoustic instruments with new technology. Interactive computer music, or music where humans interact with computers during the creative process, is a field that Siegel has explored intensely since the 1990s, in modern dance, music, and installations. He has contributed to the field both through his research and through his interactive compositions.
    - Wayne Siegel at Emusers

    Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík
  • edited October 2017
       
    Performed by the brilliant TAK Ensemble, “Sanctuary” is a ritualistic masterwork of modern classical music, combining acoustic and electronic elements with visionary intensity.
    For the third full length document of his classical works, Mario Diaz de Leon presents his most unified offering to date, distilling the modernistic hellfire of his previous releases to a crystalline essence. “Sanctuary” is an album length piece created in collaboration with TAK Ensemble, a brilliant NYC based quintet devoted to energetic and virtuosic performances of contemporary music. Featuring soprano voice, flute, violin, bass clarinet, marimba, and the composer’s own synthesizer work, the album is a hypnotic and ritualistic journey through realms of angelic and demonic experience, combining acoustic and electronic elements with visionary intensity.

    Since 2002, Mario Diaz de Leon has created a significant body of new works for acoustic instruments and electronics. Following his teenage years playing hardcore punk, metal, and electronic music, Diaz de Leon was inspired by the mystically oriented modernisms of Stockhausen, Scelsi, Messiaen, and Dumitrescu, and soon after developed his signature style while a student at Oberlin Conservatory. His debut album as composer, "Enter Houses Of" was released in 2009 on John Zorn's Tzadik label, and praised by the New York Times for its "hallucinatory intensity". A second album, entitled "The Soul is the Arena", was released in 2015 on Denovali, and was named a notable recording of the year by New Yorker Magazine. Pitchfork wrote that the album "combines his interests seamlessly into music that throbs with snarling exuberance." Both releases were performed by his longtime collaborators in the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE).

    He currently leads the metal band Luminous Vault as vocalist and guitarist, whose “Charismata” EP was released on Profound Lore Records in spring 2017. From 2012-2016, his solo electronic project Oneirogen (o-NI-ro-jen) toured internationally and released three full length albums on Denovali. He collaborated with director Zev Deans to create the score for Alien: Biotic, a short film commissioned by Fox as part of the official Alien: Covenant campaign. In 2016, the Los Angeles Philharmonic commissioned and premiered his “Lightmass” for their “Noon to Midnight” festival of contemporary music. He has also collaborated with Nate Young of Wolf Eyes on “Standard Deviance One”, which they recently performed at Tectonics Festival Glasgow with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

    Born in Minnesota, he has lived in in New York City since 2004, and received a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University in 2013, where he currently teaches.
    - Denovali  - Bandcamp
    - TAK Ensemble and Mario Diaz de Leon at Emusers


    ETA: Nice to see Denovali active again on eMu.
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