My 2013 list
Well, For what it's worth, here is the first 10 on my list in no particular order:
- Time will show how long it's going to be
Petrels - Onkalo
- "Onkalo is the follower of the highly praised Petrels concept debut album Haeligewielle ("Petrels has provided us with what has to be the strongest solo debut from a musician so far in 2011." (Fluid Radio) + "The album is a masterpiece of narrative, a blackened ship with a broken mast that defies the storm and in so doing discovers its own dark destiny." (8.5/ 10 - The Silent Ballet)
Onkalo ('hiding place') is the name of the spent nuclear fuel repository currently under construction in Finland to house hazardous nuclear waste. It is designed to last a minimum of 100,000 years - a scale of time unimaginable when the oldest surviving man made structures have endured not even a tenth of that time. The human species as we know it is thought to have existed for approximately 100,000 years - is it possible for humankind to build something that will endure a timescale that vast again? And what will be left to uncover it if it does so?
Taking this as a starting point, Petrels second album - after acclaimed debut Haeligewielle - draws on a fascination with how we deal with what is left over, both physically and mentally. With this thread running through Onkalo, Petrels also takes inspiration from speculative science, immense time scales, retro-futurism, personal history, and how the post-war optimism of the dawn of the atomic age has come up against a more uncertain vision of the future."
Denovali Records - Emusic
Who:
I'm Oliver Barrett and grew up in the past-its-prime seaside town of Weston-super-Mare in Somerset before moving to London ten years ago where I studied a degree in sound art. Since then I've played in various different bands/projectssome of which are still ongoingand put out my first album under the moniker of Petrels Haeligewiellelast April.
What:
My first instrument was/is the cello, and I've been using this as a basis to combine my interest in classical music with electronics/synthesised instruments and improv/noise. I'm interested in telling stories, contrasting different elements and approaches and in the tensions you can create by placing sounds together that might initially seem opposedwith Haeligewielle I focused quite a bit on trying to make the acoustic instruments sound as synthesized as possible and visa-versa, for example. Mainly I'm constantly striving to create something all-encompassing and immersive that I can lose myself in.
Influences and inspirations:
This list could go on for pages and pages but here're a few that are maybe more Petrels-specific (in no particular order): Vaughan Williams, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Todd Dockstader, Lau Nau, Ernst Reijseger, Tsai Ming-Liang, Belong, BusRatch, Arthur Russell, Angela Carter, Kuupuu, Vibracathedral Orchestra, John Carpenter, Markus Popp, William Vollmann, travelling, walking, eating, listening.
- Edited from Textura
- Time will show how long it's going to be
Petrels - Onkalo
- "Onkalo is the follower of the highly praised Petrels concept debut album Haeligewielle ("Petrels has provided us with what has to be the strongest solo debut from a musician so far in 2011." (Fluid Radio) + "The album is a masterpiece of narrative, a blackened ship with a broken mast that defies the storm and in so doing discovers its own dark destiny." (8.5/ 10 - The Silent Ballet)
Onkalo ('hiding place') is the name of the spent nuclear fuel repository currently under construction in Finland to house hazardous nuclear waste. It is designed to last a minimum of 100,000 years - a scale of time unimaginable when the oldest surviving man made structures have endured not even a tenth of that time. The human species as we know it is thought to have existed for approximately 100,000 years - is it possible for humankind to build something that will endure a timescale that vast again? And what will be left to uncover it if it does so?
Taking this as a starting point, Petrels second album - after acclaimed debut Haeligewielle - draws on a fascination with how we deal with what is left over, both physically and mentally. With this thread running through Onkalo, Petrels also takes inspiration from speculative science, immense time scales, retro-futurism, personal history, and how the post-war optimism of the dawn of the atomic age has come up against a more uncertain vision of the future."
Denovali Records - Emusic
Who:
I'm Oliver Barrett and grew up in the past-its-prime seaside town of Weston-super-Mare in Somerset before moving to London ten years ago where I studied a degree in sound art. Since then I've played in various different bands/projectssome of which are still ongoingand put out my first album under the moniker of Petrels Haeligewiellelast April.
What:
My first instrument was/is the cello, and I've been using this as a basis to combine my interest in classical music with electronics/synthesised instruments and improv/noise. I'm interested in telling stories, contrasting different elements and approaches and in the tensions you can create by placing sounds together that might initially seem opposedwith Haeligewielle I focused quite a bit on trying to make the acoustic instruments sound as synthesized as possible and visa-versa, for example. Mainly I'm constantly striving to create something all-encompassing and immersive that I can lose myself in.
Influences and inspirations:
This list could go on for pages and pages but here're a few that are maybe more Petrels-specific (in no particular order): Vaughan Williams, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Todd Dockstader, Lau Nau, Ernst Reijseger, Tsai Ming-Liang, Belong, BusRatch, Arthur Russell, Angela Carter, Kuupuu, Vibracathedral Orchestra, John Carpenter, Markus Popp, William Vollmann, travelling, walking, eating, listening.
- Edited from Textura
Comments
- "The Pomegranate Cycle is the debut album from Textile Audio a solo project by composer, mezzo soprano and sound engineer Eve Klein. It is a space for wild, romantic experiments in ambient electronica and post-classical forms.
The Pomegranate Cycle is woven from song, sound textures and fragmented orchestration a fragile, ebbing work, part sonic and part myth. The Pomegranate Cycle uses poetry and abstract language to convey a felt sense of narrative. It traces opera and the ghosts of women whose lives have been touched by violence. Elements of the Persephone story are strewn through symphonic timbres and ruptured with grain and glitch. A girl collecting flowers is stolen, transfigured, a mother seeks her lost child, and wreaks vengeance.
This is a new kind of opera. It deals with the genres inability to reconcile its institutions and outmoded vision of romance with contemporary audiences. It rejects the gendered violence of opera, perpetuated in the tropes of dying sopranos. The Pomegranate Cycle embodies a new kind operatic heroine, who lives, reflects and heals. She is the spark for a womens centered opera, a highly configurable and living tradition where the singer is the composer and producer simultaneously. . . ."
Wood & Wire - FMA
- "Eve Klein has been a renegade romantic since childhood. Eves solo project, Textile Audio, is the fruition of a lifetime of daydreams, opera and wanderings in the Australian wilderness. Textile Audio weaves together orchestral scores, field recordings, opera and pop vocals to take the listener on a rich melodic and emotional journey.
Eve has been working as a professional operatic mezzo soprano, electronic musician and absent-minded academic since 2002. In 2012 Eve toured with Opera Australias Oz Opera performing nearly 300 shows as Hansel, Mother, Sand Fairy and Witch in Humperdinks opera Hansel and Gretel. Textile Audio compositions have been featured on radio around Australia, included on movie soundtracks, and released through Feral Media, Mess+Noise, Cyclic Defrost, New Weird Australia and Wood & Wire."
http://www.textileaudio.com
music
- "The meeting of such unconventional musicians was always going to result in a pretty incredible piece of work, but confronting such strong identities and getting them to work together was not a given. For the past three years, Philippe Petit and Fernando Corona have regularly played live together, undoubtedly refining their collaboration with each new performance and finding the right balance between their respective sound worlds. The result is this album which equally finds its roots in Murcofs modern classical influences and Petits coarse post modernist soundscaping.
The album may barely reach the forty minute mark, but in the space of three tracks, Corona and Petit create a magnificent soundtrack which teems with haunting choral chants, lush string work and unsettling atmospherics. This album is rooted in ancient myths and legends, borrowing from Greek mythology for "The Call Of Circé", daughter of Helios and powerful enchantress, and winged divine horse "Pegasus", or from Nordic tales of giant squid-like sea monsters on "The Summoning Of The Kraken". This very much characterises the epic proportions of this album, echoing in parts the amplitude of Murcofs "Cosmos" (Leaf, 2007), and in others Petits equally ambitious "Off To Titan" (Karlrecords 2010), but they temper this with much more delicate moments, for which they assemble incredibly detailed and refined atmospheric passages.
Clocking at just over twenty minutes, the opening piece "The Call Of Circé" is articulated around a series of sequences which range from stern, doom-like guitar stabs and harsh percussive noises to eerie choral laments and theatrical vocal flourishes. The haunting melodies and ambiences of the first half are slowly broken apart by the recurring thuds of metallic percussions. When these recede, the mood has become darker, grittier, more oppressive, and remains as such for much of the remainder.
"Pegasus" recalls some of the more baroque treatment Murcof experimented with on his commissioned work for Les Grandes Eaux Nocturnes de Versailles, especially through his use of the viola de gamba as a primary sound source, but this sound source becomes corrupted as the track progresses, perhaps subject to Philippe Petits radical decay processing, until only a few distorted strands of grating bowed strings remain.
With the last track, Corona and Petit opt for an overall softer, warmer atmosphere, but there is a lingering feeling of impending danger lurking below the surface of the whole piece. This is marked by the use of sparse percussions, magnified vinyl crackles and processed guitars and textures which, assembled in various combinations, weight heavily on the otherwise almost pastoral nature of the composition.
Philippe Petit knows how to find collaborators with whom he can go beyond his own sonic universe and make them venture into unfamiliar territories, and he is an expert in making these collaborations gel perfectly. And this is one hell of a collaboration: two artists, each with this visionary "
- Bruno Lasnier / January 2013
Murcof aka Fernando Corona
- "Hailing from Tijuana, on the Mexico/US border, and now a Barcelona resident, Fernando Corona rose to attention as part of Mexican collective Nortec, mostly for his work as Terrestre, but it is with another project, Murcof, that he has made an extremely strong impact. Merging micro-beats with samples of contemporary classical music, his work, often crystallised into sweeping haunting pieces, bridges the gap between Arvo Pärt or Henryk Górecki and part of the electronic scene of today. He is credited with being one of the main influences of the likes of Erik Skodvin and of many of the artists who have appeared on Miasmah in recent years."
The complete version, as premiered in 1982, of one of the François Bayle's masterpieces.
Chris Speed clarinet/tenor saxophone
John Hollenbeck drums
Red Wierenga accordion/piano
Drew Gress acoustic bass
Matt Moran vibraphone
+1? Matt Mitchell piano
- "Led by composer, drummer and three-time Grammy nominee John Hollenbeck, The Claudia Quintet have quietly but firmly and definitively recast jazz into shimmering new shapes inflected by classical minimalism, new music, progressive rock and post-rock. They are one of the most influential stylists on other musicians in cutting-edge jazz today and the sound of jazz and what jazz can be in our time has changed because of their sound and stance.
Celebrating 15 years of work together with the release of September, this NYC ensembles sound continues to explore the edge without alienating the mainstream, proving that genre-defying music can be for everyone."
Cuneiform
Bandcamp - http://johnhollenbeck.com/
Zeena Parkins and The Adorables
- "THE ADORABLES is the latest band led by Zeena Parkins with percussionist Shayna Dunkelman and electronic guru Preshish Moments. Zeena Parkins is a harpist with Bjork, and a stalwart of the Downtown NY scene. THE ADORABLES mixes lush acoustic orchestration with live electronics, beats, and unusual instruments. Visceral, unearlthly, exquisitely rich sounds mix with drones, crafted sound processing,feedback and the guts of harp strings. Guest appearances by Deep Singh and Dave Sharma - percussion, Kristin Slipp - vocals, and Danny Blume - guitar."
- Cryptogramophone
Soundcloud - http://www.zeenaparkins.com
featuring: Alarm Will Sound, Trinity Wall Street Choir and Tarab Cello Ensemble
- "Ask composer, singer, violinist and multi-instrumentalist Caleb Burhans about his relationship to the Christian tenets of faith, and he'll give you a thoughtful but conflicted answer. "Despite the fact that I've sung in church choirs for almost twenty years, I'm agnostic," he says. "So a lot of my music deals with my struggles with religion."
Evensong is Burhans' defining statement of his complex connection to the church -- an "emo-classical" epic where sacred meets secular in a pure, dynamic expression of musical influences that range from classical to ambient to post-rock. While the album presents motifs from the Christian church service (book-ended with the opening "Magnificat" and the closing "Nunc Dimittis," recorded with the Trinity Wall Street Choir), it refracts them through the modern lens of new music and the avant garde.
This is Burhans' debut as a lead composer and recording artist, though he has long been recognized as a vital presence on the NYC new music scene. The New York Times has lauded him as "animated and versatile," a "sweet-voiced countertenor," and a "new music virtuoso." He is also a regular member of several groundbreaking groups and ensembles that have helped reshape modern classical music -- among them ACME, Alarm Will Sound, Beyondo, Bleknlok, Escort, itsnotyouitsme, Newspeak, Ensemble Signal and the Wordless Music Orchestra.
Alarm Will Sound, in fact, takes up the secular portion of Evensong, performing three pieces that test the very limits of a large ensemble's expressive capabilities. "oh ye of little faith" is the arguable centerpiece, described by none other than Steve Reich as "a lovely homage to Arvo Part's In Memorium Banjamin Britten." Further on, the Tarab Cello Ensemble infuses "The Things Left Unsaid" with contemplative longing. With whimsical and incisive liner notes by longtime friend, collaborator and guitarist Grey Mcmurray, Evensong marks Burhans' arrival as one of the most promising young composers to emerge from NYC's trial-by-fire proving ground."
Cantaloupe Music
- "Caleb Burhans was born in 1980 in Monterey, California to Ron and Venus Burhans. He grew up listening to his father, who in the '60s and '70s had played rock 'n roll on tour with Ray Charles, Kenny Rogers and the Everly Brothers. Burhans' musical studies began as a boy soprano at the age of nine in Houston, Texas. In 1990, he moved to Janesville, Wisconsin, where he studied violin, piano, music theory and composition, as well as picking up viola, cello, bass, percussion, mandolin, guitar, electric bass and conducting. During his years in high school, Burhans participated in such musical endeavors as choir, orchestra and strolling strings, as well as jazz and punk bands. After graduating from high school in 1997, he attended Interlochen Arts Academy before moving on to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. While at Eastman, he studied violin, viola, voice, composition, chamber music, orchestral music, baroque performance practice and contemporary music. Burhans graduated from Eastman with a bachelor's degree in viola performance and composition.
In the summer of 2003, Burhans and his wife Martha Cluver moved (with their lizard, named Buddha) to New York City, where they now reside. Burhans specializes in early music, contemporary music, pop/rock music, and free improv. His main instruments are violin, viola, guitar, piano and singing countertenor. In addition to his career as a freelance violinist, violist and countertenor, Burhans is a member of the Trinity Wall Street Choir, Philadelphia's Schola Nova and the new music ensemble Alarm Will Sound, as well as the bands Dialects, itsnotyouitsme and Beyondo. He has been heralded by the New York Times as "animated and versatile" and a "sweet-voiced countertenor."
http://cantaloupemusic.com/artists.php?artist_id=68
Track 5 @ Soundcloud - http://soundcloud.com/caleb-burhans
ETA august.13: Bandcamp
From the CD booklet @ Atma Classique:
- "Murray Schafers quartets have featured prominently in the repertoire of the Molinari Quartet since
its establishment in 1997. At that time, Murray Schafer had composed six string quartets.
Now, thanks in part to commissions fromthe Molinari Quartet, to its performances, and to its steady efforts
to spread these works, his oeuvre comprises 12 string quartets. The Molinari has premiered four of the six new
quartets that Shafer has composed during the past 15 years.
We, the members of the Molinari Quartet, would like to express our profound gratitude to the patrons
who have sponsored these premieres. In particular, we thank Phyllis Lambert, who made it possible for us
to celebrate our 15th anniversary in 2012 by commissioning Schafers 12th string quartet.
When I first met Murray, in 1988, I was a member of the Morency Quartet, and we were in Peterborough,
Ontario, to play a protean work of his entitled The Greatest Show. I can never forget the festive spirit of
those workdays, preparing for this open-air concert/spectacle/opera. At that time already, Murray
talked to me about his quartets as if they were his children: They all share the family look, but each is a
quite distinct entity. Is this not the hallmark of a great composer?
On numerous occasions the Molinari Quartet has played several quartets by Schafer in the same
concert, sometimes even performing a marathon of the first seven quartets in a single evening. Played
this way, as if each individual quartet was actually a single movement of a very long megaquartet, the
cyclic form of the overall work becomes eloquently clear.
With this new disc of quartets 8 through 12 the listener can also experience this cyclic form, formany relationships,
both inmaterial and in expression, link these works. Each, nonetheless, is unique and stands alone
and these quartets can be appreciated one at a time; there is no need to listen to themas an ensemble.
As performers, we are filled with emotion when playing the Schafer quartets. Sensitive and refined
writing; pure, beautiful sonorities; powerful harmonies; pungently expressive dissonances; impetuous,
energetic rhythms; fascinating transitions between episodes these are just some of the elements that
characterize Murray Schafers quartets. For us, these are great works, destined to remain in the string
quartet repertoire for many years to come."
http://quatuormolinari.qc.ca/en/
Autechre - Exai
Robert Hampson:
Analogue Electronics, Concr
1/ White Numbers - Bevis Frond
2/ Moon Tides- Pure Bathing Culture
3/Crimson/Red - Prefab Sprout
4/Karios4tet- Everything I Hold
5/Oblivion Hymns- Hammock
6/ Born in Tokyo- BvDub
7/Tiny Ghosts- Cadjita
8/This Graceless Age- John Murray
9/Sticky Wickets- Duckworth Lewis Method
10/ Lund Quartet - Lund Quartet
Jacob Kirkegaard:
- With Ensemble Senatet:
Clarinet: Vicky Wright; Percussion: Mads Bendsen; Trombone: Andras Olsen; Violin: Kirsten Riis-Jensen; Viola: Mina Fred; Cello: Sofia Olsson.
- "In collaboration with Danish ensemble Scenatet, Jacob Kirkegaard's two pieces Labyrinthitis and Church are here interpreted by classical instruments. The intention of this transformation into an instrumental score is to explore the musical dimension and potential of the sounds that were used in creating the original works.
Church (from "4 Rooms", Touch, 2006) originally consists of ambient recordings of an abandoned church inside the radioactive zone in Chernobyl. Laybrinthitis (Touch, 2008) is a canon of oto-acoustic tones generated by the artist's own ears. Like most of Kirkegaard's sound works, both pieces are characterised by a strong focus on methodology, and by the artist's wish to omit any deliberate emotional or "musical" intention."
- "Jacob Kirkegaard is a Danish artist focusing on scientific & aesthetic aspects of resonance, time, sound & hearing. His installations, compositions & performances deal with acoustic spaces or phenomena that usually remain imperceptible. Using unorthodox methods for recording, Kirkegaard captures and contextualizes hitherto unheard sounds from within a variety of environments: a geyser, a sand dune, a nuclear power plant, an empty room, a TV tower, and even sounds from the human inner ear itself.
Based in Berlin, Kirkegaard is a graduate of the Academy for Media Arts in Cologne, Germany. Since 1995, Kirkegaard has presented his works at exhibitions and at festivals and conferences throughout the world. He has released five albums (mostly on the British label Touch) and is a member of the sound art collective freq_out."
- http://www.touchmusic.org.uk/
http://fonik.dk/works/conversion.html - http://www.scenatet.dk/
Elizabeth Brown, flute, shakuhachi, theremin; Newband; Momenta Quartet; Pro Musica Nipponia, Yasushi Inada, conductor; Ben Verdery, amplified classical guitar played with slide bar.
- "The music of Elizabeth Brown (b. 1953) revels in paradox, but of a subtle kind. The strangeness of the music sneaks up on you; its liquid, mellifluous quality masks a far more radical stance. Seemingly irreconcilable instrumental timbres coexist peaceably: shakuhachi with string quartet, theremin with guitar, Partch instruments with theremin. The music is blessed with an old-fashioned gift for clear and singable melody . . . except for the fact that the tune keeps bending and melting. There is a genuine romantic sensibility, yet it exists in a soundworld that can only be avant-garde. But the avant-gardisme is in turn presented within a sensibility that is tender, sweet, and toylike. In short it expresses a genuine innocence, something we encounter far too rarely in an era of postmodern irony. Browns musical world is one of dreamlike sounds, images, textures, colors, and harmonies. One sees the literature of the past, especially the Romantic era, transformed through its colored filter. One also glimpses a musical future that is fresh and imaginative, but never afraid of beauty, nor of humane warmth.
Brown is a gentle maverick. Though her music bespeaks an ironclad intelligence and steely will, and evidences ties to all sorts of American experimental traditions, it still desires to give pleasure to performer and listener alike. It is eclectic, but seamlessly so. Its many sources and influences blend into an organic whole that seems to have always been there, but which she fortuitously discovered. Above all, it is personal, the work of an unpretentious, deep, and questing spirit.
New World Records - Experimedia Preview
- "Elizabeth Brown's music has been heard in Japan, the Soviet Union, Colombia, Australia and Vietnam as well as across Europe and the US. She has received grants, awards, and commissions from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Barlow Foundation, the Asian Cultural Council, the Cary Trust, the Greenwall Foundation, NYFA, Orpheus, St. Luke's Chamber Ensemble, Newband, and the Japan/US Friendship Commission. She has been a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center in Italy and at the MacDowell Colony, and was Artist-in-Residence at the Hanoi National Conservatory of Music, in the Grand Canyon, in Maine's Acadia National Park, and in Isle Royale National Park, a U.S. Biosphere Reserve in the middle of Lake Superior. She has been composer-in-residence at the Bravo! Vail Valley Music Festival, the Cape and Islands Chamber Music Festival, and the Bennington Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East. A solo CD, "Blue Minor: Chamber Music by Elizabeth Brown" was released in 2003.
Brown is celebrated both here and in Japan for her compositions combining eastern and western sensibilities. This past season alone, 'Shinshoufuukei '(An Imagined Landscape) won Grand Prize in the Makino Yutaka Music Award Composition Competition for Japanese traditional instrument orchestra, and 'Mirage' was a prizewinner in the SGCM Shakuhachi Composition Competition 2010, with performances in Tokyo's Kioi Hall and Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall, Takemitsu Memorial. Music from Japan presented the Japanese premiere of 'Rubicon' in Fukushima prefecture, performed by members of Tokyo's celebrated Reigakusha gagaku orchestra. Music from Japan also commissioned 'fragments for the moon', for concerts featuring Brown with nohkan/shinobue artist Kohei Nishikawa in February 2011 in New York City and at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C. Finally, Brown was April Artist-in-Residence in the Grand Canyon, continuing work on a series of solo shakuhachi pieces inspired by particular places in nature. Brown has also given solo shakuhachi performances at the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in NYC, in the sculpture quarry of the Lacoste School for the Arts in Provence, and as Artist-in-Residence inseveral National parks. Since she premiered 'Mirage', for shakuhachi and string quartet, with the Grainger Quartet at the World Shakuhachi Festival 2008 in Sydney, Australia, it has also been performed in Tokyo, Prague, and New York City. In 2008/2009, she lived in Japan on a Cultural Exchange Fellowship supported by the US/Japan Friendship Commission.
Spring 2012 will see the premiere of Brown's 4th collaboration with visual artist Lothar Osterburg. 'A Bookmobile for Dreamers', commissioned by the Electronic Music Foundation through Meet the Composer's Commissioning Music/USA program, is a multimedia chamber opera for theremin, recorded sound, and video, which celebrates the imagination as inspired by the printed word. Brown and Osterburg were in residence at the Liguria Study Center in Bogliasco, Italy, in spring 2011.
Brown, who holds a master's degree in Flute Performance from The Juilliard School, often performs as flutist in her own music, as well as with many NYC ensembles, including the New York City Ballet Orchestra, American Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, and Flute Force."
American Composers Forum - http://www.elizabethbrowncomposer.com/
Janácek Philharmonic Orchestra, Christian Arming, Petr Kotik, and Zsolt Nagy, conductors; Charles Curtis, cello solo, with members of the San Diego Symphony.
New World Records
- "Pogus is very honored to be able to reissue this recording of works by the late Jerry Hunt (1943-1993), originally released on ¿What Next? Having long been fascinated by Hunts work, it is great to be able to have these last works of his available on CD once again."
To quote Blue Gene Tyranny:
- In the 1970s electronic music practitioners constituted a rare and marginal population on the frontiers of interactive media and performance. Audio, with its modest bandwidth requirements, led video by at least a decade in every major discovery. Early artists were able to experiment, construct, interconnect and perform with electronic systems that were consciously digital, real-time and interactive long before those buzzwords were mentioned in other artistic contexts. Among the pioneers, Jerry Hunt was the rarest, most marginal explorer of a remote terrain. As his musical activities moved from the electronic sound pieces of the 1970s into the legendary performances of the 1980s, Hunt brought along with him a curiously rich and viable ecosystem of pieces, structuring principles, performing gestures, and theatrical personae.
The sounds on this recording, created in 1993, are completely different from the ones that constitute normal or academic electronic music. The three sections of this electronic work constitute the composer's last pieces. He regarded the recorded version of this work as a "document for rehearing." The overall sound is the densest and most intricate in this one of a kind artist's body of work. The three sections consist of "interlocking audio and video optical discs which provide the fundamental image, sound and program control strings ... action code pattern structures ... for a group of transactional mimetic gesture exercises ... inflection calls evoking ... melody streams" with simultaneous tracks of acoustic percussion. The sonic result is an entrancing, overwhelming, evocative shamanic performance of brilliantly designed electronic timbres.
Pogus Productions - Soundcloud
- "Jerry Hunt (November 30, 1943 in Waco, Texas - November 27, 1993 in Canton, Texas) was an American composer who created works using live electronics partly controlled by his ritualistic performance techniques, influenced by his interest in the occult. He committed suicide in response to terminal cancer.
His collaborators included Karen Finley, Paul Panhuysen, and Philip Krumm. Hunt was also the founder of IRIDA Records, which released recordings with works by Larry Austin, James Fulkerson, Dary John Mizelle, Rodney Waschka II, and others, as well as recordings of his own music."
Last.fm - http://www.jerryhunt.org/
- "North Carolina-bred, New York-based violinist, singer and composer Caroline Shaw thought she was "having a psychotic break" when, at 30, she was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in music for her Partita for 8 Solo Voices a startling original work that draws on Baroque dance forms, experimental vocal music and the drawings of artist Sol LeWitt. Shaw sees composition as a logical extension of her musicianship and, in fact, prefers to be known as a musician rather than a capital-C Composer. Her versatile music-making is most often on display with the vocal octet Roomful of Teeth and as violinist with the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. But her compositions themselves are dramatic, lush, poetic and innovative. Though emblematic of an increasing percentage of musicians comfortable with various styles and performance practices, her voice is powerfully forward-looking, exciting and entirely her own."
--Alex Ambrose, Q2 Music
New Amsterdam Records
Tim Berne: alto saxophone
Oscar Noriega: clarinet, bass clarinet
Matt Mitchell: piano
Ches Smith: drums, vibraphone, percussion
- "Acclaim for the first, eponymous album from saxophonist-composer Tim Bernes acoustic quartet Snakeoil came from far and wide: All About Jazz described the music as unpredictable and fresh, while The Guardian called it an object lesson in balancing composition, improvisation and the tonal resources of an acoustic band. The album made the DownBeat critics poll of the top 10 best releases of 2012, New York Times critic Nate Chinen listed it as his No. 1 release of the year, and Jazzwise underscored the stature of Snakeoil by declaring it to be suffused with genuine humanity and more than a little wisdom. Stoked by this reception, Bernes Snakeoil has upped the ante with its second ECM release, Shadow Man. Over four years together, Berne and his band of New York standouts pianist Matt Mitchell, clarinettist Oscar Noriega and drummer/
percussionist Ches Smith have developed a rapport that sounds like communal telepathy. The studio outcome is a marvel of kinetic action, the six pieces of Shadow Man making for music as visceral as it is cerebral; there is rollercoaster dynamism and aching lyricism, roiling counterpoint and intriguing harmony, glinting detail and ensemble impact. The album is a dizzying experience for the senses, breathtaking and, ultimately, moving in its sheer imaginative verve.
ECM - Screwgun - AAJ
This leaves another two to make it a "Top 20" - It's beginning to get difficult now . . .
Erik Friedlander - Claws and Wings
"What do you do when someone special in your life dies? The shock can be numbing and disorienting. Within days of the death of his wife in November of 2011, cellist and composer Erik Friedlander fell off his bicycle on a wet morning in New York City, tearing completely the UCL (ulnar collateral ligament) of his thumb, and effectively putting himself out of commission for 3 months. With concerts canceled and no practicing to be done Friedlander had a lot of time to think about difficult months he and his daughter had just gone through. Lynn, Eriks wife of 22 years, an award-winning choreographer and writer, who collaborated frequently with her husband, had suffered from breast cancer and her slow descent had been tough on everyone.
After months of rehab and soul searching Friedlander began playing again. For me it was time to back into the flow of life. Grieving wasnt over -- it doesnt really work like that -- but life is a hard-ass, it doesnt stop, Friedlander says. It was like climbing onto to a moving freight train and I was out of practice. The thing is, music had been there for me through a lot of tough times, and it was still there for me. I just needed give it some attention.
August, 2012 and Friedlander began composing again. He called to long-time collaborators Sylvie Courvoisier and Ikue Mori as well as producer/engineer Scott Solter and convened a 2-day session on the Lower East Side to record the new project. The music strongly resonates with Eriks mind-set at the time: meditating on a life lost, regaining his balance, and then moving forward with optimism."
Skipstone Records - Bandcamp
http://erik-friedlander.squarespace.com/
Edward Ka-Spel - One Last Pose Before the Ruin
- "The ghosts of decades past are blocking the doors but you carry the future in the palm of your left hand. It promises a gentle landing, a transformation in soft colours. Hope. Eternity. Now, for the sake of posterity, one last pose before the ruin.....please."
Beta-Lactam Ring Records
- I will probably add a few more + possibly some honorable mentions and important 2013 finds.
Time will show.
Released 19 February 2013
Nels Cline - guitar
Ellery Eskelin - tenor saxophone
Rob Sudduth - tenor saxophone
Ben Goldberg - contra-alto clarinet, Bb clarinet
Ches Smith - drums
- " I have been developing my abilities on the Eb contra alto clarinet (a weird member of the family, pitched below the bass clarinet) for some years, mostly in my work with the group Tin Hat. Somehow it occurred to me to have a band where I was the bass player, on this instrument.
Of course the group would need two of my tenor saxophone heroes (Ellery Eskelin and Rob Sudduth), a guitar genius (and now certifiable rock star) (Nels Cline), and the deeply tumultuous drummer Ches Smith.
So after finishing up the premier of my latest giant project, Orphic Machine, in March of 2012, I wrote a bunch of songs and assembled this crew at the Bunker studio in Williamsburg one day in May. We learned the tunes, rehearsed, and recorded them all in just a few hours, and the results are extraordinary -- raw, dire, and to the point."
- Bob Goldberg.
Eb contra alto clarinet:
http://bagproductionrecords.org - Review by Jonah - music
Mohammad - Som Sakrifis
- "Following on from their previous releases (the highly regarded 'Roto Vildblomma' CD and the 'Spiriti' 3LP box, both on Antifrost) 'Som Sakrifis' follows the trio through three tracks of deep space experimentation where the acoustic and electronic blend together as a monumental whole. Listening to 'Som Sakrifis' takes the listener on an expansive journey through the netherworld of the low range whilst retaining distinct traces of musicality. The time and space in these works have a logic more akin to that of Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr than any contemporary music references. Monumental monochromatic movement is the order of the day. Sit back, strap in and let these fine explorers take you way out into the nether world."
- http://www.pan-act.com/ - Touching Extremes review
MOHAMMAD
- " is a chamber music trio consisting of Coti K (contrabass), ILIOS (oscillators) and Nikos Veliotis (cello). Based in Greece, Mohammad make long form work drone works that explore the lower end of the frequency spectrum whilst retaining an intense emotional capacity. The results are monumental slow moving physical blocks of sound, both daunting and musical. The sheer weight of these recordings is impressive, the interplay of the musicians and instruments staggering, this end result being an album rich with immense harmonious abstraction which highlights years of dedication to their unique path.
Soundcloud - http://www.mohammad.gr
It took me a while to get into this, but even though I don't understand French and it for the most part is spoken words in French, I think it's the most excellent album From Minizza so far.
Avec : Rainier Lericolais, Franck Marguin, Geoffroy Montel, Etienne Bonhomme, Olivier Cavaill
The Stranger - Watching Dead Empires in Decay
Polymath James Leyland Kirby must surely have one of the most confounding CVs in the business: he spent years taking the piss out of the music industry with anthems rallying against the (VV)MCPS, he notoriously fell out with various well known record labels for reasons youll just have to google, goaded Aphex Twin with a series of tributes and channelled his love of everything from Falco (Rock Me Amadeus), Chris De Burgh, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Stockport karaoke nights into a stream of increasingly bizzare 7s back in the early noughties.
But at the same time he was responsible for releasing some of the very earliest material from Boards of Canada (Hell Interface: 1997), made a ruck of frankly groundbreaking industrial electronic records, brought New Beat to the worlds attention and, in 1999, made his first album as The Caretaker, a project that would go on to release some of the most loved Ambient/ Lynchian albums of recent times. SInce then hes also produced an incredible suite of releases under his own name, scored various film projects and released three EPs under the Intrigue & Stuff banner which are, for our money, so ahead of their time they might just start sinking in properly by the end of the decade.
All of which brings us to Watching Dead Empires in Decay, a new album recorded under another of Kirbys pseudonyms The Stranger and released on Modern Love, a label that has been close to Kirby through these last eventful 15 years. Its a dream album for the label: perhaps the most ambitious of Kirbys career so far. Its complex, singular, enigmatic, percussive, dark, and you just cant work out how it was constructed. Gone are the sampled 78s of The Caretaker, but it also doesnt exactly sound electronic you just cant quite fathom how any of it was put together: Field Recordings? Found Sounds? Sheets of metal scraped and hammered? Drum machines re-wired? Its stark and unsettling, haunted, even troubling but often just beautiful.
It starts with the sharp clang of opener We Are Enemies But Not Here before the woozy percussive crawl So Pale It Shone In The Night sucks you into a bare landscape: somewhere between Eraserhead and Fumio Hayasakas music for Akira Kurosawa. And then there are moments that break through the tension with clarity and familiarity, nostalgia even: Where Are Our Monsters Now, Where Are Our Friends? could have been made by Boards of Canada if they had taken a turn into more noxious terrain back in 1998, while Spiral Of Decline offsets the drum programming youd most likely associate with a Powell record with an oblique sense of timing and space. It all ends with About To Enter A Strange New Period, an unusual, vaporous coda that offers no resolution it just shuts proceedings down with nothing settled."
Modern Love - Last.fm
Christopher Campbell & Grant Cutler - Schooldays Over
- "Down at the roots, folk songs erase their authors. Even when they can be traced to their original writers, they connect even further back to something indigenous, chthonic. The Irish folk ballad Schooldays Over was written by Ewan MacColl as part of a larger work entitled The Big Hewer, which was broadcast by the BBC in 1961. In its frank depiction of a life that lead directly from the schoolhouse to backbreaking labor in the mines, it is very much of its time. But its plain, melancholy melody adheres to something more universal as well, and thats the thread that Chris Campbell and Grant Cutler pull out and build on for this new innova release.
It begins with the faintest wooden soundthe shift of a chair or the creak of a piano bench, perhaps. The music unfolds delicately in reverberations and echoes from piano, glockenspiel, strings and more laid on top of synthetic tones and beds of sound. When Cutlers delicate, birdsong-encircled vocals arrive, they sound like the ashes of MacColls song, burnt down then returned from a distant place, a residual haunting repeating itself inside the track. Stretched into a roughly 20-minute suite, the songs pressing, immediate concern with the toll of hard labor is effaced and supplanted by a meditation on times fleeting nature, on questions of duty, work and leisure.
Campbell and Cutler havent added to or fleshed out the original so much as zoomed in so close were practically inside the songs heart, watching the world from inside a sepia-tinted diorama. Their achievement here is not making the song their own, but excavating it, turning it into something for no one and everyone. That is, at the root, a folk songs job. . . . "
Innova Recordings - Soundcloud
More Grant Cutler @ Emusers
Produced by Michael Riesman // Conducted by Brad Lubman
Performed by Ensemble Signal
with Martha Cluver, Mellissa Hughes and Caroline Shaw - solo voices
- "Over the past 25 years, Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe have changed how composers think about writing, commissioning and presenting music. Since the founding of Bang on a Can in 1987, these three artists have defined their own landscape in modern music, fusing classical tradition with pop techniques in ways that continue to inspire an emerging generation of young artists.
Shelter is the third in a trilogy of collaborative works that began with 1999's The Carbon Copy Building, followed by 2001's Lost Objects. Shelter taps into the various meanings and connotations of the word, from basic protection from the elements to the building of an American home. Commissioned in 2005 by the Cologne-based musikFabrik ensemble and BAM's Next Wave Festival, the project reunited Gordon, Lang and Wolfe with Deborah Artman, who wrote the libretto for Lost Objects. Artman notes that Shelter "evokes the power and threat of nature, the soaring frontier promise contained in the framing of a new house, the pure aesthetic beauty of blueprints, the sweet architecture of sound and the uneasy vulnerability that underlies even the safety of our sleep."
Like Lost Objects, Shelter is an oratorio, but with smaller forces: three sopranos and a large, mixed ensemble. Ensemble Signal first performed the work in 2010 at the Bang on a Can Marathon in New York City. This premiere recording--conducted by Brad Lubman and featuring vocal soloists Martha Cluver, Mellissa Hughes and Caroline Shaw--was produced by Michael Riesman. On Shelter's American premiere at BAM in 2005, which was also conducted by Lubman, the Wall Street Journal's Barbara Jepson wrote, "The pursuit of shelter is as old as humanity itself. But these forms of refuge can be shattered in an instant, as events like the terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina have all too recently reminded us."
Cantaloupe Music
Full streaming of the album provided by The Atlantic for a limited time (probably) @ The Atlantic @ Soundcloud
Review @ The Atlantic Homepage
- "Ensemble Signal is a large NY-based ensemble dedicated to offering the broadest possible audience access to a diverse range of contemporary works through performance, commissioning, recording, and education. Its Artist roster includes some of most gifted and innovative young musicians working in New York. Signal performs with conductor Brad Lubman, who founded the group along with cellist and co-artistic director Lauren Radnofsky. Lubman, one of the premier conductors of new music, has worked closely with some of greatest composers of contemporary concert music among them Berio, Boulez, Reich, Wuorinen, and Lachenmann and has appeared with some of the worlds most illustrious orchestras and new music ensembles.
To form what The New York Times has described as one of the most vital groups of its kind, Lubman and Radnofsky assembled a new music dream team (TimeOutNY) of independent artists who have worked closely with one another and Lubman over the last decade. Members of JACK Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, and other leading New York ensembles perform regularly with the ensemble. Signal is flexible in size and instrumentation, enabling it to meet the demands of its diverse repertoire that ranges from Steve Reich to Helmut Lachenmann.
At home in concert halls, clubs, and international festivals alike, Signal has performed at venues ranging from Carnegie Hall's Zankel Hall to (le)Poisson Rouge. Signal made its debut in Spring 2008 at the Bang on a Can Marathon in NYC and the Ojai Music Festival in California, earning praise for deeply committed performances (Musical America) of gripping vehemence (LA Times). Soon after, Signal gave two sold-out performances of Steve Reichs Music for 18 Musicians and You Are (Variations) at (le) Poisson Rouge, earning praise from the New York Times for their vibrant, euphoric performances that seemed to electrify the remarkably youthful audience. Capacity crowds have greeted Signals returns to LPR for performances including Philip Glasss Suite from The Hours and Symphony No. 3, Michael Gordons Trance, and Steve Reichs Pulitzer Prize-winning Double Sextet.
Recent highlights include performances at The Tanglewood Festival of Comtemporary Music, playing the music of Brian Ferneyhough; The Guggenheim Museum, for a staged production of the NY Premiere of Charles Wuorinens It Happens Like This; and on Miller Theatres Composer Portrait series, premiering a new work by Hilda Paredes, written for Signal and Irvine Arditti. Future projects include the commission of a 30 min work for 20 players by Steve Reich. On the educational side, Signal helps emerging composers and performers refine their craft through collaborations at institutions such as the Eastman School of Music and the June in Buffalo festival.
Signals recordings include Philip Glass's Glassworks and Music in Similar Motion (Glass's Orange Mountain label); and Sarah Kirkland Sniders Penelope (New Amsterdam Records). 2012-13 recording releases include a CD/surround-sound DVD of music by Lachenmann, with the composer as soloist in Zwei Gefühle (Mode); Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfes Shelter (Cantaloupe); and Reichs Music for 18 Musicians and pulitzer-prize winning Double Sextet (Cantaloupe)."
Artists:
Violin: Olivia DePrato, William Knuth, Yuki Numata, Courtney Orlando^, Chris Otto, Ari Streisfeld
Viola: Caleb Burhans, John Pickford Richards, Victor Lowrie
Cello: Kevin Macfarland, Lauren Radnofsky^, Caitlin Sullivan
Bass: Greg Chudzik
Flute: Kelli Kathman, Jessica Schmitz
Oboe: Jacqueline Leclair, Christa Robinson
Clarinet: Bill Kalinkos, Ken Thomson
Bassoon: Brad Balliett
Trumpet: Mike Gurfield
Trombone: Steven Parker
Piano/Keyboard: David Friend, Oliver Hagen, Lisa Moore , Thomas Rosenkranz , Ning Yu
Percussion: Jamie Dietz, Doug Perkins^, David Skidmore, Bill Solomon^
Harp: Nuiko Wadden
Sound Director: Paul Coleman
2012-13 Season Guests
James Hirschfeld, Trombone
David Byrd-Marrow, Horn
Nick Tolle, Percussion
Adrian Sandi, Clarinets
Bandcamp - Emusers Exclusive Bang on a Can & Cantaloupe Music Thread