Aaron Jay Kernis | ... |
Abel Steinberg Winant Trio | ... |
Alvin Curran | On October 20, 1988, a large part of western Europe heard a unique radio concert -- CRYSTAL PSALMS -- a concerto for musicians in six nations, simultaneously performed, mixed and broadcast live in ste... |
Anthony Braxton | ... |
Arawi | "Arawi" (Aymara for song and musical creation) was founded in 1985 and is dedicated to musical options that exist in both traditional styles and classical forms of Bolivian music.
The majority of the... |
Batak | 75 thousand years ago, a volcano erupted deep in the interior of North Sumatra, spreading ash as far as Sri Lanka and leaving behind a crater now known as Lake Toba. One hundred kilometers long, it is... |
The California Ear Unit | This is the gift record for doubting friends who still tell you that new music is hellbound in a handbasket.
--L.A. Weekly
This is a strange time for new music. All manner of divisions, irritating a... |
Carl Stone | There is nothing commonplace about the sophisticated sampling practiced by Carl Stone, who has been in the musical transformation business ever since graduating from CalArts in the '70s. For Stone, wh... |
Carlos Gusatavino | When I read poetry that touches me,I become very agitated, my whole body contorts, I vibrate totally, and tears appear in my eyes. It's very strong! I then take the manuscript paper and write the note... |
Charles Dodge | If there is one piece identified with Dodge, a "signature" piece if you will, it would have to be "Any Resemblance..." which has those qualities that seem to imbue his work in general -- charm, wit, p... |
Choir Of St. Gayané, Komitas Keshishian | ... |
Cornelius Cardew | Twenty years on, Cardew's music still provokes controversy. Even amongst his many admirers, his later 'political' music in particular creates unease and perhaps misgivings. The relation of the music t... |
Cuarteto Latinoamericano | The Cuarteto Latinoamericano has been deeply invested in performing the cycle of composers of Latin American heritage around the world for the past few decades. On a given night on a concert stage the... |
Daniel Lentz | Achieves a totally original blending drawn from exotic forces, an overall sound at once contemporary and evocative of ancient voices under some imagined Gothic roof.
--Newsweek
"Missa Umbrarum" was ... |
Darynn Zimmer | This imaginatively crafted recital of rarely heard French melodies places Zimmer in the forefront of emerging young American sopranos.
--Classical Pulse!
This collection of lesser known French art s... |
David Hykes | True to the Times (How to Be?)" develops further the current phase of Harmonic Chant work (since 1991), which began with the album "Windhorse Riders". My aim now is to show Harmonic Chant as a unified... |
David Hykes & Djamchid Chemirani | An exquisitely haunting disc of meditative music accompanied by subtle percussion.
--CD Review: The Basic 50 Definitive
World Music Library
The Harmonic Chant is a contemplative musical discipline I... |
David Tanenbaum | The highlight [of the Bath International Guitar Festival] was a world premier -- Barabas ... Tanenbaum displayed astounding mastery and skill, drawing a bewildering variety of tones and colours from h... |
Deep Listening Band | Timbres and harmonies warp as they well up toward the open air, change shape, resonate in unfamiliar, sometimes disturbing combinations. The pace is peaceful, pulseless, the boundaries of the composit... |
Dmitri Shostakovich | Best Small Ensemble Performance.
--Grammy nomination 1997
The poet Carl Sandburg once said that Shostakovich's music is music "written with the heart's blood", and it was this feeling that enabled m... |
Ellen Fullman | An incredible quietude flows out of this music.... Listening, one becomes conscious of the inner workings of being ...
--Juan Christopye Ammann, Kunsthalle-Basel
Created by composer Ellen Fullman, t... |
Ensemble Project Ars Nova | This recording is simply the best of a very fine but still small number of discs featuring secular music of the late 14th century -- a time of great social and political upheaval, and the beginning of... |
Erdem Helvacioğlu | “Altered Realities” is an album of solo acoustic guitar and live electronics. All of the compositions were recorded in real-time, directly to DAT (Digital Audio Tape) without any overdubs, mixing,... |
Etty Ben-Zaken | My first encounter with some of the songs in this recording was in my grandmother Esther's kitchen. Back in my childhood town in Israel, I used to help her prepare her famous leek balls. At fifteen mi... |
Frederic Rzewski | A spectacular performance.
--The New York Times
"The People United" is a series of 6 cycles, each of which consists of 6 stages, in which different musical relationships appear in order: (1) simple ... |
Gyan Riley | Gyan Riley, born in California in 1977, is the son of renowned avant garde composer and North Indian Raga vocalist Terry Riley. He completed his undergraduate studies at the San Francisco Conservatory... |
Hans Wendl & Aina Kemis | A uniquely dark, gentle, austere, strikingly powerful disc of distant intimacy, cold warmth, and other oxymorons of the borders linking opposites.
--Stereophile
The astonishing purity of the vocal m... |
Harold Budd With Zeitgeist | One shatters glass in a vacuum, then finds the art part among the shards.
—Harold Budd
With this work, composed for Zeitgeist, plus the release of "By the Dawn's Early Light" in 1991, I returned t... |
Henry Cowell | Henry Cowell invented and developed most of the extended techniques we have heard on and in the piano over the last seventy years. During his lifetime (1897-1965), he composed a vast amount of symphon... |
Ingram Marshall | Dark Waters, for English horn and tape, was written in 1996 for the oboist Libby Van Cleve. The English horn is amplified and processed through several digital delay devices and mixed live with the ta... |
Ira J. Mowitz | Death is the title piece's subject, and the sense of space and loneliness is astounding. Mowitz's rich, booming, unidentifiable tones weep in some vast acoustic of the imagination.
--Village Voice
A... |
Janice Giteck | For a postminimalist, Giteck traverses a wonderful range within each piece, surging from darkness into light, from sorrow into sexuality, from stasis into dance.
--Village Voice
"Om Shanti" was comp... |
jeffrey roden | these 26 pieces for 1961 fender precision bass are comprised of two sets of miniature and minimalist cycles, recorded entirely over two seperate days in los angeles area studios; each contains the br... |
Joan Jeanrenaud | n 1999, after twenty years as cellist of the Kronos Quartet, I chose to leave the group and began a metamorphosis of sorts in my musical development as a solo artist. During residencies in Hawaii and ... |
Joan La Barbara | Contrasts the sacred with the secular, the serene with the sexual. Joan La Barbara is the perfect vehicle ... for this delicate music.
--CD Review
For this recording, I focused on particular aspects... |
John Abercrombie, George Marsh & Mel Graves | The players' mutual respect promotes a degree of passionate simpatico and risk-taking that is not only unusual, but spellbinding
--Jazz Times
In the course of my life as a musician, there have been ... |
John Adams | Shaker Loops is Adams' first real masterpiece, and one of his most enduring scores ... This recording captures the work's brilliant melding of Minimalist motivic development and Neo-Romantic power.
-... |
John Cage | ... the most convincing interpreter of Cage's keyboard music.
—The New York Times
The eight works on this album feature the different kinds of "instruments" used by John Cage in his substantial pi... |
John Cage/ Margaret Leng Tan/ Joan La Barbara | ... |
John Luther Adams | Contemporary Classical Recording of the Year 1993
--Creative Loafing, Atlanta
"Dream in White on White" (1992) is a musical landscape on the non-chromatic ("white") tones and non-tempered intervals ... |
Karlheinz Stockhausen | With its exotic, gamelan like timbres (the result of electronic processing) and its deft balance of meditative stasis and kinetic repetition, Mantra is one 60's piece that has survived its era.
--The... |
Kyle Gann | I dance only privately, and in my head: thus, Private Dances. I have never been one to write suites of small pieces, but I was motivated to try to do so by the example of Bill Duckworth’s wonderful ... |
Lou Harrison | This recording features Joan Jeanrenaud, the cellist for the Kronos Quartet for 20 years, in her first soloist recording, with the Abel, Steinberg, Winant Trio, and Benjamin Simon, violist for the Sta... |
Lou Harrison & Linda Burman-Hall | On tuning creativity: Throughout history we have thought up many visual, numeric, and verbal ways to represent the beautiful vibrations that make up music...their direct speeds, the ratios between t... |
Margaret Leng Tan | Selected as one of the best recordings of 1988 by The New York Times
It is indeed ironic that "Litania", which appears early in Satoh's oeuvre, emerges as one of his most strikingly original and radi... |
Marianne Schuppe | Hô — Taiagarù — Sauh
The art of song of Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988)
'Songs without lachrymose, sentimental lyricisms, being instead "phonetic gestures", cries, screams, exhalations; pantings, w... |
Matthias Ziegler | Matthias Ziegler is a world class musician who is a virtuoso flute player. On this CD he presents a personal vision of a solo polyphonic music that is complete in sound, form, melody, harmony, driving... |
Maurice Ravel | The name Maurice Ravel, for many of us, conjures up elegance and refinement, a faint perfume of decadence, and decorous tributes to a bygone era. His Impressionist label elicits dreamy visions of foun... |
Michael Harrison | Through the miracle of just intonation -- the art of tuning to the ratios found in the natural overtone series -- Harrison evokes glorious clouds of harmonics, from which emerge peals of divine thunde... |
Miguel Frasconi | The "Song" in Song + Distance refers not to the various popular song structures we hear everyday but, rather, to the concept of expression. The song in "singing one's heart out." The "Distance" refers... |
Morton Feldman | La Barbara's voice (in triplicate) has the freshness and clarity of a frosty morning, and the three lines congeal into chords of an icy coolness, pure-toned and precisely tuned, a joy to witness.... I... |
Morton Subotnick | For starry nights when only cosmic electronics shining brightly will do.
--L.A. Reader
"The Key to Songs" is music for an imaginary ballet inspired by A Week of Kindness, or The Seven Deadly Element... |
Olivier Messiaen | Niemann and Tilles play like one person with four very powerful hands and the recording is as crystalline as Messiaen's religious vision: * * * *
--Oakland Tribune
I. Amen of the Creation
Amen, so ... |
Paul Dresher | His sound can be both lush and austere. But there's always a sense of pulse, evolution and destination in his music.
--San Francisco Examiner
The music on this recording was composed over a span of ... |
Paul Lansky | Lansky's genius ... centers on the human voice .. in its possibilities, in much the way Cubists worked household goods.
--Fanfare
The pieces on this recording are concerned with everyday life. Two a... |
Peter Garland | Often simple in design, his consonant or modal melodies, frequently inspired by southwestern Native American or Mexican folk music, grow rich in resonances through repetition or subtle variation, sugg... |
Peter Scott Lewis | An appealing combination of intricacy and rhetorical straightforwardness, and the five pieces included here afford a good entree to his work.
--San Francisco Examiner
Both "Journey to Still Water Po... |
Quartett | Grittier than the usual New Albion fare ... it has none of the academic pretensions of so much experimental jazz. Of the kind of collaborative improvisations so popular today, this is one of the best ... |
Ray Brooks | In China during the Tang Dynasty, there lived a highly educated, eccentric Zen monk named Fuke. Fuke was prone to wandering about the streets ringing a bell, preaching the Dharma and chanting sutras. ... |
Reza Vali | Had Bela Bartok gathered folk material from Persia, his string quartets might have tuned out something like Reza Vali's.
--Philadelphia Inquirer
Many composers of the late nineteeth and early twenti... |
Richard Teitelbaum | Two extended works by Richard Teitelbaum for shakuhachi and synthesizer with percussion and bass accompaniment. Teitelbaum was one of the founders of the revolutionary MEV group in Rome, which explore... |
Robert Kyr | For the modern reader, the word "passion" suggests strong emotion or sexual desire. However, the word derives from Latin -- passio -- and even more distantly, from Greek -- pascho, pathos, pathema -- ... |
Rova Saxaphone Quartet | Extremely fresh music contingent on just the kind of quick-thinking, big-picture inventiveness that Rova carries off so seamlessly: * * * * *
--Down Beat
The 12th annual Leningrad Jazz Festival was ... |
Roy Whelden | An introspective and quite accessible disc which is enjoyable on several levels, not the least of which is the experimental nature inherent in the very combination of new and old.
--SEE Magazine, Edm... |
Roy Whelden/Rudy Rucker | I have lived at Cold Mountain these 30 long years. Yesterday I called on family and friends: More than half had gone to the Yellow Springs. Slowly consumed, like fire down a candle; forever flowing, l... |
Sarah Cahill | An important new recording of Ruth Crawford's (1901-1953) transcendental "Nine Preludes" and "Piano Study in Mixed Accents," and the premiere recording of "Dissonant Counterpoint" and "Gebrauchs-musik... |
Sasha Matson | Most of us are not able to live in a state of nature and wilderness, but perhaps the aesthetic dimension opened through art can bring the image of Nature to us where we do live; that is the goal of th... |
Slow Six |
There is no musical group today that compares to the Brooklyn based
Slow Six. Since the beginning, their compositional detail,
instrumental prowess, and live computer-music instruments
separated them... |
Somei Satoh | My living room just isn't good enough for this music. I need a bare wood floor, no furniture and a view of a mountain.
--The Wire
SANYOU and KOUGETSU [from Sun Moon] are a pair, like the sun and the... |
Stefano Scodanibbio | The working relationship between Stefano Scodanibbio and the Arditti Quartet has existed since the mid '80s. I remember very well looking at his first Quartet 'Visas,' which included some very unusual... |
Stephen Scott | Just for fun, put this record on and ask your friends to tell you what instrument is making the sounds. Assure them that it's an instrument they're quite familiar with. Unless they already know what a... |
Stephen Vitiello | Stephen Vitiello
Bright and Dusty Things
NA115
Stephen Vitiello, light readings and sound processing with Pauline Oliveros, accordion, David Tronzo, guitar
...a master of the [sound art] medium
--... |
Stephen Vitiello & David Tronzo | SCRATCHY MONSTERS ARE THE BAD DREAMS.
LAUGHING GHOSTS ARE THE GOOD ONES - according to my daughter, Georgia.
I've never been sure if I hear sounds in my dreams. I'm glad to know that she does. This i... |
Steve Lacy, Irene Aebi, Frederic Rzewski | Lacy and Rzewski ... make a compatible pair, creating luscious settings for Aebi's art-song renderings of Malina's supple, dark poetry and Lacy's stepwise tunes.
--CD Review
This work had its origin... |
Stuart Dempster | All three works on this disc are slow-paced and meditative in style. Nonetheless, they include some daringly imaginative -- and unexpected -- sonic effects ... fascinating.
--Audio
While on tour wit... |
Terry Riley | Equal-tempered piano improvisations that owe much to his lifelong study of Indian Nuusic -- a brilliant CD.
--Wall Street Journal
This concert represents about 50 years of thought, practice, composi... |
Threnody Ensemble | "Timbre Hollow" is the debut album by Threnody Ensemble -- a new chamber group founded by guitarists Erik Hoversten (formerly of A Minor Forest), Dave Cerf and Dominique Davison. Incorporating into th... |
Tonino Tesei | The music that I have written for the piano has always been suggested directly by the positions of my hands on the keyboard; the compositional imagination comes directly from the hands, with their mus... |
Virgil Thomson | Collectively, these [26] pieces, none of which runs more than seven minutes, remain one of the minor treasures of the American musical legacy.
--San Francisco Examiner
For Thomson's generation, the ... |
