Browse by Label: COLD BLUE MUSIC

Artist:	FOX, JIM
Title:	Last Things
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 001CD

"The Cold Blue label was started by Jim Fox in the early 1980s -- in the days of vinyl. Early releases were by Peter Garland, James Tenney, Ingram Marshall, Harold Budd, etc. By the time of its demise a few years later, Cold Blue was recognized by many new-music critics as a label with a unique focus -- particularly West Coast minimalism and post-minimalism. Jim Fox is a LA-based composer of instrumental and electro-acoustic music. 'The Copy of the Drawing' is a sectional, non-dramatic, serpentine soundscape charged with a certain abstract mysteriousness -- it overlays, chains, and weaves a whispering voice with strands of nonverbal, pitched sound. The text is built of fragments -- sentences, phrases, and individual words -- from twenty-three letters addressed to the scientists at Mt. Wilson Observatory between 1915 and 1935. 'Last Things', scored for bass clarinet, pedal steel guitar, piano, and electronic keyboards, is somewhat of a rhapsodic call and response between bass clarinet and pedal steel guitar, constructed of seven connected sections (or songs) that over the length of the piece slowly build in intensity."

Artist:	BYRON, MICHAEL
Title:	Music Of Nights Without Moon Or Pearl
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 002CD

"Music of Nights Without Moon or Pearl is a 1998 work for string quartet, contrabass, two pianos, and electronic keyboard. An arch-form work that unfolds slowly and insistently, at its point of greatest activity, the texture of Music of Nights ... might be likened to the sound of rainfall on a roof -- delicate, resonate, active, continuously changing while, in some sense, seeming to remain the same. Invisible 'Seeds' for James Tenney is a 1998 work scored for the same forces as Music of Nights. Entrances is a mid-1970s work for four pianos -- all four parts stunningly played by David Rosenboom, who also realized the specific construction of the version of this somewhat open-form piece that is heard here. Starting with intermittent bursts of notes, it builds to an extraordinarily dense barrage of sound."

Artist:	SMITH, CHAS
Title:	Nikko Wolverine
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 003CD

"'Nikko Wolverine' (1999) is a three-movement piece scored for various bowed and struck metal instruments in non-tempered tunings. These instruments, which were designed and built by the composer, emit tones that are rich in complex harmonics and often sound more electronic than acoustic. 'Tons Tons Macoutes' (1999) is a texturally dense work for Smith's metal instruments. It is almost glacial in both its presence and its pace, and it might call to mind certain musique concrète works. 'Genus, Sho-Bud' and the hymn-like 'Near the Divide', both composed in 1999, feature the composer on pedal-steel guitar. The first of these works utilizes a highly processed sound and unfolds through series of harmonic suspensions. Chas Smith, a Los Angeles-based composer and performer in the American maverick tradition of Harry Partch, creates much of his music from exotic instruments of his own design."

Artist:	FINK, MICHAEL JON
Title:	I Hear It In The Rain
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 004CD

"Ranging from works for solo piano and solo celesta to a textural soundscape for multiple clarinets to the title piece's glimmering electronic world, Fink's music on this CD is beautifully wrought, carefully meshing surface elegance with underlying formal concerns. Describing an earlier recording of Fink's music, Joan LaBarbera wrote in High Fidelity, '?the simplicity and elegance of character that many of Meredith Monk's works display, quiet and peaceful?minimal, but with the careful sparseness one comes to appreciate in the works of Feldman, Cage, or LaMonte Young.' This description could well apply to the music on Fink's new release."

Artist:	WALKER, MARTY
Title:	Dancing On Water
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 005CD

"This CD by outstanding new music clarinetist Marty Walker presents the work of composers Daniel Lentz, Peter Garland, Jim Fox, Michael Jon Fink, Rick Cox, and Michael Byron. Ranging from lush music for ten clarinets and ten pianos to a technically thorny solo for bass clarinet, and covering much ground in between, the pieces collected here offer a diverse array of styles and technical concerns. However, there seems to be a simple underlying link that holds them all together -- a fascination with music's inherent sensuality. Performing with Walker are a number of noted new music stalwarts -- William Winant, Wadada Leo Smith, Bryan Pezzone, Amy Knoles, David Johnson, Rick Cox, and Susan Allen."

Artist:	COX, RICK
Title:	Maria Falling Away
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 006CD

"This CD brings together six of Rick Cox's elegantly sparse, dark, sensuous, vaguely desolate soundscapes in which emotions seem to bubble just below cool surfaces (tracing a history of his work from 1990 through 2001). Most of these pieces display Cox's subtle, idiosyncratic electric guitar playing techniques, which sometimes employ preparations placed amid the strings (similar to those utilized in prepared piano works) and the use of such objects as sponges and brushes and glass lab slides to set the instrument's strings in motion. (Cox has been developing these techniques since the early 1970s.) These works also highlight Cox's ear for unusual and interesting harmonies. Featured performers: Jon Hassell, Thomas Newman, Jeff Elmassian, Chas Smith."

Artist:	SMITH, CHAS
Title:	Aluminum Overcast
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 007CD

"The six-movement set of variations that comprise Aluminum Overcast play with the listener's sense of time -- the perceived pace and the clock pace at which musical events take place -- as they slowly progress, the spare advancing to the dense. The first five sections/variations are built from shared/recurrent phrases -- melodic phrases (for bowed and struck metal), rhythmic phrases derived from geometric and Fibonacci structures, and phrases of 'harmonic noise' that vary in density. The sixth movement, something of a coda to the whole work, steps aside from the variations structure and into a purely textural, Ligeti-like soundworld. Aluminum Overcast is scored for metal instruments of the composer's design -- resonators that sprout rods, which are bowed and struck; large, clangorous sculptures of titanium; metal strings strung across multiple resonators; and vibraphone-like arrays of metal plates -- along with an understated touch of pedal steel guitar and electronically processed flute and woman's voice. Chas Smith is a Los Angeles-based composer, performer, and instrument designer and builder who, in the spirit of Harry Partch, creates much of his music for his own exotic instruments. His compositions, which always display his dualistic fascination with the scientific and the sensual, might owe their split personalities to the diverse collection of composers he studied with in the 1970s: Morton Subotnick, Mel Powell, James Tenney, and Harold Budd."

Artist:	VA
Title:	Cold Blue
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 008CD

"Back by popular demand (and available for the first time as a CD), this essential collection of West Coast new music -- an anthology known simply as Cold Blue -- is a classic. Originally issued on vinyl in 1984. Although bound together by a common concern with music's basic sensuality, the pieces collected here are wide-ranging in style -- process-driven works, through-composed pieces, ambient soundscapes, and music that glances in the directions of world music and avant-pop influences. In instrumentation, the music is also wide-ranging -- from a celesta solo to a marimba quartet to a player piano solo to works for speaking voices to music for piano and bullroarer, plus works for solo piano, synthesizers, cello and piano, and perhaps the only known piece of new music for pedal steel guitar and multi-tracked banjo." Composers include: Michael Byron, Jim Fox, David Mahler, James Tenney, Chas Smith, Peter Garland, Ingram Marshall, Daniel Lentz, Read Miller, John Kuhlman, Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, Eugene Bowen, and Harold Budd.

Artist:	ADAMS/COX/FINK/FOX
Title:
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 009CD

"Sometimes dark, sometimes quietly celebratory, the music on this CD is as straightforward as it is haunting and evocative. This disc, featuring new-music clarinetist Marty Walker, brings together Alaskan composer John Luther Adams' Dark Wind, a work for bass clarinet, mallet percussion, and piano penned in 2001, with three quintets for clarinet/bass clarinet and string quartet written in the early '90s by Los Angeles composers Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, and Jim Fox. All of these pieces -- distinct in their own voices, yet united in their muted intensities and sensuous surfaces -- inhabit a musical space that's just slightly (and interestingly) apart from most of today's prominent 'isms,' yet undeniably a part of the greater contemporary musical landscape."

Artist:	ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER
Title:	The Light That Fills The World
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 010CD

"These three works exist amid an undeniable aesthetic spirit of the times -- the embracing of pre-compositional principles and structural processes in the service of a highly personal artistic statement. However, John Luther Adams' recent work tends to transcend his compositional devices -- it is simply potent, compelling music that is timeless in its sublimity. This is quietly expressive music in which process never intrudes on the music's 'sounding,' but churns away in the background, while the foreground shimmers with a simple yet great joy in the very making of sounds. It is a music that may be readily appreciated on both intellectual and sensual levels." 3 works from 1998-01, performed on bass clarinet, vibraphone, marimba, piano, electric keyboard, violin, doublebass.

Artist:	POLANSKY, LARRY
Title:	Four-Voice Canons
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 011CD

"Over the past 25 years, Larry Polansky has been composing a series of fascinating mensuration canons (a formal concept dating back to the Renaissance) that run a sonic gamut from wildly boisterous (#6) to serenely introverted (#17, Guitar Canon). This disc brings together thirteen of these pieces (one of which is found here in three different 'realizations'). Each of the canons on this disc could be considered a different orchestration of two basic concepts -- the mensuration canon and the permutational cycling of a small number of musical elements. The instrumentation varies wildly: gamelan, electric guitars, children's voices, computer-generated sounds, marimbas, non-pitched percussion, choir, and chamber ensemble. The pitch materials, rhythms, tempos, and textures also vary dramatically from piece to piece."

Artist:	BYRON, MICHAEL
Title:	Awakening At The Inn Of The Birds
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 012CD

"Michael Byron's music is one of contrasts, rioted for its intertwining of minimalist and maximalist techniques and rigorous processes with freely composed music. In its unique way, it reconciles traditional notions of beauty with boisterous, almost-out-of-control instrumental writing. This new CD collects four of Byron's works written in the last three years arid a new recording of a piece from 1981, all performed by some of today's most-respected new-music champions: Sarah Cahill, Joseph Kubera, Kathleen Supov6, and the FLUX Quartet. Continents of City and Love arid Tidal, written 20 years apart, are both arch-form pieces scored for two pianos, synthesizer, string quartet, and doublebass. Evaporated Pleasure is a fiery work for piano, four hands. Composed from an equal-tempered approximation of the harmonic and sub-harmonic series and multiple corrupted stochastic processes, it starts out almost hesitantly and builds to a wild, swirling barrage. Awakening at the Inn of the Birds is built from sets of rhythmic units that continuously change and develop."

Artist:	SMITH, CHAS
Title:	An Hour Out Of Desert Center
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 013CD

"Chas Smith -- composer, inventor, instrument builder, and performer -- has created his own musical world, complete with its own instruments and 'language.' It is a world of carefully sculpted textures that never sit absolutely still, textures that evolve and are always in the process of a slow change of aural perspective. Critics have repeatedly compared Smith's sometimes beautiful, sometimes brooding compositions to those of Ligeti. An Hour Out of Desert Center is scored for pedal steel guitars, composer-designed-and-built crotales and sound sculptures, zithers, and a 1948 Bigsby lap guitar (a one-of-a-kind instrument that was owned by famed steel player Joaquin Murphey, who played with Spade Cooley, Tex Williams, Sons of the Pioneer, and other classic country artists). Here, Smith's musical texture, evolving slowly and continuously over the course of the piece, is without dramatic flourishes. Like the spare landscapes around Desert Center, California, it simply exists in its muted beauty."

Artist:	VA
Title:	The Complete 10-inch Series From Cold Blue
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	3CD BOX
Price:	$23.00
Catalog #:	CB 014CD

"Back by popular demand (and available for the first time on CD), this boxed set of three CDs collects all the music released on a popular series of 10-inch vinyl records that were put out by Cold Blue in the early 1980s. During the Cold Blue label's first incarnation, this music by seven West Coast composers created much of the company's reputation as a challenging and always interesting source of new music. Although bound together by a common concern with music's basic sensuality, the pieces collected here are wide-ranging in Style -- process-driven works, carefully through-composed pieces, ambient soundscapes, and music that draws on influences from around the world. In instrumentation, this music is also wide-ranging -- from violins accompanied by gourd rattles to an ensemble of clay ocarinas and whistles and flutes to works for piano (solo and duo), synthesizers, singers, speaking voices, cello and piano, electric guitar and clarinet, and perhaps the only known piece of new music for pedal steel guitar accompanied by multiple dobros. The diverse, free-spirited, genre-bending music in this set was characteristic of certain trends in West Coast music of the 80s. And, to some degree, most of this music tangentially addressed the lingua franca of 70s minimalism -- embracing certain aspects, fleeing others." Composers: Peter Garland, Michael Jon Fink, Barney Childs, Read Miller, Chas Smith, Rick Cox, Daniel Lentz.

Artist:	LENTZ, DANIEL
Title:	Los Tigres de Marte
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$8.00
Catalog #:	CB 016CD

"Swirling, compelling music. Its wildly branching roots touching everything from Debussy and Delius to bop to techno. Sometimes lush and enveloping, sometimes brittle and percussive; sometimes suspended and motionless, sometimes agitated. Featuring clarinetist Marty Walker with string quartet and electronic keyboards. (16 minutes)." 'When it comes to attempts at musical seduction, Daniel Lentz's music is way out in front.' -- Kyle Gann, Village Voice.

Artist:	GANN, KYLE
Title:	Long Night
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$8.00
Catalog #:	CB 019CD

Cold Blue is an LA-based label, focusing on modern composition in the realms of "West Coast minimalism" and "post-minimalism". Lately it has chosen the medium of CD EPs, (15 to 30 minute short duration releases), allowing the listener to concentrate on singular works w/ o the clutter. It is slowly evolving into one of the most important labels in the history of contemporary American composition. "Long Night is exquisitely drifting, ever-unfolding music for three pianos that sometimes play independently and at other times in synchronization with one another. For this recording, all three piano parts were recorded by Sarah Cahill. Gann calls Long Night 'the most successful piece from my early, Brian Eno-influenced, ambient period, a variable-length piece for three non-synchronized pianos at different tempos.' The composer writes, 'I wrote Long Night very much under the influence of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, impressed particularly by his phenomenology of moods and his disavowal of personality as a unified, linear consciousness. I wanted a piece that was a series of moods, connected neither linearly nor abruptly, but in overlapping discontinuity; and a unity that was not felt moment to moment, but that would leap out in unpredictable motives and reminiscences. These were the days, you know, when ambient music was still soft and unobtrusive. Each piano part is constructed in repeating loops, whose lengths can usually be altered at will by the pianists, and the relationship between the pianos is unsynchronized and aleatory -- which is why, for a recording, only one pianist is necessary." 25-minute EP.

Artist:	COX, RICK
Title:	Fade
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$8.00
Catalog #:	CB 020CD

Performed by Rick Cox (electric guitar), Thomas Newman (piano) & Peter Freeman (bass and signal processors). "In three connected sections, Fade offers a series of harmonic 'moments' of various densities and complexities and timbres and lengths. Throughout the work, these moments, like elements in a mobile, are in a constant state of changing perspective. Rick Cox is also a skilled multi-instrumentalist whom guitarist/composer Ry Cooder called 'the hidden master of the crepuscular and the diaphanous.' Cox was an early explorer/developer of 'prepared electric guitar' techniques. His concert pieces, which often employ himself (electric guitar, woodwinds, and/or electronics) in the company of other instrumentalists, have been performed throughout the U.S. and recorded on the Cold Blue, Grenadilla, Advance, and Raptoria Caam labels." 25 minute EP.

Artist:	FOX, JIM
Title:	Descansos, past
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$8.00
Catalog #:	CB 021CD

"Descansos, past is moody, intimate 'in memoriam' music for double bass (performed by Barry Newton) and a choir of nine cellos led by new-music-champion cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick." Descansos, past inhabits the same haunted soundscape as Fox's 2004 release, The City The Wind Swept Away -- the unconventional scoring (pizzicato bass and nine bowed cellos) produces a sort of lush bleakness that evokes the windswept open spaces of the American West. Perhaps Descansos evokes the strange roadside memorials that gave Fox his title, but to these Eastern ears, it is reminiscent of the brooding lyricism of England's Gavin Bryars. This is a music that seems to linger even after the recording itself has ended." -- John Schaefer. 15 minute EP.

Artist:	LENTZ, DANIEL
Title:	On the Leopard Altar
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 022CD

"With this release, On the Leopard Altar makes its first appearance as a CD. In 1984, it was released on vinyl by ICON Records. On the Leopard Altar, with its multiple vocal, keyboard and wineglass parts, haunting neo-romantic melodies, sparkling timbres, and unusual additive and subtractive structures, is a remarkable collection. 'Lentz's music inhabits what he terms a musical 'state of becoming,' where both new and reappearing musical and textual fragments are fused through complex layering processes. However, the real basis of his seductive music may be the dreamy impressionism of Debussy and the lyrical voice and keyboard interaction of Schubert's lieder.' -- John Schaefer, host of WNYC's New Sounds."

Artist:	SMITH, CHAS
Title:	Descent
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 023CD

"With Descent, Smith continues to create the great, sometimes clangorous soundscapes that have fed the popularity of his earlier Cold Blue releases. The central pitch and structural ideas for the three pieces that comprise this CD were originally conceived for an evening of music that Smith presented at Los Angeles' historic Schindler House. Here, those initial ideas are expanded and developed. On this recording, Smith utilizes his large sculptural instruments, which are all made of various metals (and go by such unusual names as Copper Box, Que Lastas, Pez Eater and Jr. Blue), steel guitar, the recorded sounds of jet engines, and Smith's self-designed-and-built three-neck steel guitar, 'guitarzilla,' which he prepares (a la John Cage's prepared piano) with metal rods and plays with hammered dulcimer hammers."

Artist:	FAHRES, MICHAEL
Title:	The Tubes
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 024CD

"I was transfixed by the haunting sounds and the poetic pacing of Fahres' music on this CD. Rather than the sound floating through the room, it was as if I was floating in the sound.' --Morton Subotnick
"This collection of three intimate and beautiful pieces by composer and radio producer Fahres -- 'Sevan,' 'The Tubes,' and 'Coimbra 4, Mundi Theatre' -- weaves naturally occurring acoustic phenomena and elements of soundscape with the playing of celebrated performers. 'Sevan' is built from a recording of Armenian musician Parik Nazarian's vocalizations in massive pipes near the shore of Lake Sevan, Armenia. It explores resonance, echoes, and voice properties. 'The Tubes' weaves together the breath-like sounds of the Atlantic Ocean as it strikes tubular volcanic rock formations on the Island of El Hierro (the westernmost of the Canary Islands) with the breathy tones of Jon Hassell's trumpet and Mark Atkin's didgeridoo, creating a starkly beautiful study of breath patterns and the sounds of air in tubes. ('The Tubes' was mixed by composer/producer Michael Hoenig.) 'Coimbra 4, Mundi Theatre' is a bright, colorful soundscape of the Portuguese city Coimbra during a recent music festival/spectacle that involved most of the townspeople as participants. Michael Fahres, who studied composition with Louis Andriessen and Ton de Leeuw, is a composer whose recent work has been devoted to electro-acoustic soundscapes."

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	A Sweet Quasimodo Between Black Vampire Butterflies...
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 025CD

...For Maybeck. "A Sweet Quasimodo... is stunning music for two pianos played simultaneously in a tremolo style that Palestine calls 'strumming,' a technique that has defined his piano music since the late '60s. It spins out its sonic tapestry in surges and ebbs, and dense sonorities with hypnotically dancing overtones growing from its few opening pitches. This live recording from the Maybeck recital hall (February 2006) also contains Palestine's short spoken reminiscence about his life in California more than 30 years earlier and a few very short 'ritual' songs in his unique falsetto vocal style accompanied by the drone of a rubbed brandy snifter."

Artist:	ADAMS, JOHN LUTHER
Title:	Red Arc/Blue Veil
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 026CD

"The four pieces that make up this CD -- 'Dark Waves,' 'Among Red Mountains,' 'Qilyuan,' and 'Red Arc/Blue Veil' -- are for various combinations of one or two pianos, percussion, and electronics. Each piece is built from a complex, polyrhythmic layering of voices that combine to form large, multi-arch musical shapes that explore a rich palette of harmonic and timbral colors, lush textures, and clear, simple compositional forms. This is music of broad strokes and ever-changing ebb and flow."

Artist:	PETERS, STEVE
Title:	The Webster Cycles
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$8.00
Catalog #:	CB 027CD

"The Webster Cycles, a somewhat open-ended piece for any combination of wind instruments and/or voices, allows for a good bit of decision-making and improvisation on the part of the performer(s). In the present recorded version, six trombone parts were performed (via overdubbing) by noted composer/performer J.A. Deane. The result is a beautifully coherent yet ever-changing music that slowly shifts its texture and harmonic focus as if its individual parts were refractions of a giant aural prism. The wonderful, subtle inflections and tonal shadings that Deane brings to each phrase imbue the piece with a vibrant, palpable sense of energy and motion. The piece's score is constructed from a selection of words drawn from a Webster's dictionary. The words become pitch sequences or melodic phrases that are to be played within the duration of a long breath. These sequences are grouped into seven sections, which the performer(s) may perform in any order they wish while maintaining the internal order of phrases within each section." 30-minute CD EP.

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