Browse by Label: MUTABLEMUSIC

Artist:	VILLA-LOBOS, HEITOR
Title:	Guitar Music of Villa-Lobos
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17513

Joseph Bacon, guitarist. "Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), the greatest of Brazilian composers, was a man of instinct, vigour and passion; the antithesis of the academic composer who writes for the eye and brain, not the ear and heart. His innovations in the techniques of guitar composition are unparalleled. His own considerable ability as a guitarist as well as his fertile imagination led to the invention of many brilliant and telling effects. And the sheer beauty and vigour of the music place these pieces at the forefront of modern guitar music. Three distinct periods of Villa-Lobos' life are represented on this record. The Valsa-Chôro, Schottisch- Chôro and Chôros #1 date from 1912 when he was a young man playing his guitar in the street bands. The Etudes were written in 1929 when Villa-Lobos was in Paris for an extended visit. Here he met Segovia and he wrote a series of twelve etudes for the great guitarist. In character they range from dry 'finger studies' to rhapsodic and savage fantasies."

Artist:	REVOLUTIONARY ENSEMBLE
Title:	The Psyche
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.50
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17514

The Revolutionary Ensemble was: Leroy Jenkins (violin), Sirone (bass), Jerome Cooper (drums, piano). "Long awaited reissue of the Revolutionary Ensemble's 1975 album The Psyche. This group introduced New York to decided musical advances, many pioneered by Chicago's A.A.C.M. musicians. Ex-Chicagoan Leroy Jenkins, who played violin, of all unheard-of modern jazz instruments, had formed his concept from classical, swing, blues, and modern elements and had been one of the radicals who discovered new concepts of sound, space, and musical relationships in the late 1960s. Jerome Cooper had been a somewhat later Chicago explorer, while Sirone's freedom of motion had grown out of work with the most visionary New Yorkers. If you doubt the expressive capacity of stringed instruments, The Psyche should change your mind: Jenkins and Sirone have many ways of bowing and plucking, along with dramatic passages high and low on their instruments. Careful listening and sensitive responses sustain this music; accompaniments to solos grow into intense interplay. The ensemble regularly re-forms into solo, duet, and trio combinations, aided by the players' doubling instruments. Jenkins' mastery of thematic improvisation, including motive recall and motivic transformation, provides an especially valuable unifying element."

Artist:	MITCHELL, ROSCOE
Title:	Solo 3
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	3CD
Price:	$25.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17515

"Sudden music! All alone, unprotected, Roscoe Mitchell confronts Silence: the void, the vast unknown. One and a half of the 38 pieces in this collection are composed. Two more are improvisations that begin with at least some conditions. The other 34 and a half pieces are completely improvised. Mitchell simply picks up a horn or mallets and begins playing. He's armed only with his wide-ranging imagination, his instruments, his virtuosity, and his experience -- for what more does he need? Proof of his self-sufficiency is that each improvisation is a distinctive, flowing work that has its own meaning, its own unique story to tell. 'I started working on one CD,' he says, 'but I started getting more and more material, and I thought that at this point in my career, one solo CD is not enough. I'd better put out three CDs, because time is going on by.' Mitchell has been creating a cappella solos for around four decades now. He's one of the Chicagoans who virtually invented the unaccompanied horn solo in free jazz."

Artist:	CRESHEVSKY, NOAH
Title:	Hyperrealism
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17516

"Hyperrealism is an electroacoustic musical language constructed from sounds that are found in our shared environment ('realism'), handled in ways that are somehow exaggerated or excessive ('hyper'). Fundamental to hyperrealism is the expansion of the sound palettes from which music is made. Developments in technology and transformations in social and economic realities have made it possible for composers to incorporate the sounds of the entire world into their music. Essential to the concept of hyperrealism is that its sounds are generally of natural origin, and that they remain sufficiently unprocessed so that their origin is perceived by the listener as being 'natural'. Since the sounds of our environment vary from year to year, generation to generation, and culture to culture, it is impossible to isolate a definitive encyclopedia of 'natural' sounds, but there are a great many sounds that are familiar to nearly all of us. These are the most basic building blocks in the formation of a shared (if temporary) collective sonic reality. Hyperrealism celebrates bounty, either by the extravagant treatment of limited sound palettes or by assembling and manipulating substantially extended palettes."

Artist:	ROSENBOOM/J.B. FLOYD/TRICHY SANKARAN, DAVID
Title:	Suitable For Framing
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17517

Reissue of this obscure Canadian album from 1975, originally issued on the A.R.C. Record label, with extended mixes and bonus material from the same period. Performed by David Rosenboom and J. B. Floyd (pianos, one in each channel) & Trichy Sankaran on South Indian percussion (mrdangam and kanjira). "On April 19th, 1975, at Northern Illinois University, three musicians met in a milestone event from which emerged a unique, improvising trio with two pianos and South Indian percussion. Fortunately, it was recorded and excerpts released on a long out of print LP. This CD recaptures the essence of the entire evening of musical discovery with previously unreleased music recovered from digitally reprocessed tapes recently discovered in diverse states of preservation."

Artist:	MARSH AND W.A. MATHIEU, GEORGE
Title:	Game/No Game - 21 Improvisations
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17518

George Marsh, percussion and W. A. Mathieu, piano. "When George and I play together we tend to hear compositionally, that is, we try to weave coherent stories told through musical ideas. Surface texture, which is like the atmosphere of a story, does arise, of course, but strictly musical ideas drive the narrative from the inside. This means remembering (as best we can) what we've been playing. Consequently the pieces are short, typically three or four minutes. In the table of contents on the next panel, we've numbered the pieces, but left them untitled because no matter how hard we try to find names for them, for us they remain simply pieces that sound the way they sound." (W. A. Mathieu). 'Game' History: "Viola Spolin characterized the original theater games she introduced as '?a timeless moment when all are mutually engaged in experience. You don't know what's going to happen, and that's where the joy is, the everlasting spiral.' In the 1950s, as theater games emerged in the culture, artists were learning a new definition of the present, which seemed limitless and beckoning. By 1970, free improvisation was in the air, and game playing was well on its way to becoming a standard training method for both actors and musicians internationally. Meanwhile George and I have had four decades of collaboration to develop our work and trust. Game/No Game, recorded between 1999 and 2002, represents not so much the games themselves as their end result: the musical mutuality that games engender."

Artist:	BERGMAN/LOL COXHILL/PAUL HESSION, BORAH
Title:	Acts of Love
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17519

Borah Bergman (piano); Lol Coxhill (soprano saxophone); Paul Hession ((percussion). "With a unique, two-handed approach that dispenses with the traditional notion of piano playing as competing or interlocking lines, Borah Bergman deals with sound as mass, great chilly bergs or hot flows of magma that change shape as different layers flow against one another, hardening and melting at different rates. By contrast, Lol Coxhill is a singer, a chanticleer on the dunghill of the city or on the rooftree of your house, a head full of old songs and the harmonic codes to transform them. The simplest difference may be that Coxhill comes from a jazz tradition, never more communicative than when playing changes and subverting a saccharine show-tune, while Bergman, for all his deep understanding of blues, boogie-woogie, swing, bebop, comes from somewhere else, classical, cantorial, exclamatory, De profundis clamavi . . .What unites them, though, even beyond the astonishing lingua franca of improvisation, is the idea of music as a kind of labour. Both seem to inhabit an old European ideal, anti-romantic and the toughest creative path there is, that subordinates the idea of works, perfect icons of expression ready for admiring consumption, to the idea of work, a physical, mental and moral effort that has ritual at one end of its spectrum and entertainment away at the other. These are hugely enjoyable pieces; they also have an element of ritual to them; but at their core is something much more profound and constantly evolving."

Artist:	BUCKNER, THOMAS
Title:	Contexts
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17520

"Three improvisations: alone; with David Darling, cello; with Borah Bergman, piano composition: ILEX with Earl Howard, composer and electronics; Gustavo Aguilar, percussion; Wu Man, pipa. For more than 30 years, baritone Thomas Buckner has dedicated himself to the world of new and improvised music. As a performer, producer, and promoter, Buckner has enabled the creation of an extensive body of new works by some of the world's leading, most exciting and most challenging composers. Currently, Buckner works regularly with composers Robert Ashley, Roscoe Mitchell, Alvin Lucier, Annea Lockwood, Bun-Ching Lam, Jerome Cooper, David Wessel, Tom Hamilton, Leroy Jenkins, Phill Niblock, Wadada Leo Smith, among others. More than 70 composers have written works exclusively for him over the last 20 years. Buckner has been featured on over 40 recordings, including five of his own solo albums as well as recordings by Annea Lockwood, Sorrel Hays, Alvin Lucier, the Deep Listening Band, Jin Hi Kim, Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams and many others."

Artist:	HOWARD, EARL
Title:	5 Saxophone Solos
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17521

"Earl Howard is a virtuoso saxophonist and has developed an extended repertoire for the instrument including 'Cinco Centavos' for solo saxophone and 'Naked Charm' for saxophone and tape. Howard has been performing his compositions in the United States and Europe for the past thirty years. His recent compositions include music for live electronics, electronic tape music as well as music for electronics and instruments. Earl Howard's method of creating orchestrated sounds with electronics and adding live, improvisational performance creates a unique, densely layered composition."

Artist:	BUCKNER/MEL GRAVES/GEORGE MARSH, THOMAS
Title:	Homage
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17522

"This project is the product of over thirty years of musical collaboration and personal friendships. The three of us met in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early seventies and worked together in many contexts, exploring improvisation and new music. When I moved to New York in 1983, there was a brief hiatus, and then, on hearing a composition of Mel Graves played here, I asked him to write me a piece. This led to my premiering many works of his and making several recordings. Meanwhile, George and Mel have been a great rhythm section all these years. When Mel suggested that he compose 'Blanco' to highlight George's remarkable polyrhythmic and timbral abilities, I loved the idea. Because of the deeply personal nature of the project, we decided to place it in the context of our improvised music. Then, the tsunami occurred and Mel was inspired to write a piece for improvisors commemorating the tragedy. We went back to Mesa Studios to create and record 'Tsunami' and then recorded some improvisations which we called Homage. It's an homage to music and what it means in our lives and to the deep friendship it has engendered." -- Thomas Buckner

Artist:	MATHIEU, W.A.
Title:	The Indian Parrot
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17524

"Latest release by William Allaudin Mathieu, pianist, composer, teacher, recording artist, and author. 'A Parrot, Three Fish, and a Donkey' is a modern piece with a medieval text, and medieval sensibilities have worked their way into the musical fabric: the small percussion instruments, the instrumental range lying (for the most part) within the range of the human voice, and, most of all, the harmony, which is a kind of modulating modality. Inspired by the universality of Rumi's poems, Mathieu felt especially free in this piece to borrow from many centuries of Eastern and Western harmonic practice."

Artist:	JOSEPH, DAN
Title:	Archaea
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17525

"Mutable Music is pleased to announce the debut release by composer and hammer dulcimer virtuoso Dan Joseph. Entitled Archaea, the recording consists of three recent extended chamber works performed by The Dan Joseph Ensemble: Tom Chiu (violin), Michael Lowenstern (clarinet), Danny Tunick (percussion), Marija Ilic (harpsichord), Loren Dempster (cello) and the composer on hammer dulcimer. Influenced most directly by the first generation minimalists, Joseph's works bring a welcome new voice to the idiom with his unique sense of timbre, intricate rhythms and unexpected formal turns. Equal parts East coast and West coast, Appalachian and Balkan, rock and baroque, his style is characterized by its immediate beauty, positive spirit and exhilarating drive."

Artist:	BOURDELLON/THOMAS BUCKNER, JEROME
Title:	Totem: Improvisations with the Sculpture of Alain Kirili
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17526

"In August of 2005, on a visit to Paris to celebrate the birthday of sculptor Alain Kirili, singer Thomas Buckner and flutist Jérôme Bourdellon gathered with Kirili at his studio to record these duo improvisations in the presence of his group of sculptures entitled 'Totem.' Both musicians are longtime collaborators with Alain Kirili, performing most recently at a concert at the Theatre du Palais Royal in Paris celebrating to opening of an installation of his sculptures in the garden of the Palais Royal. The music is a spontaneous, abstract response to and interaction with the sculpture. Jérôme Bourdellon is a composer and flutist residing in Nancy, France. For more than 30 years, baritone Thomas Buckner has dedicated himself to the world of new and improvised music. As a performer, producer, and promoter, Buckner has enabled the creation of an extensive body of new works by some of the world's leading, most exciting and most challenging composers. Currently, Buckner works regularly with composers Robert Ashley, Roscoe Mitchell, Alvin Lucier, Annea Lockwood, Bun-Ching Lam, Jerome Cooper, David Wessel, Tom Hamilton, Leroy Jenkins, Phill Niblock, Wadada Leo Smith, among others."

Artist:	TIMELESS PULSE
Title:	Quintet
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17527

Timeless Pulse: Thomas Buckner (voice); George Marsh (percussion); Pauline Oliveros (accordion); David Wessel (live-electronics); Jennifer Wilsey (percussion). "Timeless Pulse sometimes recalls the soundscapes of Günter Müller, Butch Morris, David Shea and AMM, and is thus recommended to fans of them and harmonious (yes, that's right, with harmony) free-improv." --Mark Keresman. "Formed in 1993 in a residency at the Deep Listening Institute, the musicians of Timeless Pulse -- whose members come from jazz, classical and electronic -- make music together through listening and responding in the moment. The five compositions on this recording from 2005 are warm, compassionate tapestries of soft, rolling sounds performed by accordion, cymbals, drums, gongs, bells, chimes, sampled sounds and voice."

Artist:	BUCKNER, THOMAS
Title:	New Music For Baritone & Chamber Ensemble
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17528

"For 30 years, Thomas Buckner has carved out a very special niche -- that of a champion of the avant-garde. In concert halls throughout the world, his 'baritone-mastery' has astonished both audiences and critics. He has an extraordinarily flexible voice; his experience and ability ranges from madrigals, lieder, opera, free improvisation, extended techniques, all the way to electronically processed wordless minimalist song. This wonderful new collection of works for baritone and chamber ensemble were all written specifically for Buckner. Annea Lockwood is known for her explorations of the rich world of natural acoustic sounds and environments, in works ranging from sound art and installations, through text-sound and performance art to concert music. Petr Kotik is a performing musician (conductor and flutist) and the founder and director of the S.E.M. Ensemble which expanded in 1992 as The Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble."

Artist:	TYRANNY, "BLUE" GENE
Title:	The Somewhere Songs/The Invention Of Memory
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17529

"This beautiful new recording by 'Blue' Gene Tyranny includes the mysterious The Somewhere Songs cycle (1997-2001) for baritone voice and electronics, and 'The Invention of Memory' (2003-2005). A lyrical discourse for baritone voice, string ensemble, guitar, and piano, The Somewhere Songs concerns friendships in or undergoing difficult circumstances. The narrator, in a sense, builds his own circumstantial world as he sings -- the vocal part was composed first by singing spontaneously and the 'transitional systems' (pitch/rhythm, etc., material) were derived from that vocal line to generate other acoustic and electronic parts. The question of the 'true intentions' of the two former friends is of course left to the listener. 'The Invention of Memory' is about the behavior and physiology of the brain. In the course of reading, Tyranny was struck by what seemed to be rough parallels between the way that people have described forms of memory and certain musical procedures. This thought created a strange sensation in him -- something about the true nature of music. 'The Invention of Memory' was written to research this nameless correlation. An initial 'Song,' heard in a piano solo at the outset, provides a basic reference to which the players return, similar to a past event that is recalled in varied ways. The song is then 'scanned' by the players, employing different musical procedures. Some of the musical forms employed are traditional (canonic imitation, passacaglia) while the majority are compositional procedures Tyranny developed for earlier pieces, including melodic transfers within a closed loop (from the transformational lattice score of 'Stars Over San Francisco,' 1972), drone with internal motion (from 'The Interior Distance,' 1959), camouflage (from 'Sleeping Beauty in Camouflage,' 1992), and the song modulated by its own internal voice ('gravity' modulation from 'The Driver's Son,' 1989 - present). 'Blue' Gene Tyranny, composer and pianist of avant garde music, has toured extensively in solo and group concerts throughout the U.S., Europe, Canada, Mexico and Brazil. He also played in teenage rock bands and for a gospel church. He has composed over 50 works for electronic, instrumental and vocal ensembles, over 30 film and video soundtracks, and 50 scores for dance and theatre productions. He has performed on many albums and performed with such diverse performer-composers as Robert Ashley, Peter Gordon, Laurie Andersen, John Cage, Leroy Jenkins, David Behrman, Brenda Hutchinson, Jon Gibson, William Duckworth (The Cathedral Band), Phil Perkins, Ben Manley, Carla Bley, Iggy Pop, Lise Vachon, and many others."

Artist:	BULTMANN, NILS
Title:	Terminally Unique
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17530

"This project was created from a series of improvisations, compositional sketches, and field recordings. With the help of Pro Tools, it has evolved into this present form. Nils Bultmann is a violist, improviser, and composer currently based in the San Francisco Bay area. Rooted in classical technique and tradition, he has developed his own voice within the context of a wide variety of musical styles and art forms. Active as a performer in the United States and Europe, he plays both classical repertoire as well as his own compositions, and is involved in collaborative projects of dance, film, and avant-garde improvised music. He has generated an expansive body of work in the recording studio, including solo and multi-track viola music as well as collaborative and improvised material. He also writes through-composed works for traditional instrumentation including for solo pieces, string quartets, and orchestral music. He has appeared as a soloist with an orchestra premiering his own work. As an improviser, he has worked with Ken Butler, David Wessel, Frank Gratkowski, Myra Melford, Evan Parker, and Roscoe Mitchell. In September 2004, he was a guest at the International Symposium for Improvised music in Munich, Germany to perform two new works by jazz saxophonists Roscoe Mitchell and Evan Parker, as part of the Transatlantic Art Ensemble, which was recorded and released on ECM Records."

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Artist:	JENKINS' DRIFTWOOD, LEROY
Title:	The Art of Improvisation
Label:	MUTABLEMUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	MUTABLE 17523