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viewing 1 To 14 of 14 items
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CB 036CD
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"An exciting and eclectic anthology of 14 new, previously unreleased pieces -- many written just for this CD. Music by John Luther Adams, Gavin Bryars, Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, Jim Fox, Peter Garland, Daniel Lentz, Ingram Marshall, Read Miller, Larry Polansky, David Rosenboom, Phillip Schroeder, Chas Smith, and James Tenney. Among the tracks are dramatic pieces, drifting pieces, and pieces that simply defy easy categorization. From a dozen cellos to a solo just-intonation National steel guitar, from a Harry Partch diamond marimba with strings to a solo accordion, from music featuring celesta or hammered dulcimer or densely layered tracks of steel guitar and Hammond organ or classical guitar with electronics to string quartets, solo piano, and a variety of small chamber ensembles, this collection contains something to surprise (and delight) just about everyone. Among the featured performers are many renowned new-music champions, including Sarah Cahill, Guy Klucevsek, John Schneider, ETHYL, the Formalist Quartet, Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick, and a host of other fine players, including a number of the composers themselves. Like much of the music on this west coast label, this album¹s pieces tend to focus on the many and various aspects of music's basic inherent sensuality, which may be seen as a uniting aesthetic interest among its composers."
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CB 033CD
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"Sudoku 82, a spare, beautiful, spacious piece for eight pianos, was composed utilizing systems derived from sudoku puzzles and the GarageBand computer program. It is here performed (all eight parts) by noted Los Angeles pianist Bryan Pezzone. The music is pure Hobbs (and perhaps even English by nature) in the way it simply side-steps overt emotionality, yet is quite comfortable and inviting in all aspects. 'Sudoku 82 is one of a series of pieces I have been working on since 2005. There are now over 125 of them that use Apple's GarageBand software and random procedures culled from the numbers found initially in hexadecimal sudoku puzzles and latterly from online random number generators. I choose the sounds I want and the overall duration, but then let the numbers determine what goes where, how many times, how long, how much silence, and so on. Sudoku 82 used a number of piano loops played on eight pianos at an extremely slow tempo, the result being that the pianists seem to be frozen in time. It was Jim Fox who suggested that the piece might be performed 'live' rather than using samples as I had originally done. This is therefore the first of the series to come off the computer and into the recording studio, and I am delighted with the result, which is dedicated to Jim Fox, whose music and predisposition towards slow tempos I have admired for many years.' -- Christopher Hobbs." CD single; total playing time: 19:12.
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CB 034CD
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"Four serene yet deeply emotive and entrancing pieces for solo qin (a Chinese zither-like instrument). Quiet, sparse, vaguely eerie, almost Feldmanesque, almost delta-blues-like. Performed by the composer, who mastered the qin while living and teaching for many years in Taiwan. 'Chinese scholars in antiquity took their qin to the mountains to compose music in accord with the aesthetics of nature. They developed string techniques to convey the movements of birds, insects, streams, even zephyrs and mist. Gesture became music, a tactile rhetoric to describe the most distant or delicate notions. Silence was an integral motif. I was inspired by the old qin books of music notation and extended the calligraphy to include a contemporary language.' -- Christopher Roberts." Total playing time: 27:59.
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CB 031CD
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"This CD presents the premiere recordings of two spirited and enticing quartets that draw on the composer's well-traveled ear and great sense of personal vision. Both works move with a unique sense of grace and a sincerity of expression that is purely Garlandesque -- marked by a sometimes lively dancing, a sometimes alluring stasis and an often sauntering gait that allow musical ideas to seem to appear intuitively and develop subconsciously. Performed and recorded beautifully by members of the renowned British new music ensemble Apartment House, which has for the past 15 years championed the music of such composers as Christian Wolf, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew, Philip Corner and many other experimental and avant-garde composers at major festivals throughout Europe. Peter Garland is a composer, world traveler, musicologist, writer and former publisher (Soundings Press). He studied music composition with Harold Budd and James Tenney at Cal Arts and maintained long friendships with Lou Harrison, Conlon Nancarrow, Paul Bowles and Dane Rudhyar. Since the early '70s, Garland's own music has been marked by a return to a 'radical consonance' and a simplification of formal structure influenced by Cage, Harrison, early minimalism and a great variety of world musics. His unique and highly engaging music has been performed around the world by such noted performers as pianists Aki Takahashi and Herbert Henck, percussionist William Winant, accordionist Guy Klucesvek and the Kronos Quartet and released on the Tzadik, New Albion, Cold Blue, Mode, Avant, Toshiba-EMI/Angel and other labels."
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CB 029CD
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"Nakadai, which KPFA Folio/Other Minds Radio called 'one of the most explosive LPs of the '80s,' is a set of five works that offer a catalog of musical 'waves' -- from ripples to tsunamis. It features Smith playing pedal steel guitar solo, overdubbed, and with a mallet percussion quartet made up of Bob Fernandez, John Fitzgerald, M.B. Gordy, and Theresa Knight. This first CD reissue of Nakadai allows today's listeners to hear prototypical Smith -- music composed when his present style was in its nascent state. In addition to the original Nakadai tracks, this release includes two 'bonus' tracks: 2008's evocative 'The Ghosts on the Windows' and 1991's 'Joaquin Murphey,' a tribute to the legendary pedal steel guitarist of the same name."
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CB 028CD
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Featured works: "Point Conception (for nine pianos);" "NightBreaker (for four pianos)." Performed by: Arlene Dunlap (piano), Bryan Pezzone (piano). "Point Conception is Lentz's wild nine-piano tribute to the octave. It amasses and bubbles over with incessant streams of octaves (harmonic and melodic) that run the length of the keyboard. Through a 'cascading echo system,' long-time Lentz Ensemble pianist Arlene Dunlap performs all of its parts. Presented with 'Point Conception' is Lentz's previously unrecorded 'NightBreaker,' a kaleidoscopic and explosive tour de force for four pianos. An exciting roller-coaster of a work, it ambles, jumps, careens, pauses, and flings itself forward. Through overdubbing, noted Los Angeles pianist Bryan Pezzone performs all of 'NightBreaker''s parts. Both pieces revel in and comment on the conventions of late-19th-century harmony and harmonic motion."
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CB 027CD
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"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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CB 021CD
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"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.
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CB 019CD
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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.
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CB 015CD
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"A haunting music for trombones, strings and piano. A fragile music of rarefied and quietly rumbling harmonies that, like drifting clouds, seem to float in and out of 'view.' A music that is both motionless and moving forward with a strange sense of inevitability. (23 minutes)"
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CB 017CD
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"Music that combines equal measures of beauty and grit. A moody, elusively shaped textural music that is compelling in its power and grace from its very first violin note to its final shimmer of decaying cymbals. For an ensemble of violins and cellos, percussion and electronic/sampled sounds. (29 minutes)." 'Dense, slowly changing sounds, atmospherically gloomy and harmonically quite subtle.' -- The Musical Times (London).
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CB 009CD
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"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."
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CB 005CD
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"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."
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CB 002CD
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"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."
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