With its almost 30 years of existence, the Angelica Festival can be considered one of the historical and most advanced music events in Italy. Founded in 1991 along with the Festival, I Dischi Di Angelica is a record label meant to explore and promote music creations developed through the festival activities. A highly selected catalogue featuring unique productions from an incredible array of musicians and composers such as Terry Riley, Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran, Roscoe Mitchell, Misha Mengelberg, Charlemagne Palestine, Heiner Goebbels, Lindsay Cooper, Tristan Honsinger...
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ANGELICA 058CD
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Antonio Della Marina is an electronic music artist and composer who has been working for over twenty years almost exclusively with sine waves, focusing his research on the exploration of the physical properties of sound and on tuning systems derived from the laws of natural harmonics. Active in a liminal space between music and visual arts, his compositions are conceived as actual sound sculptures, for which he uses mathematical abstractions and self-built generators. For several years he has been collaborating with Alessandra Zucchi, an architect and multimedia artist who predominantly works on the physical and psychological perception of space. Drawing inspiration both from La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela's Dream House, as much as from visual artists and designers such as James Turrell, Dan Flavin, Verner Panton, and other visionaries, Della Marina and Zucchi favor the creation of spaces where the audience can enter to listen and experience a journey through sound in an all-embracing environment. Their work has been showcased in galleries and at international festivals (Electro Media Works in Athens, Logos Foundation in Gand, Experimental Intermedia in New York, etc.) and from 2011 they manage Spazioersetti in Udine, Italy, a gallery/workshop permanently hosting one of their sound and light installations. Given the hybrid and expansive nature of his production, recording media have rarely been explored by Della Marina, who in fact had only one album published under his own name so far: Fades, released by i dischi di angelica in 2006, two years after his eponymous concert hosted by AngelicA Festival. This new CD Sanje also originates from a multimedia performance: "nella notte, al cinema: The Dream" was a midnight concert for sounds and video projections by Alessandra Zucchi, which took place in July 2021 at Stazione di Topolò/Postaja Topolove, a small festival which ran for a few years in a tiny village of 20 inhabitants on the Italian-Slovenian border of Benecija.
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ANGELICA 057CD
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Francesco Serra (Cagliari, 1980) is a self-taught guitarist living and working in Bologna. His research focuses on identifying performance practices aimed at extending the timbre qualities of the guitar and emphasizing the evocative potential of sound. Throughout his musical journey, particularly in the three albums released between 2008 and 2019 under his solo project Trees of Mint (Micro Meadow, Trees of Mint, and NW, released by Here I Stay and Trovarobato Parade), he has progressively deconstructed the song form through sound experimentation, making the physical phenomenon of sound and its interactions with the performance space the focus of his exploration. His previous album, Guest Room (i dischi di angelica, 2022), born of a residency project promoted by AngelicA/Centro di Ricerca Musicale, was actually structured as a form of dialogue between the signals generated by the minimal electro acoustic setup prepared by the musician (electric guitar, two amplifiers, three snare drums, and loop machine) and the physical and emotional responses of the unique sound architecture of Teatro San Leonardo (a former three-nave church) that hosted him for a month during the pandemic. Personal, his new release for the Angelica label, continues the musician's "reductionist" and abstract approach with an even greater essential rigor. Here the initial setup is acoustic: a sound flow beginning with sparse, exploratory phrases of acoustic guitar that, after a temporary completeness found in movement three, starts falling apart in the encounter with the resonances of a drum snare in movement four, eventually dissolving into a completely different "soundscape" (Sardinia, Serra's birthplace): a long field recording of distant night echoes, on which the guitar returns only at the end, now extended in the drone of the e-bow.
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ANGELICA 056CD
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Composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton is recognized as one of the seminal figures of the music of the second half of the 20th century and of the beginning of the 21st. Expressing himself through an enormous variety of mediums, Braxton has opened with his work new conceptual and technical paths in the trans-African and trans-European musical traditions, finding a highly original synthesis between jazz-based improvisation and the complexity of classical-contemporary music. Angelica Festival previously hosted Braxton in 2006 with Richard Teitelbaum, in 2007 with Cecil Taylor's Historical Quartet, and in 2018 for the premiere of his duo project with the harpist Jacqueline Kerrod; this new four-CD box release represents a further degree of exceptionality by documenting the entire 2022 European tour with which Braxton launched his new project for four saxophones. The distinctive feature of this new project is the addition of electronics: an interactive system in real-time, uniquely developed by Braxton using the SuperCollider platform, which acts almost as a fifth improvising member of the ensemble. Lorraine is the name Braxton coined for the compositional system that governs the first stages of this project still in progress: as he explains in the video-interview available online and on Angelica website, it is a "new system of poetics," a "mutable and fantasy space" which represents for the composer "the Aether level" (wind, breath, clouds), as opposed to the "ground" level he explored up to this point with his "Tri-Centric Thought Unit Construct," on which he based much of his music production from the 1980s onwards. Accompanying him in this new phase once again are musicians who have been part of his conceptual "music systems" in recent years, in the role of both instrumentalists and/or orchestra conductors: James Fei, Chris Jonas, and Ingrid Laubrock (replaced by André Vida for the Vilnius date only). Includes 40-page booklet with photos and an essay in English and Italian by Mario Gamba.
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ANGELICA 055CD
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In May 2022, at the age of 88, Christian Wolff performed once again at AngelicA, nine years after the monographic concerts the festival had dedicated to him in 2013, which was documented on the CD album Angelica Music, (ANGELICA 030CD, 2020). Among the greatest and most singular living composers, for the opening of the thirty-second edition of the festival he presented a world-exclusive program, alongside two of his long-time collaborators, the percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky and the drummer Joey Baron, and an Angelica orchestrA of seven electric guitars, made up for the occasion around students and teachers of the Conservatory "G.B. Martini" of Bologna led by Walter Zanetti. Spanning over 58 years of the composer's production, the program offered on May 7th revolved around Sveglia, a new composition for seven electric guitars commissioned as a world premiere by the festival. Renowned up to that point as a pianist, it was apparently Wolff's interest for several rock bands of the time who pushed him to buy an electric guitar in the mid-'60s, and the first of his compositions to incorporate this instrument were the three Electric Spring of 1966-67. In the 2000s he also composed three pieces for solo guitar (two of which were recorded by Sergio Sorrentino, guest of Angelica orchestrA at this time), but he had never composed for an ensemble of guitars only, as on this occasion. Largely completely notated, but with a series of compositional features left open (i.e. no specification of tempi, dynamics and spacing of musical elements), Sveglia also includes short quotations from other compositions (Bach's Brandenburg Concertos n. 3 and 6, and a motet by Gombert), "that need not necessarily be noticed." The other piece composed specifically for the concert in Bologna (and for one held later in New York, at the space for experimental music from which it took its title) is Roulette, performed by Wolff with Schulkowsky and Baron.
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ANGELICA 054CD
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Born in 1933, with a career spanning over 65 years, the American composer Philip Corner has explored the most diverse artistic and musical expressions: as a pianist and trombonist, he performed historic and contemporary authors such as Ives, Cage, Cacioppo, Hellerman (in 1963 he also took part in the first integral performance of Vexations by Satie curated by Cage in New York). As a composer and performer, he was a member of Fluxus (defining with his Piano Activities the most iconic performance of the movement, albeit in the "over the top" rendition by Maciunas, Williams, Vostell, Paik, Higgins, Patterson, and Knowles in Wiesbaden in 1962); but also (between 1962 and 1965) of Judson Dance Theatre, composing music for dance and theatre pieces by Lucinda Childs, Yvonne Rainer, Living Theatre, etc. In 1963 he co-founded the Tone Roads Chamber Ensemble with Malcolm Goldstein and James Tenney; in 1972, with Julie Winter, the ensemble Sounds out of Silent Spaces (at whose performances took part Annea Lockwood, Alison Knowles, Ruth Anderson, and Tom Johnson); and in 1975, with Barbara Benary and Daniel Goode, the Gamelan Son of Lion. He experimented with both "action music" and "meditative music," electronic or concrete montages, proto-plunderphonic collages, graphic scores, verbal philosophical/poetic instructions, contemporary gamelans, extreme minimalism (in 1977 in New York his Elementals lasted 123 uninterrupted hours on a single note, played in turn by guests spanning from Beth Anderson, to Cage to Paik); but he also composed for string quartets, chamber music ensembles, and orchestras. As a visual artist he created countless assemblages, calligraphies, collages, drawings, paintings and objects made of various materials, showcased in museums and collections around the world. Corner has been living in Italy since 1992, and he presented several projects at AngelicA (amongst which an unprecedented trio with Joan La Barbara and Alvin Curran paying homage to Cage), but perhaps the most peculiar one has been Chorus at the Corner: A Joyfull Noise, a commission entirely dedicated to his compositions for choir. A concert made possible by the availability of two "resident" choirs at the festival.
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ANGELICA 053CD
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Born in 1966, Uday Bhawalkar studied Dhrupad for more than 12 years, following the traditional method of transmission from guru to disciple (guru-shishya parampara), under the supervision of Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar and Ustad Zia Fariduddin Dagar, and in 1987 was awarded the Dagar Swarna Padak prize by the legendary Ustad Nasir Aminuddin Dagar Sahab of Senior Dagar Brothers -- all three of them members of the Dagar Family who have been passing on this music tradition since the 15th century. In addition to performing at the most prestigious classical Indian music festivals since a young age, Uday Bhawalkar has collaborated internationally with artists from different music traditions, amongst whom the choreographer Astad Deboo and the Ensemble Modern of contemporary music. He has also contributed to the soundtrack of films such as Cloud Door by Mani Kaul, Mr & Mrs Iyer by Aparna Sen, Anahat by Amol Palekar, and more. AngelicA invited Uday Bhawalkar to perform in Bologna twice, in 2008 and 2019. Despite a decades-long career his production has been poorly documented on records, and it is now enriched by Raga Yaman, on which he is accompanied by Manik Munde on the pakhavaj (a two-headed horizontal drum) and by Aniruddha Joshi and Chintan Upadhyay on tanpuras. The recording is not of one of his concerts in Bologna (during which he performed the same raga), but of a rendition of the same piece considered particularly significant, which had been privately pressed on CD by Bhawalkar only for personal use in 2006. Raga Yaman is a raga, based on a heptatonic scale, considered one of the most important and fundamental of the Hindustani tradition. It is often the first to be taught to students, but it also offers great opportunities of improvisation, and it is a raga that has been recorded by historic artists such as Ustad Vilayat Khan, Pandit Pran Nath (in the Yaman Kalyan variant), and Uday's master himself Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, on one of his CDs from 1991 in which one of the two accompanist on the tanpura was Uday himself.
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ANGELICA 051CD
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untitled #400 is a project presented as a world premiere by Spaniard Francisco López and Dutch pianist and composer Reinier Van Houdt at the opening of the 31st edition of AngelicA, on May 15th, 2021. The two musicians already worked together on untitled #275, a performance for mechanically prepared piano, quadraphonics and electronics which received a special mention at the 2011 edition of the Ars Electronica festival in Linz. In comparison to the piano "preparation" implemented in #275, the concept behind untitled #400, developed during six years, effectively introduced a new instrument: a "stringless piano" (or "inside-out piano"), whose initial inspiration came from Lopez's installation The [Music] Room presented at the Caramoor Centre for Music and Arts in Katonah (New York), in which a Disklavier piano in full automatic performance could be seen playing, but without hearing the notes associated to the keys, since the hammers were not touching the strings. The stringless piano used in untitled #400 consists exclusively of a portion of the instrument disassembled: the part comprising the keyboard and keys, the hammers and the interconnected mechanical parts, used as an autonomous unit of execution. The housing case, the lid, the soundboard, the strings and the pedals of a regular piano are completely missing. The first movement is played by van Houdt acoustically. In the absence of the strings, what you hear are the dull thuds of the felt of the hammers (several of which would be found on the ground at the end of the concert, due to the violence of the performance), but also the creaks of the wood against the screws and the metal sheets -- in fact, all the peculiar sound and mechanical-behavioral characteristics of the new instrument are explored, thanks to the powerful miking applied by López. The second movement, on the other hand, represents an "evolutionary transformation" created in the recording studio using exclusively exploded, dissected and recombined sound materials from the first movement, which in the live dimension is spatially diffused with an immersive audio system in total darkness, as is the custom of the Spanish musician in the last few years. The concept behind untitled #400 actually seems to reference to the "Machinistic Music" which occupied the vanguards of the early twentieth century, and which finds its contemporary expression in several of Lopez's compositions developed from original recordings of production machinery, electromechanical systems, and industrial sites.
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ANGELICA 052CD
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"Eternal Triangle was a dream come true: bringing together two of my favorite musicians in the whole world with me on the stage of AngelicA. Two musicians capable of encompassing both the most earthly and natural and the most rarefied and cosmic dimensions of sound, spontaneously and often seamlessly. Drawing from inspiration and life experience. We certainly didn't know this performance was going to be Toshinori Kondo's last one outside of Japan, and his last concert with a band. This is why in opening the files to work on the mixing we were struck by the sensation of a journey into the unknown and by the fact that it was Kondo-sans trumpet that was guiding us onto this path. Once or twice every few thousand concerts one gets the impression of having touched 'that thing', the inexpressible, which gives meaning to the rest of time, to the rest of the journey. Like the efforts of the mythological alchemists' lab. This, which remained the first and only concert of Eternal Triangle, was indeed one of those rare moments of coronation." --Massimo Pupillo (May 23rd, 2022)
The 2019 edition of AngelicA presented, only a few days apart, two exceptional trios assembled around two legends of the improvised music scene: Peter Brötzmann and Toshinori Kondo. Travel companions since the '80s throughout countless experiences (including Die Like a Dog quartet, dedicated to Albert Ayler), the two found themselves in Bologna, this time as part of two different line-ups: Brötzmann was presenting the Italian premiere of his music trio with drummer Hamid Drake and the Gnawa musician Maâlem Moukhtar Gania (ANGELICA 041CD); Kondo was instead with Eternal Triangle -- a trio founded with bass player Massimo Pupillo and drummer Tony Buck which represented something completely new, even though the participants' paths had crossed on a few other occasions, since both Kondo and Bucks had already played with bassist Pupillo: more precisely as part of Hairy Bones (Brötzmann/Kondo/Pupillo/Nilssen-Love), and as part of the Buck/Pupillo duo. Musicians belonging to different generations and paths of life, all of which took them outside of the prearranged boundaries of their genre and instrument. In this concert in Bologna, which fatefully remained the trio's only one, the connection among the musicians appears perfect, creating a dialogue through which each one drew equally from their own experiences to add nuances to the sound palette, but it was undeniably -- as Pupillo recounts in the notes -- the Japanese master that acted as a real reference point to build the rich and feverish soundscapes that were being explored.
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ANGELICA 050CD
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Organum for Stefano, the third record that I Dischi di Angelica dedicates to the work of Terry Riley, represents a significant example of "coming full circle": indeed, in 1997 AngelicA Festival organized a concert in Bologna for Terry Riley and Stefano Scodanibbio -- it was their first tour together, and the beginning of a collaboration that would last for years, promoting their first album Lazy Afternoon Among the Crocodiles, recorded in the Shri Moonshine studio in Riley's home between 1994 and 1995. After his magnificent piano solo at the 2000 edition, AngelicA invited Riley back in 2013 to dedicate a special tribute-portrait to him, presenting his music in a series of concerts held in three different cities (Bologna, Modena, and Lugo), with different line-ups: The 3 Generations Trio (with Tracy Silverman and Gyan Riley); the ARTE saxophone quartet from Switzerland; and indeed a concert, commissioned as a world premiere, dedicated to Stefano Scodanibbio who had passed away the year before, in January 2012. The venue selected for the concert was the Basilica of Santa Maria dei Servi, hence Riley decided to use its historic Tamburini opus 544 pipe organ for the concert paying homage to the memory of Stefano. The organ was built in 1968 based on a design by Luigi Ferdinando Tagliavini, with a total of approximately 5000 pipes divided into 60 registers.
As Riley himself explains in the liner notes: "... Stefano and I had a long history of touring and playing concerts together and one of the features of our concerts was always an arrangement of a vocal raga for bass, voice and tamboura. Stefano, although not trained in Indian classical music, had an uncanny ear for the right choices in pitch and rhythm to accompany my traditional vocal renditions. Two of Stefano's favorite ragas were Malkauns and Bageshri, late night ragas with deep feelings ideally suited to the profound sounds emanating from his string bass. The concert was completely improvised, introducing the melodies of ragas Malkauns and Bageshri, both vocally and in the harmonized organ passages of an intuitively structured form. The last section is an improvisation upon the passages of my composition 'Simply M...', a piece I frequently played for Stefano."
The result was a very precious concert -- the only official recording of Riley on the pipe organ -- which ranges from minimalism to Indian music, grandiose Bachian architectural constructions, even progressive echoes -- in a kaleidoscopic flow of ideas which, both spontaneously and with a great clarity of intention, travels through moments and reminiscences of the respective musical identities and experiences shared by the two musicians.
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ANGELICA 048CD
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Francesco Serra is an Italian guitarist and sound explorer. His music research focuses on performance practices aimed at expanding the timbre qualities of the electric guitar, as well as the evocative potential of sound in relationship with space and image. In 2012, at the time of his first album, Serra was often compared with musicians such as John Fahey, Loren Connors, and Alan Licht, while this new work entitled Guest Room appears more as a "reductionist", abstract journey comparable in its rigor to the work of Alvin Lucier or Phill Niblock. Starting from a minimal electroacoustic setup (electric guitar, two amplifiers, three snare-drums, a loop machine), this work is the result of his residency at the Angelica | Centro di Ricerca Musicale -- Teatro San Leonardo in Bologna during the 2021 lockdown. A work born out of the intent to catch the acoustic identity of this peculiar space (the theater is a former church, originally part of a convent). Seven microphones positioned under the vault recorded the sound enriched by the refraction on the surrounding surfaces. In the span of a month, it was possible to fully document the signs of a physical presence without leaving out any of the accidental acoustic events that took place during the performance. Entirely performed in real time and without overdubbing, Guest Room is a work of austere fascination, which confirms Francesco Serra as a musician-researcher of both rigorous poetics, and charming identity.
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ANGELICA 047CD
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The Mbenzélé and Aka Pygmy Populations: "The territory inhabited by the Mbenzélé and Aka Pygmies is situated in the extreme North of the Democratic Republic of Congo, over the Equator, in the northeastern (Mbenzélé) and north western (Aka) rain forests of Ouésso in the Shanga region, near the borders with the Central African Republic and Cameroon. The Pygmies still live according to their hunters-gatherers traditions, even though the ever-increasing amount of contact they have with other Congolese ethnic groups and European visitors (like myself) are increasingly threatening their culture and survival. The welcoming I received in these two communities, both made up of approximately a hundred individuals between adults and children (many children), always touched and moved me. I stayed with them for seven days, and the recordings were carried out over five days: on the 18th and 19th February (Mbenzélé) and 23rd, 24th and 25th of February 2014 (Aka). For these people, music is an extraordinary, joyful and everyday experience that they share collectively. It is achieved through very simple instruments (vocals, hand clapping and a few other percussions), and through collective improvisation they manage to create a rhythmic and harmonic complexity which can truly amaze..." --Roberto Monari (Vignola, January 26th, 2021).
Birth & Nature: "When Roberto entrusted me with these recordings I thought back to approximately 40 years earlier, when we first met, like something that comes back. With him, a fundamental door onto the music realm opened, he passed on to me so much varied music. His home was like a little paradise (of listening) for a very young boy like me who was searching for and researching new worlds, both musical and artistic, and like a medicine music responded and nourished. Together we listened to music of all kinds and provenance: all the music forms we could find (we traveled to buy records and attend concerts), or that just presented themselves, and that had a certain peculiarity and originality provided an excuse for discovery, and ethnic music and Pygmies were also part of these worlds. The list would be longer than 40 years of life, and of listening . . . These field recordings that he offered me arrived like a present, a reflection of my youth, but I think also of his, and our shared growth and it seems like centuries ago but it feels like now, and while listening and experiencing the Pygmies this becomes even clearer. After listening and re-listening (and working) so much (on) these recordings it was like being there with them and listening to these sounds, dialogues and music was like continually witnessing the birth of something..." --Massimo Simonini (Vignola, February/April 2021).
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ANGELICA 045CD
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Hermann Nitsch - organ; Josef Smutny and Leopoldo Siano - assistants at the organ. Music by Hermann Nitsch. 32-page booklet with photos and texts (English and Italian). Text by Hermann Nitsch. Liner notes by Leopoldo Siano, photos by Enzo Sbarra, Massimo Golfieri.
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ANGELICA 042CD
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In the year 2000, when Bologna was European Capital of Culture, AngelicA Festival, then in its tenth edition, invited Cecil Taylor to hold a concert at the Teatro Comunale - Opera House of Bologna: solo, with his piano (and his dance and his poetry readings) he opened an evening that ended with a rendition of the luminous piece Coptic Light by Morton Feldman performed by the Orchestra del Teatro Comunale di Bologna, conducted by Jurjen Hempel. This unusual juxtaposition (not in the history of the festival) should not surprise: initially ascribed only to free jazz, throughout the decades Taylor's music has been re-evaluated in all its formal complexity, and is nowadays recognized as one of the most singular productions in the musical landscape of the nineteenth century. The additional uniqueness of this release is that it adds a second CD, titled Rap, to the recording of that memorable concert, which documents the public meeting-interview that Taylor agreed to give in Bologna on the following day. Moderated by the musicologist (and founding member of the band Stormy Six) Franco Fabbri, and transcribed and notated in its entirety in the forty pages booklet (in English/Italian) by the jazz critic and historian Francesco Martinelli, Taylor opened the meeting by reading a complex statement of his on the definition of music, inclusive of an explanatory glossary at the end. What came after was no less bewildering, with Taylor using the moderator's questions as a springboard for an explosive tour de force of quotes and references. It offers the listeners an experience almost equivalent to the extraordinary internal mobility of his concerts, and a precise grid of interpretation of the imaginaries he drew from to create his unique sound, scenic and vocal theatre. The release is completed by "No Matter What - Montage of Meanings", an homage that the director of the festival Massimo Simonini paid to Taylor in May 2020, editing together extracts of the concert and of the public meeting. Recorded on May 10, 2000 at the Teatro Comunale di Bologna, and on May 11, 2000 at the Palazzo dei Notai, Bologna, Italy, during AngelicA, Festival Internazionale di Musica, 10th edition Mastered in May 2020 by Bob Drake at Studio Midi-Pyrénées, La Borde Basse, Caudeval, France.
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ANGELICA 043CD
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In 2002, Misha Mengelberg was invited for the second time to the AngelicA Festival in Bologna. That edition, the twelfth, took part entirely in a squatted social center of the city, and, in collaboration with Tristan Honsinger, was conceived as one large opera lasting six days -- an opera within which the performances of many national and international artists fitted in like individual mobile "modules". Especially for this occasion and on the festival director's suggestion, who had attended a performance by the ICP Orchestra in Amsterdam during which Mengelberg had unexpectedly stood up from the piano and started singing, on the evening of May 17th 2002 the musician entered the venue pushed on a mobile platform, from which he performed a very short program of "Solo Songs" -- at the end he acted as if he was falling asleep and was pushed back behind the scenes. This burning set of approximately 15 minutes of "songs" -- in the broadest sense of the term, as the highly original Dutch composer-improviser could conceive them -- is the starting point of this CD, complemented by other previously unreleased live recordings of concerts held between 2002 and 2010 in the Netherlands, Ukraine and France, provided by the Mengelberg Foundation. As the saxophonist Ab Baars, author of the liner notes, describes them: "The improvisations on this CD are everything: annoying, exciting, meaningless, brilliant, swinging, crazy, too long, too short, irritating, beautiful, moving. And light as a feather. They come and they go again. Without intention. They are. Without boast." Rituals of Transition is the second release that I Dischi Di Angelica dedicates to the great Dutch musician and composer.
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ANGELICA 039CD
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Anthony Braxton, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and a true giant of creative music, in 50 years of career had never played in a duo with a harp; and that's exactly what happened at the AngelicA Festival in 2018. Expressing himself through a wide range of mediums, from solos to large orchestras to multimedia projects, and drawing inspiration from a wide range of influences, from John Coltrane to Karlheinz Stockhausen, Anthony Braxton has created a unique music system which celebrates the concept of global creativity and shared humanity. Harpist Jacqueline Kerrod, of South-African origins, has performed as part of prestigious classic-contemporary line-ups such as Modern Ensemble and Talea Ensemble. Since 2016 she took part in various Braxton projects such as the opera Trillium J, the 12+1 ensemble, and the ZIM Music sextet, proving to be the ideal partner for this venture where different worlds meet. The music played by Braxton and Kerrod sounds luminous as pure poetry. Music that evokes sublime worlds.
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ANGELICA 014CD
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1999 release. Fred Frith's large, flexible ensemble project using marked photographs and rules as scores and featuring as permanent members Ikue Mori and Zeena Parkins. Recordings are taken from five concerts, including the first in 1992 at AngelicA festival, and features 44 musicians, including: Jean Derome, Lesli Dalaba, Paulo Angelli, Co Streif, Rene Lussier, Jean Marc Montera, Guy Klucsevek, Myra Melford, Han Bennink, Chris Cutler, Daan Vandewelle, Massimo Simonini, and Hans Koch. Includes full color booklet containing all the graphic scores, instructions on interpretative rules and history.
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ANGELICA 031CD
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2015 release. Recorded Live at the 1993 Angelica Festival, this concert represents the first and only meeting of four great individuals. Some sort of all-star quartet including two ex-Henry Cow members, the great late bassoonist Lindsay Cooper and master guitarist Fred Frith, along with Swedish accordionist Lars Hollmer from the historical RIO band Samla Mamas Manna and Italian saxophone specialist Gianni Gebbia. Four protagonists at the height of their powers. Thoughtful music, beautifully recorded. With evocative photographs, and booklet notes by Fred Frith.
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ANGELICA 041CD
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"Three names, three cultures, three continents, three different concepts of time and timing -- this is the essence of this trio. This is what we have to bring together." -- Peter Brötzmann, Wuppertal, April 1st, 2019
With these words, Peter Brötzmann, one of the great figures in the development of a unique European approach to free improvisation since the '60s, announced his return to the AngelicA festival in 2019. A trio featuring Hamid Drake -- one of the best living drummers and guembri player Maalem Mokhtar Gania, last representative of a legendary line of Gnawa music masters, brother of Maalem Mahmoud Gania, long-time Brotzmann collaborator who died prematurely. The trio documented in this CD thrilled and surprised the attending audience with their great energy and magnetism. The music played here it's further proof that Brötzmann at the age of 78 has nothing to envy to his younger self of 50 years ago, at the beginning of his career.
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ANGELICA 040CD
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Internationally renowned musician and composer Roscoe Mitchell since Sound, his debut on Delmark in 1966, has defined a unique language based on a creative approach toward jazz and its relationship with contemporary music. Splatter, drawn from two concerts at the AngelicA Festival in Bologna in 2017, presents the most recent developments of this research. Here are two pieces from his cycle "Conversations for large orchestra". A project based on the transcription and orchestration of some pure collective improvisations with pianist Craig Taborn and drummer Kikanju Baku ("Conversations I and II" Wide Hive, 2014). This new CD includes the Italian premiere of "Splatter" and the world premiere of "Distant Radio Transmission", featuring the Orchestra del Comunale di Bologna, plus singer Thomas Buckner and Mitchell himself. The lion's share of this CD is represented by the first-ever duet with Francesco Filidei, Italian church organist and former assistant of Jean Guillou at Saint-Eustache's Church in Paris, as well as a composer whose music has been performed by great ensembles such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, Percussions de Strasbourg, and Klangforum Wien. "Breath and Pipes" is a testament to this encounter: as Joshua Marshall writes in the CD liner notes, it is "an improvisatory tour de force, demonstrating the uncanny sort of electrokinetic thrill which emerges out of the capacity of two brilliant improvisers to truly surprise one another."
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ANGELICA 038CD
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2019 release. Recorded live at the AngelicA Festival this album consists of two pieces, one by Charlemagne Palestine (quasi liturgical) featuring himself on crystal glasses and voice, accompanied by tubular bells and a string ensemble; the other by experimental Canadian composer Cassandra Miller, for 26 strings in continuous sliding motion. Both concerts were spatialized with the ensemble surrounding the public (and Palestine himself moving around the space).
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ANGELICA 030CD
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2015 release. The last surviving member of the historical New York School, performing his own compositions on piano and melodica with percussionist Robyn Schulkowsky, as well as performances of other Christian Wolff compositions by the British ensemble, Apartment House. Covering the period 1950-2013, these compositions trace the evolution of a composer through and after a period of revolutionary musical re-thinking.
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ANGELICA 037CD
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2019 release. As result of another AngelicA Festival production this Eyvind Kang album presents a new cycle of works including compositions and songs for mixed orchestra with Kang leading a large ensemble featuring traditional instruments (strings and winds), synthesizers, percussion, plus voice, and field recordings from Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls).
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ANGELICA 037LP
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LP version. 2019 release. As result of another AngelicA Festival production this Eyvind Kang album presents a new cycle of works including compositions and songs for mixed orchestra with Kang leading a large ensemble featuring traditional instruments (strings and winds), synthesizers, percussion, plus voice, and field recordings from Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls).
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ANGELICA 035CD
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2016 release. The historical meeting of four great minds in contemporary music. A totally unexpected combination of great personalities and different poetics. From Pauline Oliveros's deep accordion sound, through John Tilbury's extended pianism to Roscoe Mitchell and Wadada Leo Smith's creative music conceptions. This is highly pointillist music made of large spaces and extreme concentration. Four masters at work, period.
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ANGELICA 033CD
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2015 release. Stefano Scodanibbio (1956-2012) was one of the great contrabassists of recent times. A long-time associate of Luigi Nono and Terry Riley. Active both as an interpreter -- composers who wrote for him include Scelsi, Sciarrino, Bussotti, Xenakis, Ferneyhough... and as an improviser. This memorial CD brings together an extraordinary program of previously unreleased pieces performed with maverick figures such as Terry Riley (synth), Rohan de Saran (cello), Garth Knox (viola), Mike Svobda (trombone), Tristan Honsinger (cello), Frances-Marie Uitti (cello), Bruce Ackley (soprano sax), and Michael Kiedaisch (percussion). This is rich and tactile music with hyperreal attention to details of microtonality and timbre.
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