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Experimental Intermedia Foundation, founded in 1968 by Elaine Summers, has been presenting performances since 1973. Produced and curated by composer Phill Niblock, over 1000 concerts have been given at his loft, and he has opened his doors to hundreds of composers, giving them a place to explore the use of new ideas and technologies in their music. As an offshoot of Experimental Intermedia, XI Records was formed in 1990, with the main purpose of presenting a series of compact discs highlighting the music of contemporary artist-composers whose works are original and galvanizing. The intent of XI is to extend the experience of these engaging and pioneering works beyond the performance space into the home. XI's catalog includes Phill Niblock, Elaine Radigue, Tom Johnson, David Behrman, David First, David Watson, Lois V. Vierk, Ellen Fullman, Philip Corner, Malcom Goldstein, Annea Lockwood, and many more.
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XI 149CD
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With Visitations and Revisitations, Matt Rogalsky continues lines of work that seem to inevitably revolve around explorations and honoring of place, people, and memory. Ambient, expansive and immersive, twelve new songs without words invite listeners on travels through spectral sound worlds. All the compositions combine elements of acoustic and electronic sound, where the electronic sound is often derived from underlying acoustic sources which often remain unheard while their liminal, spectral qualities are evoked in new ways. On this collection, two "Visitations" bracket ten "Revisitations." Each "Revisitation" identified by a letter is an investigation into the work of a composer or musician whose work has meant much to Rogalsky: "The 'Revisitations' all function as homage compositions, in an alphabetical series of 26, where each letter references a composer whose work has touched me, and whose sounds I have spectrally explored in a new response piece." The "Visitations" are different from the "Revisitations" in their referencing of intensely personal conditions: one derives from the resonances of a family upright piano which came from Rogalsky's maternal side, and one evokes experiences in movement, sound and community around the base of Sacred Buffalo Guardian Mountain in Banff Alberta. The range of influences Rogalsky explores on Visitations and Revisitations span from musicians and poets in his local sphere, to internationally well-known contemporary and historical figures in music and sound. Some sources are revealed and others kept private as a guessing game for listeners. A number of the tracks on the album are based in recordings of live performances while others are purely studio compositions. Matt Rogalsky is based in Kingston/Katarokwi, in Ontario Canada where he runs the Sonic Arts Studio at Queen's University. He previously released a double CD album Memory Like Water on XI Records in 2006 (XI 131CD).
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XI 150CD
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On this album, Lucie VÃtková and Merche Blasco explore cyborgness through their relationships with their instruments. Lucie perceives the accordion as an extension of their body -- sound, matter, and movement locked in a self-generating cybernetic loop. Merche built Anette, a 3D printer, as her interlocutor and companion in the performance space; in return, Anette printed thimble-microphones Merche wears on her fingers, which render the machine's unique electromagnetic voice audible to human ears. Performed through an octophonic system, the wearable microphones expand Merche's hand gestures to sonically fill the performance space, surrounding the audience with the sensation of being within Anette's busy, mechanical body. For this album, the eight signals broadcast by Merche's thimble-microphones were later mixed down to stereo, replicating the spatial image created live. This album is the record of an inter-material conversation among the trio of VÃtková, Blasco, and Anette (technically a quartet since Merche was six months pregnant at the time), in which human and nonhuman elements of the cyborgian system are in constant interflow. The album includes a text written by Shelley Hirsch.
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XI 148CD
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XI Records announce the release of a double-CD set of Michael Winter's music organized by guitarist Elliot Simpson. Each CD features a single composition, demonstrating different sides of Winter's work.
The first, "Counterfeiting in Colonial Connecticut", is a socially-engaged piece written for Simpson and in honor of George Floyd. The second, a lot of tiles (trivial scan), derives music from a set of mathematical tilings (often referred to as tessellations). The album art features reprints of altered and counterfeit colonial Connecticut bills as well as custom-made, hand-stamped prints of the tilings. "Counterfeiting in Colonial Connecticut" interleaves guitar passages with readings of excerpts from the book of the same title written by Kenneth Scott and published by the American Numismatic Society in 1957. Readings from the Scott Compendium are complemented with readings of texts written by Winter reflecting events that occurred during the composition of the piece; particularly the protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, a black man brutally murdered by police while being arrested for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill. Simpson is accompanied by Gemma Tripiana Muñoz on piccolo and the texts are read by Simpson, Winter, and animator Mandy Toderian.
"a lot of tiles (trivial scan)" is based on a set of rectangle substitution tilings explored by Chaim Goodman-Strauss in his seminal paper "Lots of aperiodic sets of tiles". A rectangle substitution tiling is generated by dissecting a rectangle into four smaller rectangles, which are then dissected into eight even smaller rectangles, and so on. The parenthetical in the title, "trivial scan", refers to the method of sonification. Sonic parameters of the music are determined by scanning and reading the tilings. The piece is quite open. As Simpson explains about Winter's music in the notes: "Although his music covers a wide range of forms, formats, and concerns, there seems to always be a careful consideration of the adaptability of his works... They can expand and contract to accommodate diverse instrumentations, durations, spaces, and situations... There is an understanding that the myriad of possibilities defined by the scores will never be exhausted; new constellations of materials, performers, and contexts will always exist." In the recording of "a lot of tiles (trivial scan)", this variability is explored through different combinations of electronic, synthesized, and acoustic sounds featuring Simpson and saxophonist Omar López, the dedicatee of the work.
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XI 146LP
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Excerpts from a sound installation based on alto saxophone recordings and electronic sound. "Mr. Leonard creates a haunting, rhythmic, chantlike score, secular spiritual music for a New World. After leaving the gallery I kept hearing it, with delight, in my head, on the street, all afternoon." --Holland Cotter, The New York Times. The electroacoustic composition Sonance for the Precession was commissioned by Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA). The piece furthers Leonard's practice in large scale sound installation, with recent commissions by documenta, Venice Biennale, and Fujiko Nakaya of Experiments in Art at Technology. The original composition, created for the quad adjacent to WCMA, played from the dome of the historic Hopkins Observatory, the oldest working astronomical observatory in the United States. The durational work explored ancient ideas connecting the precession, or movement, of the equinox with the harmonic series. Each day, the music began just a minute or two earlier than the previous day -- mirroring the disappearing sunlight as day turned to night and autumn shifted to winter. 30 minutes of the composition played daily. The composition provided a context to reflect on how Hindu and Greek theories of astronomy and acoustics developed through intercultural exchange as far back as prehistoric times. Working closely with WCMA and producer/engineer Joe Branciforte, Leonard remixed Sonance for the Precession specially for LP and stereo listening. The result is a stunning long form composition that brings the sense of contemplation, cosmic motion and intimate timbral nuance of the installation to your living room, headphones and/or car stereo.
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XI 145CD
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A 65-minute electroacoustic composition featuring Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, bassoon. "The aural effect is minimal to the max, but it isn't simplistic. The tones vibrate and glow, the densely packed texture shifting hues like a sonic aurora borealis" --John Rockwell, The New York Times. NuDaf (2020) is the second longest piece in Phill Niblock's repertoire of recorded audio works. NuDaf is a departure from his previous pieces in that he makes extensive use of multiphonics and constructed the work with fewer tracks than usual, creating uniquely transparent and ephemeral textures. The piece is the result of a collaboration between Niblock and the stellar bassoonist Dafne Vicente-Sandoval. Her musicality and breadth of knowledge, extended bassoon performance, and uncanny timing inspired the piece. This is the first of three collaborative projects between XI Records and Akoh Media. Akoh initiated the project, suggesting that Phill confront a longer form that also seemed eminently suitable to Dafne Vicente-Sandoval's interests. Akoh, as is its tradition, presents the work in a limited numbered edition of a one-of-a-kind Petri dish that incorporates Niblock's photos in an exquisite and unique design. From the liner notes by Michael Pisaro-Liu: "... over the course of the long duration of NuDaf we listen to a slow-motion explosion that frees it, creating a spectacular shape, right before our ears."
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XI 144CD
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XI Records announce the release of Tom Chiu's new double-CD, The Live One, a diverse and thoroughly engrossing album that showcases the multiple facets of Chiu's visions. Chiu is a polymath who is as comfortable with lyricism and the beauty of tonality as he is with process-based works and challenging conventions of composition. Chiu specializes in creating spatial experiences and altered states of mind with his music, with a singular, questing path. On the album opener, "Into The Forest", melancholic themes build and become wrapped in echoes that reverberate like a skipping stone casting ripples in a pond. Dry and delicate melodies emerge that float spatially. The piece is an assemblage of over 60 musical fragments composed by Chiu, which coalesce seamlessly into a homogeneous whole. "BABIP", a solo performance, begins with Chiu's pizzicato which evokes the spirit of gamelan, and builds through increasingly intense gestures, woozy double stops and extended techniques until he starts transforming the sound of his instrument with live effects. The functionally-titled "Duo Improvisation 16741" sees Chiu pairing with sound artist and composer Michael Schumacher. Together, they create a hypnotically jarring sonic whirling dervish. Chiu's live effects invoke undertones of Tuvan throat singing as glissandos layer with insistent bell tones. The insistent piece thrillingly morphs into electronic pulses and sirens, journeying deeply into sonic abstraction. The track "Birave Trifecta" sees Chiu performing with Dan Joseph on hammer dulcimer and Jason Cady on modular synthesizer under the moniker JCC Trio. The trio's piece begins as almost a folk stomp, with echoes of minimalism in its insistence. It builds to euphoric intensity with Chiu's bravura playing, sawing at his instrument with fierce abandon. "RETROCON" is a work performed by FLUX Quartet. The epic piece unfolds like a mini symphony, with the quartet creating a stunningly rich sonic world. The layers of the string quartet swell and undulate like a small boat in the middle of the ocean negotiating the waves of an impending storm, then wail plaintively before returning with clustered hives of notes. A startling and insistent monolithic pulsing then seems to summon dark deities before receding with a delicate beauty. The final piece on the album, "deKonstruct", is an improvisation which quotes from existing materials, colliding Bach and Chiu. Chiu uses a looping pedal to create a bed for his hyper-kinetic performance which mutates through his arsenal of sonic manipulation, to mesmerizing effect. (from the liner notes by JG Thirlwell)
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XI 143CD
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From the liner notes by Dean Rosenthal: XI Records announce the release of Dave Seidel's new double-CD, Involution. The work contained on this recording represents Dave Seidel's second foray into the realm of releasing a full-length recording. But this new milestone was not reached until he had long immersed himself in the experimental scene in NYC in the 1980s and 1990s, working closely with established experimental music pioneers Lois V Vierk and Guy Klucevsek among others. Seidel's own composing and performing grew, blossoming into live performances in the 2000s and 2010s, allowing further exploration into programming and experimenting with sonority and algorithmic sonification. What we hear on this recording is the care and detail of his passion for these two features of composition and a steady integration of them. This leads us to the two pieces heard here: "Involution" and "Hexany Permutations". In thinking of sonority, Seidel has spoken of the strong influence of La Monte Young's use of perfectly-tuned intervals and Young's ideal of previously unheard sounds, those that may engender new sensations and emotions in the listener. But Seidel also confirms the influence of the work of Alvin Lucier, in particular the Orpheus Variations. For Seidel and his sonorities, he has found little use for the 12-note chromatic tempered system, no doubt the ubiquity of this universal tuning of Western music having too few possibilities for his ear. The question then appears: how does he apply this desire to explore new forms of sonority outside the well-tempered system and, for our purposes, in these pieces? The first CD in this set presents Seidel's composition "Involution", heard in three sections. The music is presented as an expansion of slowly-changing sonorities that explore the harmonic spaces inherent in certain microtonal tunings and scales, or modes within those tunings. Each section employs a different tuning and a different set of scales or modes and uses a combination of all the different technologies Seidel has been working with over the past several years: Csound, modular synthesizer, and pedals. "Hexany Permutations", the music that the second CD of this release contains, hints at the same concerns of sonority heard in Involution but tackles the composing slightly differently, with musical results of differing proportions. In this piece, the structure of the piece plays an equal if not more dominant role than the microtonal sonorities explored.
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XI 142CD
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Co-released with Umland Records, Germany. On one night in 2019, The Dorf (German for "village") took a heavy dose of the music of Phill Niblock. The impact on the musicians, gathering to play a double-length version of Niblock's "Baobab" and (in a second set) three "Dorf" tunes, was deep. It felt a bit like going to church -- a truly spiritual experience. At first, the audience did not believe the announcement that the "drone" piece would last for 46 minutes. Afterwards, their reactions showed the impression Phill's music had made on them. After a 20-minute break, three pieces followed -- a different game altogether, but connected to "Baobab" in the way that the energy and the feel for the evening had been thoroughly set by Mr. Niblock. Already his physical presence changed the reception for both musicians and listeners and the taste for this "wall of sound" was palpable. The Dorf (in itself already an orchestra of something like 25 people) had been augmented by friends to a total of 35 musicians -- almost too big to be true. In the second part of the evening, Katherine Liberovskaya projected along to the music some of her outstanding video work, which is obviously not documented on this album. Play the record at a not-too-soft volume and stick with it. One way or another, the music will get to you. Recorded live on September 19, 2019, domicil Dortmund Germany. Personnel: Moritz Anthes - trombone; Marvin Blamberg - drums, sampler; Julia Brüssel - violin; Simon Camatta - drums, sampler; Denis Cosmar - sound; Marie Daniels - vocals; Felix Fritsche - saxophone; Sebastian Gerhartz - saxophone; Christian Hammer - guitar; Florian Hartlieb - computer; Stefanie Heine - saxophone; David Heiss - trumpet; Volker Kamp - bass; Oona Kastner - synth, vocals; Jan Klare - saxophone, directing; Anja Kreysing - accordeon; Maika Küster - vocals; Katherine Liberovskaya - visuals; Raissa Mehner - guitar; Alexander Morsey - sousaphone; Johannes Nebel - bass; Fabian Neubauer - keyboards; Phill Niblock - composition; Kai Niggemann - Buchla; Adrian Prost - trombone; Gilda Razani - Theremin; Guido Schlösser - synth; Ludger Schmidt - cello; Hanna Schörken - vocals; Oliver Siegel - synth; Maria Trautmann - trombone; Luise Volkmann - saxophone; Martin Verborg - violin; Andreas Wahl - guitar; Florian Walter - saxophone; Max Wehner - trombone; Emily Wittbrodt - cello; Achim Zepezauer - electronics.
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XI 140CD
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Cecilia Lopez's work is a perfect combination of flavors that slowly reveal themselves as you spend more time enjoying it. It has marvelous layers of sonic explorations that slowly unfold and draw you in. Red is more than a musical composition. It roots lie in its physicality. Nestled on a large cargo-like cable web are an array of small speakers and contact microphones. As this web sways the speakers and microphones come in and out of proximity and form an evolving feedback network, which slowly reveal themselves as a myriad of permutations accompanied by sympathetic synthesizer tones. Zero-input mixing works seem to be very popular now, but Red takes feedback further, beyond the electronic domain, by its use of a multi-faceted instrument creating a sonic architecture intertwined with the resonances of acoustical spaces. Her Machinic Fantasies, a kind of performed installation, explores another set of instruments she has constructed using two hand-rotated, 55-gallon drums each having a speaker inside with multiple cutouts that act as acoustical filters. Her sound materials, derived from field recordings to spoken word and live acoustic/electronic instruments, are fed into the oil drums and emanate through the holes and are at the same time amplified using microphones placed near the rotating holes. Driven by a detailed score, this recording resulted from a music commission at Roulette in Brooklyn, New York combining the two rotating drum instruments with instrumentalists Jean Carla Rodea, Julia Santoli, Christopher McIntyre, and Joe Moffett. Machinic Fantasies also has multiple dimensions with the resonances of the performance space excited by the instruments, the musicians weaving their sounds into the space from different locations, and the ongoing physical rotations of the spinning drums to create a swirling almost hypnotic music.
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XI 141CD
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XI Records releases Drop By Drop, Suddenly, a two-CD set of eleven compositions for bassoon composed and performed by Leslie Ross. Ross is not only an internationally renowned instrument builder but is also an uncompromising creative musician. The first disc starts with a series of short seed pieces that play primarily with the timbral and microtonal differences highlighted between tone-holes, forming a layered effect while playing with only one fingering, single note or multiphonic. They range from the strictly tonal or modal pitch-centered to a thicker atonal and dissonant collection of frequencies. Pieces progress to longer complex ones by the second disc, some of which have as minimal material as the shorter ones, but make more extensive use of live multi-track recordings and frequency filters to further bring out changes in frequencies or accentuate specific multiphonics. The electronics used were created explicitly for each composition using the computer-based program MAX/MSP. Save for the unconventional 15 microphones of the "prepared bassoon", these recordings include pieces with no sound processing whatsoever, as well as pieces that do involve sound processing and multi-tracking. Importantly, however, any processing is made in real time, not post-recording. All recordings are single-take recordings where four speaker channels along with room microphones have been mixed down to stereo. Key clicks occasionally get picked up in a loop recording to return sometimes processed, sometimes not, while in circular breathing a multiphonic might drop out before sounding again. What might sound like clicks or occasional drop outs on some pieces are not overlooked mastering faults but the result of this live processing, presenting these pieces as they would be in performance. With a formal background in classical music and early performance practice, Leslie Ross took a plunge into the free improvisation scene of downtown New York in the mid 1980's and has immersed herself in experimental music ever since. Her connected, parallel, work as a baroque bassoon builder also opened up concurrently into explorations of invented instruments and sound installations. She has presented solo programs, both acoustic and electro-acoustic throughout Europe and the US over the past three decades. In the mid 2000's she returned her music focus to a detailed exploration, analysis and understanding of bassoon multiphonics. It is through this exploration of multiphonics and the subtle changes made when playing with resonance keys that brought her to the music presented on Drop By Drop, Suddenly.
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XI 138CD
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Electroacoustic Works collects three major pieces from the early 21st century New York-based composer Dan Joseph. This double CD release includes Set Of Four, a group of fixed-media sound collages using the processed hammer dulcimer as the primary sound source, two live performances of Dulcimer Flight for electroacoustic hammer dulcimer, and a 64-minute version of Periodicity Piece #6, a mixed-media work that originated as a multi-channel sound installation. With roots in early minimalism, ambient music, and acoustic ecology, the works herein represent a significant subset of the composer's larger body of work from the past twenty years that he has developed alongside an active career as a composer of instrumental chamber music. Dan Joseph began his career as a drummer in the punk scene of his native Washington, DC. During the late 1980s, he was active in the experimental tape music underground. He spent the '90s in California where he studied at CalArts and Mills College. His principal teachers include Pauline Oliveros, Alvin Curran, Mel Powell, and Terry Riley. Since the late 1990s, the hammer dulcimer has been the primary vehicle for his music.
From the liner notes by Alan Licht: "What's striking about Dan Joseph's music is that it's drone oriented but also mindful of timekeeping. This would seem to be a paradox: most drone-based music and/or classic minimalism often reaches for a feeling of cosmic timelessness, or a sense of perpetuity via repetition, but the pieces on these discs all demarcate time in some way . . . Duration, another minimalist conceptual hallmark, is a means to an end rather than an end in itself for Joseph: the combination of simple harmonic material and extended lengths of time allows for more activity that is readily perceived, rather than to set up a near-static hypnotic state that is only occasionally jostled by a subtle shift in the music . . . In the computer age, digital memory and storage capacity are crucial technological attributes and an everyday concern; Dan's electroacoustic pieces set up their own kind of memory banks for both the performer and the listener. The musical information is being supplied to and retrieved from both electronic and mental repository systems. This is post-minimal music where repetition is a mnemonic device, rather than a tool for trance or head-clearing."
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XI 137CD
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Ulrich Krieger's /RAW:ReSpace/ is the first ever experimental noise-metal saxophone solo album, changing and redefining how the saxophone can sound and what saxophone playing means. No saxophone player has ever dared to explore these uncharted outer realms of woodwind expression. RAW brings together noisescapes, electronica, death- and doom-metal approaches, and contemporary instrumental composition techniques, while ReSpace combines soundscapes of dark ambience and controlled feedback with a reductionist approach to create eerie ambient sound-fields. All sounds are saxophone-produced and performed live, with no sampling and no purely electronic sounds. RAW and ReSpace are part of the ongoing Universe series. Krieger is well known as a saxophone player in the worlds of rock, noise, contemporary composition, and free improvised music, and as a composer of chamber music and electronic music. He has been active in pushing the boundaries of saxophone playing in general and the function of the saxophone in rock and noise in particular, collaborating with Lou Reed (Metal Machine Trio, Lou Reed Band), Lee Ranaldo (Text of Light), Faust, and Zbigniew Karkowski, in addition to leading his own death-doom-noise-metal band Blood Oath. His original compositions vacillate between just intonation, silent music, noise, and instrumental electronic, often asking for elaborate amplification, and exist in the abysses of rock culture, refusing to accept stylistic boundaries. In his distinct style of amplified saxophone playing, Krieger processes refined acoustic and quasi-electronic sounds, using his saxophone more as an analog sampler than a traditional finger-virtuoso instrument. By amplifying his instrument in various ways, he gets down to the grains of the sounds, changing their identities and structures from within. Ulrich Krieger: electric tenor saxophone, saxophone-controlled feedback, pedals, delays, ¼-inch jack cable, vocals; Joshua Carro: drums (CD 1 tracks 3 and 5). In his liner notes, Ivar Bjørnson of Enslaved writes, "When Ulrich introduced his 'acoustic electronic' concept, there was another door blown wide open, and another glorious field of pure expression revealed. There is an openness, and a level of abstraction to the music that leaves room for 'me' to exist within the music; I can bring my own associations, patterns and inner visuals -- and let it blend, mutate and morph into the intended delivery from the artist. The acoustic element in Ulrich's music makes the sonic reality deeper, as the organic qualities of acoustic-to-electronic resonate with the mind and flesh in a way electronic-to-electronic cannot."
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XI 117CD
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1995 release. Logos Works contains eight works by the Logos Duo featuring both Moniek Darge and Godfried-Willem Raes on various instruments, as well as other performers on a wide range of instruments. "This latest recording comes as they look back upon 25 years of collaboration as the Logos Duo. More than a retrospective, we see them affirming a long artistic relationship and forging new horizons -- together and on divergent musical paths. In this, their work is a metaphorical journey: an inward exploration of the elegance of algorithmic composition and a voyage out into distant soundscapes. This CD from Godfried-Willem Raes and Moniek Darge is both a literal and figurative journey; in sound and music we have the YinÂYang energy that is the Logos Duo. Enjoy listening!" --Douglas Quin
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XI 128CD
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2003 release. Two CDs for the price of one. Alan Licht wears many hats. Over the years, he's been a curator of music as well as a tireless performer. And he's as well-known an author as he is a musician. It's one thing to have eclectic tastes; it's another to make a practice of them. While Licht's earlier records have seamlessly melded his improvisational guitar playing with extended plundered sounds, A New York Minute takes things a few steps further. Instead of fusing the many sides of Licht into one monolithic mega-mix, this disc separates them into discrete compositions. There's a lot more at stake here: the guitar pieces are showcased as guitar pieces and the plundered works are just that. The conceptual tendencies in Licht no longer hide behind his talent as a guitarist; likewise, the guitar pieces are no longer propped on hooky concepts that take our attention away from his fretwork. The good news is that both work: Licht is as strong a conceptual artist as he is a composer.
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XI 112CD
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1995 release. Allison Cameron's compositions can be characterized as rigorous forms within which specific sound worlds are explored. She experiments with the physicality of sound on various instruments, using pithy material to exploit instrumental colors. Most of her works to date have been written for a variety of chamber ensembles encompassing both traditional and unusual groups of instruments. "Cameron takes her ideas and plunges them into darkness. There is nothing objective in this approach. Cameron's music has something to hide. By highlighting only a few musical features while restricting all others, Cameron puts a tiny corner of the musical world into very fine focus. It is like illuminating the universe with a pen-light. Compare this to the barely contained brutality of 'A Blank Sheet of Metal.' This piece is never quiet -- its soft moments are full of the tension of loud, powerful, angry arguments being forcibly held back. The restraint is deafening: those moments when the tension erupts or the loopy melody at the end can't clear the ominous air. It is a dark and unclean ritual, a terrifying vision of the world. Allison Cameron's great strength is that she has lifted that lid -- slightly, not enough to let the terrifying mixture spill out, but just enough to give a sense of the darkness, the dirt, and the raw, crude power of real life." --David Lang
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XI 118CD
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1998 release. "This is not an album of environmental sound for relaxation, though listening to it might have a calming effect. Nor is it sonic nostalgia for a tame or even cute nature. Some of these sounds (especially if played loudly on speakers with good bass response) can bite!" --Warren Burt. "World Rhythms" originated as a ten-channel live improvisation in which the audience was surrounded by ten loudspeakers. The recorded sounds include volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, radio waves, geysers and pools, and tree frogs. These sounds are a physical manifestation of energies which shape us and our environment constantly, energies of which we are not always aware, but which powerfully influence and interact with the rhythms of our bodies. "i come out of your sleep" follows a tradition of sound poetry, or text-sound, begun in part by Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate and expanded by composers such as John Cage, Charles Amirkhanian, and Jackson Mac Low. The piece is based on the speech vowels in Louise Bogan's poem, "Little Lobelia." The vowels are whispered and elongated; their shapes become breathed melodic arcs and tones, and that breathing becomes the core of a stylized meditation.
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XI 135CD
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2011 release. Charlie Morrow (b. 1942) is a sound artist, composer, sound poet, event maker. Charlie Morrow is a conceptualist whose music- and sound-work explores many styles and forms, from events for media and public spaces to commercial soundtracks, new media productions, museum installations and programming for broadcast and festivals. Assembling expert project groups, Morrow employs a collaborative style that fuses arts, artists, and environment. Charlie Morrow, for an artist who has been making music for over 50 years, has been vastly underrepresented on recordings. This three-CD retrospective set attempts to rectify that situation to some degree. The 15 works on these discs span the years from 1957-2007 and include: Morrow's first major work, Very Slow Gabrieli, a super slow motion performance of G. Gabrieli's Sonata Pian e Forte for double brass ensemble; Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves, a beautiful polychromatic, almost tactile collage where chattering sparrows and mellifluous songbirds join the measured undulations of devotional voices. Brass rings out over cradles of bells, doves coo, gulls mew and the wash of the tide ushers in the late medieval intricacies of dulcimer, recorder and viol. You can experience the sound made by herds of instruments through the two instances of Wave Music included in this set. As well as environmental works, chanting pieces, audio collages, and so much more.
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XI 113CD
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1993 release. Daniel Goode's Clarinet Songs has long been a favorite on the new music concert circuit. It is a 75-minute suite for solo clarinet which Goode began writing for himself in 1979, and reached its current form in 1991. It uses all of Goode's virtuosic techniques distilled into sixteen "Songs without Words," a poetics of the new clarinet. It is made up of a series of individual pieces, each a sound world of its own, based on some unique material, perhaps a specific technical, poetic, or sonic idea, or some synthesis of these. Most use circular breathing for continuity and use alternate fingerings which produce non-tempered intervals with unusual, striking timbres.
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2CD
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XI 129CD
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2021 restock. Two CDs for the price of one. David Behrman has been active as a composer and artist since the 1960s. Over the years he has made sound and multimedia installations for gallery spaces as well as musical compositions. Sam Behrman and Siegfried Sassoon met in 1920, when Behrman, then a young writer working at The New York Times, was sent to interview Sassoon at the start of the English poet's postwar American lecture tour. In that tour Sassoon was billed as "England's Soldier-Poet." He had a reputation both as a war hero and an anti-war poet and peace activist. Many years later, each author wrote about this youthful meeting, which inaugurated a long-lasting friendship and a correspondence, mostly conducted via trans-Atlantic letters between England and America, which continued into the 1950s. My Dear Siegfried provides a performance environment in which musicians interact with texts by the two authors and with music software designed to respond to the performers' actions. The texts and the software elements are arranged as a linear thread along which the piece progresses. In QSRL (1998) a sensor listens to what the performer is doing and a computer music system provides responses to information the sensor takes in. Viewfinder (2002) is a sound installation using software based on homemade synthesizer music of the early 1970s. In A New Team Takes Over (1969), homemade synthesizer modules were used in this piece to distort recordings made off the air of press conferences by members of the new Nixon administration following the American election of 1968. Touch Tones (1979), from the early days of music done with the help of newly-available, small, inexpensive "microcomputers," made use of a kind of primitive artificial intelligence scheme. Pools of Phase Locked Loops (1972) was one of four pieces made in response to commissions to the artists of the Sonic Arts Union (Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, and Behrman). The recording is from a live performance at Radio Bremen in May 1972.
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XI 105CD
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2022 restock. Unforeseen Events is one of many pieces David Behrman has made with computer software designed to interact in real time with a solo performer. The four sections recorded here were made specifically with Ben Neill's performance style in mind. The electronic timbres are intended to complement the sounds of his instrument, the admirable and humorous mutantrumpet, with its three separately-mutable and playable bells. Refractive Light consists of three small pieces based on an interweaving and overlapping of simple phrases. A musician strikes pitches that trigger responses in the form of sustained tones. The tones die out after a few seconds. While a tone is on it deflects the pitches of other "on" tones, so that harmonic changes occur at the on-and-off edges of overlappping layers. The idea can give rise to a kind of fanning or breathing rhythm that adapts itself to different styles of playing, and to a harmonic vocabulary with dozens or scores of family members.
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3CD
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XI 134CD
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2010 release. Long overdue overview of composer David First's drone works. Featuring Chris McIntyre and Peter Zummo, trombones; "Blue" Gene Tyranny, keyboards; and The Black Jackets Ensemble. "This was something unexpected and truly different: pulsing electronic textures that derived their rhythm from the beating patterns of closely-tune pitches -- as if Alvin Lucier and Philip Glass had gone on a blind date to CBGBs... David put the beat in beating patterns" --from the liner notes by composer Nic Collins (on his initial exposure to First's music in 1987). This special and specially priced set (three CDs for the price of two) contains nine works composed between 1996 and 2009. "1996 was the beginning of a new period for me," says First. "I had spent the prior five or six years creating a lot of music for other players and larger ensembles -- culminating in 1995 with a couple of mountings of my opera, The Manhattan Book of the Dead. I was a little burned out on this and decided to return to a more personal, intimate format -- one that ended up including an even more extensive exploration of tunings, alternative compositional softwares and how my playing techniques interacted with these things. I think I just wanted to go deeper and have more control over the results. During the ensuing years I've had a few pendulum swings -- forays into beat-oriented pop music with lyrics and vocals and, of course, the re-animation of my rock band from the late 70s -- The Notekillers. But I've continued, through all of the changes, to maintain my grounding in my love of the drone and associated acoustical phenomena -- a love affair that began in my teenage psychedelic years and will, no doubt, be a most significant aspect of my music path for as long as I am at it. The tracks here represent almost every major work created from 1996 to the present and I'm grateful that they will be heard by a wider swath of people than those who lived in NYC or happened to be at one of my touring performances during these years."
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2CD
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XI 132CD
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2007 release. Two CDs for the price of one. "Fingering an Idea (a phrase pulled from a Chris Mann piece) resulted from a Phill Niblock invitation to make a double CD for bagpipe and guitar. A bagpipe CD is a particular challenge. A high beam spatial explorer, it is the kind of unstable phenomena that is hard to enjoyably reproduce on your stereo player. The first pipe recording session was an ensemble piece, the score including walks around the concert hall. The second, a solo multi-track session. The third with Rob Ramirez, recorded material was played back in the concert hall through an eight-channel MSP patch. A carnival of colliding pans, exits and entrances, re-recorded for stereo. For 'Sinister,' an old cassette recorded at Amica Bunker was the original germ. A sequence of re-tuning and de-stringing, starting with six strings pitched across a whole-tone and ending with an improvisation on one string. This old piece was dusted off and reworked through an image of bell-ringing, another outdoors vernacular." --David Watson
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3CD
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XI 119CD
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2024 restock; 1998 release. Voted one of 1998's top 15 Records of the Year in Modern Composition by the writers and critics of The Wire, Trilogie de la Mort is a work in three parts for anolog Arp synthesizer. The first third of the work, Kyema, is inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead and invokes the six intermediate states that constitute the existential continuity of the being. Kailasha, the second chapter, is structured on an imaginary pilgrimage around Mt. Kailash, one of the most sacred mountains in the Himalayas. Koumé makes up the last part of the trilogy and emphasizes the transcendence of death.
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XI 124CD
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2000 release. From the liner notes by Tim Perkis: "Ellen Band's work... lies in the path it takes, leading one from listening to recordings of natural sounds to, before one knows it, being immersed in a dense and complex field of sound which, though built completely from natural elements, is something quite transcendent and otherworldly. Band's music seduces us into perceiving the sensuous properties of familiar sounds by building dense and complex sound environments out of these elements. By sheer sensory density we are brought face-to-face with the physical, vibrational reality of sounds, bringing us to a state of attention to what we perhaps have lazily ignored through over-familiarity. The ever-active yet somehow static nature of some of these pieces, as they reach very rich sonic densities, start opening like rich noise sources, providing a field for auditory illusion and hallucination. It's as if our perceptual apparatus, brought to a high state of awareness by the odd combination of familiarity and extreme density, begins providing its own guesses about the meaning of it all -- aural hallucinations." From the liner notes by Brenda Hutchinson: "At the end of each of Ellen Band's pieces, we return to the 'real world' as it was heard in the beginning. The sounds are now full of memories with the residue of where they have been. It's hard to hear a simple, familiar sound again without imagining what its 'other life' is like."
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XI 109CD
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1993 release. Body Music is music for Ellen Fullman's unique Long String Instrument, an 80-foot long instrument with approximately 80 strings. Fullman has long been developing this instrument for longitudinally vibrating long strings. Having received a BFA in sculpture, her interest in music began with the resonance of materials used in making sculpture. When she started making the Long String Instrument, she saw it as "sculpture as music"; now she has come full circle in conceiving "music as sculpture." For the most part, the music in Body Music relies harmonically on the diatonic scale. Because of the prominence of overtone content, more complex harmony is suggested. Through her studies of extended harmony, Fullman has come to realize that harmony is "dimensional."
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