MUSIC

With Synthetic Hearts, Tubatsi Mpho Moloi, Msaki and Clément Petit issue an invitation to the listener and lover to journey to another place. Here, hearts, experiences, and sounds meet, shift and evolve across an inventive nine track album. Experimental, playful and complex, the project merges voices, instruments and sounds, across geographies and genres, creating sparse, yet lush atmospherics that spin on the universal themes of love. As skilled musical shapeshifters, Synthetic Hearts melds Msaki and Moloi’s folk sensibilities with electronic elements, as Petit teases out distinct textures from his cello across the record. Together, they look inward, in an introspective and conversational project that teases out emotions held within – towards considering what is shared and private in the messiness of our relationships with ourselves and others. On Synthetic Hearts, love, longing, confusion, sorrow, despondency and queries are opened up and negotiated in songs that vibrate with their naked, honest and tender vulnerability.

The beauty of Bach playing that can only be reached by modern piano - Nobuko Kondo, who embodies this beauty, recorded the masterpiece "Die Kunst der Fuge" from her later years. The well-honed intellect and body that lucidly multilayers the movement of the voices approach the musical existence located at the extreme north of counterpoint. From the opening note to the final silence that suddenly arrives, this is a gem of a performance that sustains a tension filled with penetrating intention and serenity.

Nobuko Kondo
D. in Instrumental Music from Tokyo University of the Arts. D. for her thesis and performance of Stockhausen's piano music, and received the Bunka Hoso Music Award. She was awarded the Bunka Hoso Music Prize, and studied at the Berlin University of the Arts as a scholarship student of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) from 1986 to 1988, graduating with the highest honors. He won a prize at the Busoni International Competition and was awarded the Nancy Miller Memorial Prize at the William Kapell International Piano Competition in 1990. He has performed with the Berlin Symphony Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra Berlin, Haydn Orchestra (Italy), Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo University of the Arts Orchestra, and many others. In 1993, she began the recital series "Piano Music of the 20th Century". In recent years, she has also concentrated on the works of J. S. Bach, especially her recitals in 2000 and 2005 of the complete works from "The Well-Tempered Clavier, Volumes I and II", which were highly acclaimed. She has also released the CDs "J.S. Bach Toccata Complete Works," "New Viennese Music School Piano Works," and "Nobuko Kondo Plays J.S. Bach" (specially selected for "Record Geijutsu"), which have been well received. In April 2017, he spent a year in Berlin as a long-term overseas trainee at Kunitachi College of Music, where he conducted research focusing on Beethoven's piano works. She is currently a professor at Kunitachi College of Music.

 

Brümmer, the master of computer music
Creative music in pursuit of new richness
Surprised by the beauty of electronic sounds

A new album following "Resonance Sphere" (WER-2077) released in August 2022 by Rudger Brunmer, who has released extremely unique works in electronic, algorithmic, and computer music for decades. is. In this work as well, music with a rich expression that cannot normally be achieved with acoustic instruments is brilliantly created from digital media. Even the electronic sound alone will amaze you with its beauty and the realism of the space, which is different from reality. This is a high-level electro-acoustic work that unifies and embodies the structure of instruments and music from a new perspective.
★ "Kouki Shine" begins with a murmuring sound. It develops energetically into a series of high-density rhythms, and at the moment it reaches its climax, the movement stops, transforming into a sound field in which a huge amount of sound particles fluctuate. Ravel's "Gallows" on a transformed piano are layered at different pitches and speeds.

[Contents]
Rudger Brümmer (1958-): Sound patterns

[CD1]
Amazonas (2010)
Repetitions (2005)
Shine (2007)
Between Twilight(t 2019)

[CD2]
Dynamic Move ~for piano, live electronics, fixed media and live video (2006)
Time opens Le temps s'ouvre (1995)
Nyx (2001)

【player】
Rudger Brunmer (Live Electronics)
Other vocalists, piano and programmers also participate

Gould's masterpiece, GOLDBERG VARIATIONS of '55 is now available in clear color and 180g weight! Gould's SONY debut recording was an electrifying performance that fundamentally overturned the concept of "Bach on piano. The fast and furious touch, the pleasurable counterpoint processing, and the unique singing of the inner voice had a decisive impact that could not be ignored by later generations.

Meditations highly recommended. This is J.S. Bach: Das Wohltemperierte Clavie Vol.2 by the Romanian pianist Andrei Vieru. His father was a composer, and he himself seems to be a very intellectual person, not only playing the piano but also painting and writing. His playing is not instinctive and hedonistic as a pianist, but with intellectual restraint and a hint of a seeker of truth. Rather than rolling along with the flow of the music, he lets the sounds become music through the workings of his mind, and as you drift through the world of sound that emerges, it seems to penetrate your inner self before you know it, creating an addictive allure. Also, it is not a classical expression, which is peculiar to classical music, but has a sense of contemporaneity, which I think is also very meaningful. This is a must-listen for people who are not classical music lovers.

Just in time for the holidays.... 
A new expanded reissue of the sold out & extremely limited LP from 2017. 

Her son Loren Connors writes... 
"These recordings, no matter how rough the sound quality, capture the essence of the art of bel canto soprano Mary Mazzacane. Born in an Italian American neighborhood (Fairhaven) near Yale, she was one of the first women to graduate from the Yale School of Music. Ms. Mazzacane, who was active on the opera stage from 1947 through the 1970’s, playing leading roles in Madame Butterfly, Tosca, Amahl and the Night Visitors and other works, left no commercial recordings. All we have is a shoebox full of muddy practice sessions and live performance recordings on barely playable cassette tapes, along with a few radio broadcast acetates... Throughout these pieces, her voice has a unique inner warmth and a beautifully clear tone, the closest I know to the pure clarity of bells."

Vladimir Ivkovic主催の〈Offen Music〉からも編集盤が組まれていたウクライナの女性建築家で詩人、音楽家のIhor Tsymbrovskyが、ポーランドの〈Koka Records〉から96年に人知れず発表し、今や入手困難を極める希少カセット作品『Come, Angel』が〈Kontakt Audio〉と〈Infinite Fog Productions〉の共同により、2022年度、史上初の単独再発。ネオ・クラシカルから前衛音楽、ドローン、ジャズまでもが、東欧的なあちら側のフォークロアと共に溶け合う、未知なる絶景の如し大傑作盤！

Vladimir Ivkovic主催の〈Offen Music〉からも編集盤が組まれていたウクライナの女性建築家で詩人、音楽家のIhor Tsymbrovskyが、ポーランドの〈Koka Records〉から96年に人知れず発表し、今や入手困難を極める希少カセット作品『Come, Angel』が〈Kontakt Audio〉と〈Infinite Fog Productions〉の共同により、2022年度、史上初の単独再発。ネオ・クラシカルから前衛音楽、ドローン、ジャズまでもが、東欧的なあちら側のフォークロアと共に溶け合う、未知なる絶景の如し大傑作盤！

CD version limited to 270 copies, six panel digipack** Recording of the premiere performance of Nitsch’s latest large scale symphony for full orchestra, brass ensemble and choir, in five movements. Composed for the 155th Action of the Orgien-Mysterien-Theater, and performed at the nitsch museum, Mistelbach, September 9th, 2018. Directed by Andrea Cusumano. "The 155th action in Herman Nitsch's Das Orgien Mysterien Theater took place on September 1, 2018. As the first action to be staged in the Nitsch Museum in Mistelbach, Vienna, it coincided with the occasion of his 80th birthday. A series of processions both viscerally affecting and poignant in their restraint took place in the museum to a very crowded audience. This action was accompanied by a new symphony composed by Nitsch for large orchestra, brass band, and choir. Sudden and explosive motifs for the brass band punctuate still, though unnerving, drone-like passages that modulate over the course of the two-hour performance. Throughout, the movement of the participants in the action and the audience is accentuated by the incongruous percussive ring of the whistle that calls attention and directs the activity, heightening the intensity of the entire work.“ (Patrick Quick)

Having worked with the likes of D.K., J.Tripp, Wojciech Rusin, FUMU, U, Best Available Technology, Grim Lusk, Mars89 and many more to create two sell-out cassettes as 'O. G. Jigg & Friends', the experimental, neo-medieval O. G. Jigg offer their first solo outing. Previously exploring early music and more traditional folk arrangements, Jigg has now composed a contemporary suite, albeit one that seems to have slipped back into a more recent past. Drawing clear influence from post-war classical and the effect it had on soundtrack composition during the 60's and 70's, O. G. Jigg has composed what sounds like the lost OST for a 1970's BBC earth mysteries drama that would have been aired just before children went to bed — early enough to tempt a few, who would have no doubt had to recover from nightmares of spirits rising from stone-circles across rural England. A quote from Malvern Brume encapsulates this feeling nicely; "Makes me think of what I wish the music for 'Children of the Stones' had actually been like. It's bloody wicked!" The music is written for a small orchestral ensemble, often focusing on the woodwind section, using the balance between dissonant and consonant to create an uneasy undertone — even in the sweetest melodic sections. There are definitely more thematic structures in the music than heard on previous releases — sometimes even through the tropes of the aforementioned 60's & 70's era of television and cinema — but it's never overdone. The album helps to ease the listener's mind out of the city and into the landscapes of rolling hills and overgrown and tumbled-down chapels, probing the topographical resonance of stone circles and other prehistoric monuments of the British countryside. This record marks the first release on Will Yates' new 'Earth Memory Recordings' label. A project focusing on psychogeographical recordings and artists exploring global folklore through the sonic medium. This first album is being released in partnership with Tokyo-based label Diskotopia, long-time supporters of Will's own music as 'Memotone'. The record has been beautifully mastered by Seance Centre boss, Brandon Hocura.

CUGATE CLASSICS proudly presents: “Works For Choir” by ARVO PÄRT, one of the most important and influential composers of our time. Remastered by HELMUT ERLER at D&M Berlin and available as 180gr LP, CD and DL.ARVO PÄRT (born 1935 in Paide, Estonia) doesn’t need to be introduced to anyone who has the slightest interest in classical music, and his audience reaches far beyond the regular attendants of symphony halls. After first serialistic compositions, “Credo” (1968) was a turning point in PÄRT’s life and work, being the first piece carrying a religious title and expressing a creative crisis that PÄRT answered by lesser compositions and studying medieval and Renaissance music in search for a new musical language. In 1976 PÄRT returned with “Für Alina” and introduced his new (and self-developed) style that should become his trademark sound which made him the famous and honoured composer he is now: the so-called tintinnabuli. In 1984, after the Estonian composer and his family emigrated from the USSR and settled in Germany, the album “Tabula rasa” opened the next important chapter in PÄRT’s career: the ever continuing close relation to Manfred EICHER and his ECM label where many of the composer’s works have been released since. “Works For Choir” presents several compositions for choir from the period from 1989 to 1991, recorded in Vilnius with the aweard winning Vilnius Municipal Choir Jauna Muzika under the artistic direction of Vaclovas Augustinas. For this reissue, all tracks have been remastered at D&M Berlin for best possible sound.

Ajdin Asllan was born in Leskovik near the present-day southern border of Albania on March 12, 1895. At the age of 30, on July 12, 1925, he married a girl named Emverije, who was one month shy of her 16th birthday, in her native town Korçë, about 80 miles north. He arrived in New York by himself less than a year later on September 20, 1926, and when he filed his Declaration of Intent to become an American citizen in 1928 as a resident of Detroit, he gave his occupation as "musician." Emverije joined him in New York City on July 27, 1931. Asllan appears to have made his first recordings in November 1931 as a clarinetist on four songs issued as 12” discs by Columbia sung in Albanian by K. Duro N. Gerati. In January 1932 he recorded again, this time singing and playing oud on three Columbia 12”s along with several Albanian singers and the violinist Nicola Doneff (born March 21, 1891 Dichin, Bulgaria; died July 19, 1961 New York). In 30s Asllan launched an independent label called Mi-Re (roughly “With New” in Albanian) Rekord primarily to release his own recordings, but it stalled out after about 6 releases. In October 1941 he accompanied a Greek singer and songwriter named G.K. Xenopoulos as an oudist along with the beloved Greek clarinetist Kostas Gadinis and accordionist John Gianaros for the Orthophonic subsidiary of Victor Records run by Tetos Demetriades. The trio of Gadinis, Asllan, and Gianaros cut another four sides for Orthophonic May 1, 1942. Shortly thereafter, Asllan relaunched his label as Me Re with the help of Doneff and then quickly renamed it, more generically, Balkan. Gianaros came in as a business partner, and Balkan released scores of records, some of them seemingly selling thousands of copies in the mid-40s, but Gianaros split angrily with Asllan after just a few years over money problems. By 1947, Doneff had trademarked the Kaliphon label, which drew from much of the same roster of New York musicians of the Greek- and Turkish-speaking performers as Balkan and apparently collaborated in distribution, marketing, and manufacturing into the 1950s, but some business distinction had been drawn. A third label, Metropolitan, was launched and became at catchall for further Greek, Turkish, Armenian, and Ladino material by New York players, but it's not clear who was in charge or how things were divided up. Maybe Metropolitan was started by Asllan as a separate business to dodge the taxman or old creditors? We don’t know. All three labels shared a standard black-on-red color scheme that, it would seem reasonable to guess, was based on the Albanian flag and Asslan’s original, core purpose as an artist and impresario. Adjin and Emverije lived during the 1930s into the 50s first at 143 Norfolk St. and then at 42 Rivington St. (where Asllan opened a record shop), in Manhattan's Lower East Side, where Eastern European Jewish immigrants surrounded the small Albanian community and Turkish-speaking Sephardic Jews, and abutting Little Italy and a strip of Greek coffee houses on Mulberry Street. He worked within a network of primarily Turkish- and Greek-speaking performers in New York and released recordings prolifically made both locally and overseas through the 40s and 50s. He corresponded with his brother Selim (who sings on track 1, side A, later worked on the radio in Tirana and co-founded the National Ensemble of Folk Songs and Dances) back home, who was able to secure masters of Albanian performers recorded in Istanbul and Athens along with performances by Turkish- and Greek-speaking stars including Rosa Eskenazi and Udi Hrant (both of whom subsequently made extended visits to the U.S.) Greeks and Armenians had, even at the low ebb of immigration during the 1940s-50s, substantial immigrant populations in New York and around the country - Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and many other cities. Those markets kept the Balkan label afloat for nearly 20 years. But Asllan also issued about 40 discs for the Albanian-language market ca. 1945-50 (at which point he retained a 500-series numbering scheme for them, picking up where he’d left off with his Me Ri label a decade earlier), including both folk music of southern Albania and choral music, much of the latter anti-Fascist Communist songs. In addition, three discs were issued as part of Balkan’s Greek series of uncredited musicians from Pogoni and Konitsa, towns about 30 miles south as the crow flies from where Asllan was born. The total Albanian-speaking population in the U.S. at the time was less than 10,000, and many couldn’t afford record players. But despite the small market for Albanian-language songs, he made sure to release discs for his countrymen. It was a time of immense political and social turbulence in both Albania and Greece, and the sense of duty to music is palpable in his work. Balkan’s business model was haphazard. Its numbering system, if one can call it that, indicates a tendency to start a series, then add to it - or not - sporadically, driven largely the question, “can we sell 500 of these? (And if so, can we sell 1000?)” The last Balkan 78s were issued around 1959; a few LP releases appeared around 1960, more than 20 years after Asllan released his first discs. We know he visited his native home and family in 1951, 25 years after having become American. He died in New York in October 1976. He had no children, save the records. ========= We have so far been able to trace a biographical narrative of only one of the other immigrant performer among those who play on this collection, Chaban Arif, who apparently sings on track 9. He was born May 22, 1899 in Berat, Albania, attended school through the second grade, and arrived alone at Ellis Island on November 2, 1920 at the age of 19 under the name Aril Shaban. His intention upon arrival was to meet up with a cousin, Mahomet Hajrules (who, in turn, had arrived only six months earlier under the name Mehemet Airula) in Southbridge, Massachusetts. However, there was a family of four from Shaban’s hometown on the same steamship who were headed to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (via a stop first at the south Philadelphia home of a relative), so Shaban wound up in Pittsburgh. He filed his first papers to become a U.S. citizen in Canton, Ohio in 1925, but he had returned to Albania in June of 1928, where he married an 18 year old woman named Nadire, and by 1931 had returned to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, where he was working at the Duquesne, Pennsylvania Carnegie steel mill. (When his cousin Mehmet Hajrulla filed his Declaration of Intent to naturalize as a U.S. citizen in 1937, he was a widower living on Braddock Ave. in Pittsburgh and working as a painter.) The 1940 census found Shaban Arif relocated to 55 Clinton St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, about seven blocks from Adjin Asllan’s place on Rivington. Arif told the census enumerator that he worked 60 hours a week, 52 weeks a year for $916 a year (about $17,000 a year in today’s money) at the counter of of a restaurant. The man he listed on his WWII draft registration card as his closest contact was named Kardi Braim, who gave his country of origin either as Albania and Macedonia on different documents, had himself worked for a brick manufacturer in Erie County, Pennsylvania in addition to a string of other laboring jobs and worked at the time at Stewart’s Restaurant. It would seem reasonable to guess that both Shaban Arif and Kardi Braim were in Adjin Asllan’s limited social circle of Albanians in the neighborhood in the early 1940s when he recorded on this song. The $1 that the disc cost could have represented three and a half hours of labor at the restaurant. We know nothing else of Shaban Arif’s life except that he died in New York City in September, 1971. (Kardi Braim died in 1978.)

80 page book with over 50 photos and a 21 track CD. Printed in Belgium by die Keure. Designed by John Hubbard. "Zabelle Panosian sang one of the most amazing notes I've ever heard - so much humanity, sorrow, promise, infinite longing. When I write my novel the main character will be Zabelle's note." -David Harrington, Kronos Quartet "Please listen to the Armenian singer, Zabelle Panosian. [Her ‘Groung'] is a secret song that steals away the breath of those who are fortunate enough to hear it." -Nick Cave "A carefully crafted and detailed, yet succinct biography. Many of us were introduced to Armenian-American singer Zabelle Panosian’s soul-jolting rendition of “Groung” via the 2011 release of To What Strange Place, but here, in Zabelle Panosian: I Am Your Servant, for the first time, we travel with Panosian from her birthplace in Bardizag to her home in New York. We are there in the studio with her at Columbia Records for her historic recordings in lower Manhattan, and we stand with her in the radio studios of WEAF. We become readers of reviews of Panosian’s concerts both celebrated and scathing. We accompany her on performances, minuscule and grand from Waterford to Providence and San Francisco to Fresno, eventually recrossing the Atlantic with her to sing in France, Italy, and Egypt. More than a singer or performer, we learn of Zabelle, the estranged sister, the loving aunt, and the mother who passes the baton to her daughter, Adrina Otero, completing what will be the starting point for future historians or ethnomusicologists wishing to explore Zabelle Panosian and her legacy.” -Richard Breaux, Associate Professor of Race, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Among the most significant Armenian singers in the early twentieth century, Zabelle Panosian made a small group of recordings in New York City in 1917-’18. Unaccountably, she was then largely neglected as an artist for more than half a century. This volume by three dedicated researchers is the first effort to reconstruct the life and work of a woman who had an exceptional and cultivated voice — who toured the world as a performer and made a significant contribution to the cultural lives of the Armenian diaspora, the elevation of Armenian art song, and the relief of survivors of the Armenian genocide. Panosian’s music is derived from a syncretic experience of the Western Armenian village near the sea of Marmara where she was born and a passion for the coloratura sopranos she encountered in Boston. As an immigrant carrying the traumas of dislocation and the loss of her home, she transformed her grief into action, dedicated her life to an expression of the greatest art she could imagine, both from her former life and her new life in America, and she created a path in her wake for her daughter to become a renowned dancer. Tracing her story from the Ottoman Empire to New England, from the concert halls of Italy, Egypt, and France to California, Florida, and South America through two World Wars, the story of Zabelle Panosian is that of a serious talent recognized and celebrated, dismissed and forgotten, year by year, waiting only to be known and loved again.

Meditations highly recommended. This is J.S. Bach: Das Wohltemperierte Clavie Vol.1 by the Romanian pianist Andrei Vieru. His father was a composer, and he himself seems to be a very intellectual person, not only playing the piano but also painting and writing. His playing is not instinctive and hedonistic as a pianist, but with intellectual restraint and a hint of a seeker of truth. Rather than rolling along with the flow of the music, he lets the sounds become music through the workings of his mind, and as you drift through the world of sound that emerges, it seems to penetrate your inner self before you know it, creating an addictive allure. Also, it is not a classical expression, which is peculiar to classical music, but has a sense of contemporaneity, which I think is also very meaningful. This is a must-listen for people who are not classical music lovers.

Having assembled 99 collaborators for their previous album The Consuming Flame, on their new album Baltimore-based electronic duo Matmos focus upon just one person: Polish polymath Bogusław Schaeffer. Celebrated in his native land but not widely known beyond, Schaeffer innovated for decades across the boundaries of classical composition, electronic experimentation, and radical theater in playfully form-breaking ways. At the suggestion of Michal Mendyk of the Instytutu Adama Mickiewicza in Warsaw, Matmos were given access to the entire catalogue of Schaeffer’s recorded works to use as they saw fit. Neither performances nor remixes, the resulting encounters between past and present take tissue samples of DNA from past compositions and mutate them into entirely new organisms that throb with an alien vitality. What emerges across this suite of eight new songs is a composite portrait of the utopian 1960s Polish avant-garde and the contemporary dystopian cultural moment regarding each other across a distance. Like the anagrams of the letters of Bogusław Schaeffer’s name that were re-assembled to create some of the song titles, the album itself is a musical re-assemblage of component parts into possible but unforeseen new shapes. Adding harp from Irish harpist Úna Monaghan, erhu, viola and violin from Turkish multi-instrumentalist Ulas Kurugullu, and electronic processes from Baltimore instrument builder Will Schorre and Horse Lords wunderkind Max Eilbacher, the resulting arrangements constantly toy with scale as they move from the close-mic-ing of ASMR and the intimacy of chamber music to the immensity of processed drones and oceanic field-recordings that close the album. Offering a “life review” of production styles, Regards / Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer builds temporary shelters out of the panoramic wreckage of modernist composition, sixties tape music, seventies dub, eighties industrial music, nineties postrock and dark ambient, 2000s era glitch fetishism, and contemporary post-everything collage sensibilities. The contrary poles of humor and morbidity for which Matmos are known show up on the album’s distinct sides. Balancing structure and texture, side one of the LP is spiked with plunderphonic surprise edits and unexpectedly pop pleasures, while side two opens out into more extended, sprawling and ominous forms. On the opening track “Resemblage / Parasamblaż” the choral harmonies and analogue electronics of Schaeffer’s work jostle against distinctly contemporary sub-bass drops and spiky high-end fizzes. But just as often historical dividing lines seem to blur, soften or melt, as when “If All Things Were Turned to Smoke / Gdyby wszystko stało się dymem” cuts and refolds fragments of harp and aquatic musique concrète from Schaeffer’s 1970 composition “Heraklitiana” into a faintly swinging polychronic elegy. Throughout, nostalgia is repudiated in favor of creative re-use. To facilitate the transcultural exchange that is the album’s essential premise, all song titles and liner-notes are provided in both English and Polish. The album was mastered by Rashad Becker and features illustration and design by Robert Beatty.

When Alexander the Great came in 333 B.C. to the Phrygian city of Gordium (located in what is today central Turkey), he was confronted by a puzzle no one could solve. Alexander apparently solved the puzzle, but all that survived from the story is a parable, a legend of the Gordian Knot. In the summer of 2004, many issues I was facing seemed mysterious and unsolvable. This may be why the legend of the Gordian Knot came to my mind when deciding on the title of the piece. The Plains at Gordium was composed from June to August 2004 and is dedicated to Charlotta Kotik. The incentive to compose the piece came from a percussion group in Brno, Czech Republic, who asked me for a piece of music. Not being a commission-disciplined composer, I wrote a piece for six percussionists, while the Czech group, DAMA-DAMA had only four members and could not perform it. The size of the piece also defies the scale of a standard percussion piece, 1,290 measures over a 108-page score. The Plains at Gordium belongs to a group of compositions that I started in 1971. All of the music is based on a steady pulse. Although the various pieces, for example There is Singularly Nothing, John Mary, If I Told Him, Many Many Women, and many more, are independent compositions, parts of them can be mixed in a collage-like performance. The common, steady pulse is what can unify all the different parts, performed simultaneously, into a coherent whole. In a way, all these compositions, written from the 1970s to early ‘80s, can be regarded as one endless continuous piece with changing instrumentation. In 1977, I began composing a percussion piece entitled Drums, adding pages and pages to it. It cannot really be said that the piece was finished in 1981, I just stopped adding pages to the score. Drums envisions any number of players (minimum of 2), each with a differently tuned set of four drums, all locked into a steady pulse. It can be performed simultaneously with parts of other compositions from this period, instrumental and vocal (the vocal parts use texts by Gertrude Stein and later by R. Buckminster Fuller). The Plains at Gordium follows the same basic idea, without the intention of making collage-like additions or performing parts of it with other compositions (although there were performances with some vocal segments from There is Singularly Nothing). Unlike the early pieces, it sometimes takes off, doubling in tempo. Also, bells have been added here, in addition to the set of six differently tuned drums for each player. - Petr Kotik, March 2021

Chris Korda is an internationally renowned multimedia artist, whose work spans thirty years and includes electronic music, digital and video art, performance and conceptual art, and culture jamming. Chris pioneered the use of complex polymeter in electronic dance music, and invented a unique MIDI sequencer in order to explore polymeter composition techniques. Chris composes and performs music in a variety of genres, and has released many albums on labels such as Perlon, Mental Groove, and Gigolo Records. Chris also worked as a computer programmer for thirty-five years. Her new album "Passion For Numbers" is one of the very few album in the world entirely composed in complex polymeter, meaning that each pieces of music uses several prime meters simultaneously. A unique way to compose music with a new generation of musical algorithmic, inside which Korda injects the DNA of neo classical, ambient and jazz music. This refreshing album will please you whether you are into complex musical composition, experimental music or just seeking for a beautiful, emotional and accessible musical moment. This is a "In your hearts not the charts" album, as Irdial Discs once said. Pleases read an extract of Chris Korda's letter about Passion For Numbers, included as insert in its entirety in this vinyl release: This is an album of piano music, but I wrote it without a piano. Not having a piano turned out to be constructive, because I had to rely on my brain instead of my fingers, and particularly on my imagination and inner hearing. The album belongs to a category called phase music, and it’s also algorithmic, or more precisely rules-based generative music. I don’t write music in the usual sense of the word “write.” I build kinetic sculptures, and the sculptures generate my music. My sculptures are virtual, meaning they’re invisible machines that exist only as data within my home-grown software. My process is related to the work of a relatively obscure early 20th century artist named Thomas Wilfred. Like me, Wilfred was an engineer-artist, and built machines that generated art from phase shift. My music is in complex polymeter, meaning it’s not just in odd time, but in multiple odd time signatures, and not one odd time signature after another sequentially, but all of them running concurrently. Most music isn’t constructed this way, which is why I needed to develop custom software in order to compose my music. My software is called The Polymeter MIDI Sequencer, and you can easily find it on the Internet. I also use music set theory, change-ringing and gray code, explanations of which can be found in Wikipedia. Chris Korda (extract from "Passion By Numbers" liner notes)

Arthur's epic minimalist orchestral composition conducted by the late Julius Eastman 

Stunningly beautiful, mercurial and moving. 

The transcendental, ephemeral sound scape originally intended for theatrical performance. First release in 1983 on Chatham Square.

This is a masterpiece among the many reissued CDs, reputed to have the best realism in sound quality.

The second part in a collection of stunning Persian-tuned piano pieces, cut from Iranian national radio broadcasts made for the Golha programmes between 1956 & 1965. Morteza Mahjubi (1900-1965) was a Iranian pianist & composer who developed a unique tuning system for the piano which enabled the instrument to be played in all the different modes and dastgahs of traditional Persian art music. Known as Piano-ye Sonnati, this technique allowed Mahjubi to express the unique ornamental and monophonic nature of Persian classical music on this western instrument - mimicking the tar, setar & santur and extracting sounds from the piano which are still unprecedented to this day. An active performer and composer from a young age, Mahjubi made his most notable mark as key contributor and soloist for the Golha (Flowers of Persian Song and Poetry) radio programmes. These seminal broadcasts platformed an encyclopaedic wealth of traditional Persian classical music and poetry on Iranian national radio between 1956 until the revolution in 1979. Presented here is a collection of Morteza Mahjubi's stunningly virtuosic improvised pieces broadcast on Golha between the programme's inception until Mahjubi's death in 1965 - mostly solo, though at times peppered with tombak, violin & some segments of poetry & song. The vast collection of Golha radio programmes was put together thanks to the incredible work of Jane Lewisohn & the Golha Project as part of the British Library's Endangered Archives programme, comprising 1,578 radio programs consisting of approximately 847 hours of broadcasts.

Musician and composer Sahba Sizdahkhani serves as a unique crossroad of East meets West. Influenced heavily by both 1960’s spiritual free-jazz and Persian Classical Music, he channels the fire-energy and longing for connectivity these two stormy histories represent. At age 12, his self-proclaimed “aha moment” occurred while listening to The John Coltrane Quartet for the very first time. He was hooked and immediately began studies on jazz drum set and classical snare drum. As the years passed, however, his ferocious love of jazz and improvisation would open pathways and pointers to his native roots of Persian Classical Music, and eventually, he would begin formal studies on the Iranian santur with master santur player Faraz Minooei. Sahba has completed two separate Bachelor of Arts degrees: one at Berklee College of Music, in Jazz performance, and the other at The University of Maryland, in Art History & Archeology. He worked in Paris for several years in textile design but ultimately moved back to New York city to further pursue jazz drumming. He has composed film scores for Chelsea Winstanley (JoJo Rabbit), Whalerock Industries, maverick avant filmmaker Paul Clipson, as well as a live score performance for the Cinema 16 series in the legendary tunnel underneath the Manhattan Bridge. Additionally, Sahba has recently recorded with Michael Morley(Dead C) and currently has running musical collaborations with Derek Monypeny, Rob Magill, and Zachary James Watkins + Ross Peacock. He has shared live bills with a vastly diverse class of artists including Laraaji, C spencer Yeh, Susan Alcorn, Henry Kaiser, Rova Saxophone Quartet, Sunwatchers, Wizard Apprentice, Talibam!, Plankton Wat, Peter Brötzmann, and Don Dietrich (Barbetomagus). He has performed at The White House, Park Avenue Armory, Kennedy Center for the Arts, Basilica Hudson’s 24 Hour Drone Festival, WFMU live performance, “Fire Over Heaven” at Outpost Artist Resources, The Embassy of France, VOA studios, and Garden of Memory Festival at The Chapel of the Chimes. Sahba’s hazy, atmospheric solo performances with 104-string santour and drums have been described as “a dispatch from antiquity.” And WIRE magazine recently stated “Sahba Sizdahkhani starts playing [his] instrument as if he's pleading for his life. His playing is breathtaking. . .” This particular work, “GANJ,” which translates to “treasure” in Farsi, documents the magical first meeting between a musician and a new instrument. It is the first ever raw, unrefined recording of Sahba on solo santur as opposed to drum set. It was recorded in solitude during the Winter Solstice of 2019 without any prior training or study whatsoever on the mystical 102-stringed trapezoid dulcimer. The consequent emphasis due to lack of any technical skill, was pure sonics, overtones, resonances, and an homage to minimalist composers such as Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and early Miles Davis. Days after completing this work, Sahba rushed to seek out formal studies of the Persian Classical Radif with his current teacher, Faraz Minooei.

Tetsuo Furudate has been working on projects including electronic music, films, videos creating time passages between old and new pieces, re-reading the past through re-appropriations. All his recent pieces can be watched or just listened to. it is also a cultural mix embracing all eastern and western cultures (from JS Bach to Merzbow). Here he recreates a borderless and timeless universe, where voices and pianos reach emotional moments of great depth. The whole is driven by Tetsuo who, by a continuous mixing, conceives these different pieces as an editor would a film made of borrowings images, archives material and unpublished fragments. The Nocturne, The Nightmare and a Fruit features Keiko Higuchi and Olga Magieres. Tetsuo Furudate was first the collaborator and friend of Zbigniew Karkowski in Japan, together they created some of the most radical but complex pieces under the name of World as Will (after Arthur Schopenhauer's book), some of which were rewritten for the Viennese Zeitkratzer Ensemble. Keiko Higuchi is above all a pianist and performer, linked to jazz and improvisation. She was revealed by Love Hotel (2008), her concerts are like real performances, she is considered as one of the most singular and impressive performing artists of her generation. Olga Magieres, Russian pianist living in Denmark, specializes in improvised music and the syntactic relationship of languages. She has already collaborated with Tetsuo in 2010 with Introduction Of Blue Of Noon, her first opus Piano and Poetry had been praised.

The imagery of musical forms emptied of earthly meaning, of solitude, and of a connection to the divine were irresistible to Federico Mompou. A desire to be alone had shaped Mompou’s early musical direction: as natural shyness ended his ambitions to be piano virtuoso, after studies at the Paris Conservatoire he turned to composition instead. His approach remained introspective – far removed from the overt and public expressions of the avant-garde, both before and after the Second World War – and pursued a line inwards, towards Catalan traditional music, idiosyncratic technique, and a spiritually clarified instinctivism inspired particularly by Erik Satie. The four books of pieces are considered by some to be Mompou’s masterpiece. Música callada creates a sort of musical negative space, in which presence (of external references) creates lightness, and absence (of formal complexity, of counterpoint, of thematic or harmonic development) creates weight and substance.

Metaphors such as these also lie behind James Rushford’s See the Welter, composed as a companion piece to Música callada in 2016. In See the Welter, Rushford introduces a concept of ‘musical shadows’. The aim is not a recognisable transcription or recomposition of Mompou’s twenty-eight pieces, but a sort of Proustian ‘sieving’, in which memories and sensations – such as finger pressures, resonances and harmonic rhythm – are projected across a new surface, in new forms, and as new memories. Just as a shadow both intensifies and diffuses the form of the object by which it is cast, so Rushford’s piece transforms and scatters the details of Mompou’s collection while intensifying its essence. Compositionally, the piece is the inverse of Mompou’s: a single block in place of a multitude of fleeting impressions; its long shadow. Expressively, however, See the Welter explores the same territory, if seen through the other side of the glass: resonances and absences, silences within sounds, luminosity and intensity, bodies within spaces.