MUSIC

Mary Jane Leach is a composer focused on the physicality of sound, its acoustic properties and how they interact with space. She has played an instrumental role in NYC's pioneering Downtown scene alongside Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner, and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation and reappraisal of Julius Eastman's work since his death in 1990, compiling Unjust Malaise (2005) and editing the book Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music (2015). Woodwind Multiples features four pieces for multiples of the same instrument: four bass flutes, nine oboes, nine clarinets, and seven bassoons. Each piece works closely with the unique sound of each instrument, combining pitches that create other, sometimes unexpected, tones, primarily combination and interference tones, as well as rhythmic patterns. What you hear is what happens naturally -- there is no processing or manipulation. 8B4 (1985/2022), played by Manuel Zurria, is for four bass flutes. It is a revision of 8x4, which was written in 1985 for the DownTown Ensemble and was only performed once, due to its unusual instrumentation: alto flute, English horn (originally bass oboe), clarinet, and voice. Xantippe's Rebuke (1993) was written for Libby Van Cleve, for eight taped oboes and one live, solo oboe. The eight taped parts are equal and dependent, while the solo part is meant to be a solo with the tape as accompaniment. The piece works with the unique sound of the oboe, starting with unison pitches that create the richest sound, building the piece from there. Pitches and rhythmic patterns that occur naturally are notated and then played later, which in turn create other pitches and rhythmic patterns. Charybdis (2020), played by Sam Dunscombe, is for solo clarinet and eight taped clarinets. It combines a somewhat obscured reference to Weep You No More, a John Dowland piece, which combines with the sound phenomena created from the melody and supporting chords of the Dowland. Feu de Joie (1992) was written for bassoonist Shannon Peet and is an homage to the bassoon and its wonderful sound. It is for seven parts -- six taped and one "live." The taped bassoons combine to create a bed of sound that exploits the unique qualities of the bassoon, creating combination and interference tones, starting off with unison pitches, creating a rich sound that builds from there. Most of the subsequent pitches and phrases occur naturally, and are then notated later on in the piece, which in turn creates other notes and phrases. Engineered by Manuel Zurria, Bryce Goggin, and Sam Dunscombe, mastered by Rashad Becker.

A sense of optimism infuses Penguin Cafe’s fifth studio album Rain Before Seven… not the braggadocious, overconfident kind, but more a blithe, self-effacing optimism in keeping with the national character. Even when all signs point to the contrary, it operates within the certainty that things are going to be alright. Probably.

The title comes from an old weather proverb with the rhyming prognostication — fine before eleven — hinting at a happy ending, irrespective of the science: “I found it in a book and I'd never heard it before,” says Arthur Jeffes, leader of Penguin Cafe. “It has faintly optimistic overtones and I quite like it. It's fallen out of usage recently but it does describe English weather patterns coming in off the Atlantic.”

From the widescreen reverie of opener ‘Welcome to London’ with its cheeky nod to Morricone to ‘Goldfinch Yodel’, the self-described “Maypole banger” at the denouement, there’s a welcome sense of sanguinity, always with an undercurrent of exotic rhythmic exuberance. Playfulness pervades, with a titular nod to A Matter of Life… from 2011, the last album title that concluded with an ellipsis. That Penguin Cafe debut is the bridge between the legendary Penguin Cafe Orchestra, led by Arthur’s father Simon Jeffes, and the much-loved descendent, led by Arthur.

“Stylistically it's really satisfying to get back to playful rhythms and instruments,” says the younger Jeffes, who kept the group’s debut from 12 years ago in mind when writing the new album. “Certainly when starting out, I became aware that we’d stopped using quite a few of the textures that had been there at the beginning—and it was certainly there in my dad's earlier stuff. So there's a lot of balafon and textures from completely different parts of the world, musically and geographically: ukuleles, cuatros and melodicas that you can hear.”

It’ll become clear when listening to Rain Before Seven… that the themes explored transcend mere weather chat. In a sense, it’s a sonic diary scribbled from below the parapet, waiting for the danger to blow over. Jeffes, like many of us, found himself in lockdown in 2020. COVID-19’s first European destination was Italy, where he and his family were staying at the time in a converted convent in Tuscany, bought some twelve years ago with his mother, the celebrated stone sculptor Emily Young. There might be worse places to be stranded during quarantine than a hilly enclave surrounded by olive trees, though the family were faced with the same sobering fears and uncertainties that much of the world was forced to contend with.

And so titles often refer to personal experience during this period. ‘Galahad’ is a triumphant celebration of Arthur’s beloved dog who died, aged 16, written in an irrepressible 15/8 time signature, and ‘Lamborghini 754’ is named after the 40-year-old tractor he bought for his mother, which he could see from the studio as she traversed the olive grove. Jeffes is the first to admit that he was fortunate to have space to manoeuvre, a luxury that was denied to millions living in cities and towns. Moreover, the plight of city dwellers seemed to eerily coalesce with a vision Arthur’s dad had that would inspire the Penguin Cafe Orchestra into life in the first place.

The story goes like so: back in 1972, Simon Jeffes ate some dodgy fish whilst holidaying in the South of France, which caused him to hallucinate: “As I lay in bed I had a strange recurring vision,” he said later. “There, before me, was a concrete building like a hotel or council block. I could see into the rooms, each of which was continually scanned by an electronic eye. In the rooms were people, everyone of them preoccupied…” Jeffes could make out “electronic equipment. But all was silence. Like everyone in his place had been neutralised, made grey and anonymous. The scene was, for me, one of ordered desolation.” The antidote to this premonition of an uncannily familiar future was the freewheeling Penguin Cafe “where your unconscious can just be”.

Simon Jeffes took “a slightly eccentric antiquarian approach” to assembling his music, according to Arthur, repurposing sounds that were unapologetically easy on the ear; a reaction, perhaps, to the earnestness of the post-war serialists, which happened to coincide with the rise of minimalism. “But he loved Boulez,” adds Arthur, “and John Cage too. I think my dad felt that there was a lot of sub-Cage that didn't need to be there.” Classical music dovetailing with pop and East African rhythms might not sound all that remarkable in the internet age (and in advertising, which PCO were never averse to), though in the 1970s they found a home on Brian Eno’s Obscure label, such was the arcane nature of what they were doing. The Penguin Cafe Orchestra wouldn’t remain recherché for long.

“I think his novel approach was to take interesting, weird ideas and do strange things with them,” says Arthur, “but always while keeping an eye on making sure it sounded beautiful and emotionally engaging.” That ethos has been carried into Penguin Cafe. “It’s a commitment that we made when I picked it up again, because we play my dad's music but we also perform new music in the same sound world. That means I’m honour bound to keep an eye on the original thread and make sure we don't start heading off into thrash metal territory.”

Nevertheless, encouraged by co-producer Robert Raths, the rhythmic elements of Rain Before Seven… have never been more to the fore and, at times, even hint at the electronic. ‘Find Your Feet’, for instance, is underpinned with more than just a pulse. Mixed by Tom Chichester-Clark, it brings to the musical melange what Arthur describes as a “near electronic feel”. He adds, excitedly: “There are elements of fun here which we haven't really done with the last three records.” Another ebullient highlight is ‘In Re Budd’, dedicated to the late ambient godfather Harold Budd, who Arthur discovered had died on the day he’d been writing the celebratory ear worm with a deceptively tricky syncopation. Played on an upright piano with some “prepared” felt to accentuate the bounce, Jeffes feels a track with an Afro Cuban Cafe vibe would appeal to Budd’s contrariness.

And then there’s the aforementioned ‘Welcome to London’, which got its name as the world started to open up and people were finally allowed to fly again. Jeffes, who touched down on home soil for the first time in a while, was struck by its cinematic John Barry-esque qualities as he took a taxi into West London from Heathrow with the mise-en-scène of the opulent twilight. The optimism is there, and maybe a little caustic irony too. “Robert [Raths] added a layer of nuance which I think is interesting, because many Londoners are not from London originally. So you pitch up to London as an outsider, and you haven't really found your tribe yet, you get mugged… and then ‘Welcome to London’ takes on a more sarcastic resonance.” 

Delivering the long overdue follow up to their brilliant 2015 outing, Arco, the duo of Giovanni Di Domenico and Jim O’Rourke return to Die Schachtel with Immanent in Nervous Activity. Understated and elegant – enlisting the contributions of Eiko Ishibashi and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto – across the album’s two sides Di Domenico and O’Rourke slow time, deftly weaving tension into restrained sheets of tonality, texture, and harmonic dissonance, producing a startlingly beautiful intervention with the temperaments of experimental sound practice that shifts the borders of electroacoustic music and high minimalism. Issued on vinyl in a limited deluxe edition of 400 copies, housed in a sleeve with an original artwork by Bruno Stucchi/dinamomilano and complete with a large format poster, Die Schachtel is thrilled to deliver another defining statement by one of the most exciting partnerships in the contemporary landscape of adventurous sound. While less than a decade apart in age and equally diverse in the range of practices they have embraced over the course of their respective careers, Giovanni Di Domenico and Jim O’Rourke each represent the creative high points and ambitions of two very different generations. Initially emerging in Chicago during the late ‘80s and based in Japan since the mid-2000s, for more than three decades O'Rourke has carved a relentless path through the field of experimental sound, creating a body of work - hundreds of albums deep - that refuses any form of stasis and obligation to genre or idiom. He is an artist driven by a singular quest, his endless curiosity driving him to constantly forge into uncharted, visionary realms. Italian born and Brussels based, since his appearance on the scene during late ‘90s and early 2000s, Giovanni Di Domenico has constructed a striking solo practice that bridges numerous forms of improvised and electroacoustic music, all the while rigorously working within various ensembles - Abschattungen, AufHeben, Bonjintan, Cement Shoes, etc. - and intimate collaborations with Akira Sakata, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Chris Corsano, Joe Talia, and others. Di Domenico and O’Rourke have retained a regular and fruitful working partnership over the last decade, collaborating within the groups Bonjintan and Delivery Health, as well as a handful of jointly billed ensembles, but their 2015 LP, Arco - an investigation into waiting and patience as means toward musical form - was the first to encounter them as a duo, and marked an unquestionable high point within this collaborative body of work. Seven years on, their latest outing, Immanent in Nervous Activity, picks up where its predecessor left off; a second chapter informed by the territories of creative exploration that each has traversed since. Immanent in Nervous Activity rides the razor’s edge between bristling electroacoustic wizardry and the constrained structures and harmonic interplay most often encountered within musical minimalism. Begun in a studio not far from O’Rourke’s home in Japan with Di Domenico simultaneously playing piano and Rhodes organ, as the sessions gathered steam - O’Rourke’s deft hand processing and delivering electric interventions - the duo was joined intermittently by Eiko Ishibashi on flute and Tatsuhisa Yamamoto on snare drum, radically expanding the pallet of sound sources at their disposal. In its final form, produced via a rigorous and lengthy process of mixing, Immanent in Nervous Activity operates in two movements. The first rests largely in acoustic realm, with Di Domenico’s fluidly percussive piano and organ lines offering structure and harmony to the delicate textural interventions of Ishibashi, Yamamoto, and O’Rourke. Together they collectively weave a hypnotic tapestry of tonality and texture that inexplicably bridges the challenges of avant-gardism with the pure pleasure of pop. The second movement - constructed by O’Rourke from the material generated by the sessions - shatters form to an elemental and sprawling state, slowly distilling the remnants into an otherworldly, sonorous ooze that fully departs the earthy zones for pure, electroacoustic abstraction. Over the glacial evolution of its side-long duration, tension builds as material sources and the presence of each artist’s hands draw in and out of focus, droning and abrading within a vast expanse of pointillistic nature that renders itself subservient to the sweeping force of the whole, seemingly rethinking the terms and possibilities of electroacoustic music in real time. Joining the conversant vision of two of the most striking voices within the field of contemporary sound, Immanent in Nervous Activity is issued by Die Schachtel in a very limited edition of 400 copies on high quality black vinyl, sleeve printed in Italy in deep black and metallic silver on extra matt white heavy cardboard, including a black/silver limited "zepelin" 30x90cm poster, original artwork + design by Bruno Stucchi/dinamomilano.

Released for the first time in 2009, ‘utp_’ is the third installment of Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto’s V.I.R.U.S.'s series. It was commissioned for the 400th anniversary of Mannheim, Germany. The flowing 10-section multimedia work derives its shape from a rasterized structure of the southwestern city, founded in 1608. The recording documents the work’s debut performed by Ensemble Modern at the National Theatre in Mannheim. The music embraces the electronic, piano-based palettes, an expanded array of avant-garde chamber instrumentation and natural timbres. It combined the digital visual score created by Carsten Nicolai and Simon Mayer, and lighting design by Nigel Edwards.

Jacqueline Nova (Ghent, Belgium, 1935 - Bogotá, Colombia, 1975), a representative figure of Colombian avant-garde music, developed important and radical work within the field of electronic and instrumental music, as well as in interdisciplinary forms. This album, Creación de la Tierra - Ecos palpitantes de Jacqueline Nova: Música electroacústica e instrumental (1964-1974) ("Creation of the Earth - Throbbing Echoes of Jacqueline Nova: Electroacoustic and Instrumental Music (1964-1974)")¸ under the curatorship and research of the Colombian composer Ana María Romano G., recovers Nova's most important electroacoustic works: "Creación de la tierra (Creation of the Earth)" (1972), "Oposición-Fusión (Opposition-Fusion)" (1968) and "Resonancias 1 (Resonances 1)" (1968-69), as well as the music for the film Camilo el cura guerrillero (Camilo the Guerrilla Priest) (1974), composed during her stay at the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales (CLAEM) , of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute, in Buenos Aires, as well as in the Study of Phonology of the University of Buenos Aires. The compilation also includes the instrumental works "Omaggio a Catullus" (1972-1974), "Transiciones (Transitions)" (1964-1965), and "Asuimetrías (Asymmetries)" (1967), in which she explores randomness, timbre possibilities or the encounter between acoustic and electronic media. The interest in experimenting with the human voice, and interdisciplinary work involving visual arts, were some of the aspects that have defined Jacqueline Nova's work. Ana María Romano has written: "Nova lived in an environment hostile to change, to debate and discussion, hostile to her being an autonomous and lesbian woman. She undertook feats that make her a pioneer, even though she did not set out to be taken as one, but only as a result of the commitment, dedication and passion of a creator with her society. Jacqueline Nova died in Bogotá of bone cancer. Her tragic and early death not only cut short a career in full creative force, but also directly affected the development of electroacoustic music in the country. After her death there was a great silence -- close to 15 years -- in musical creation with electronic means. Nova challenged a conservative milieu and survived alone, working in a field thought to be exclusively masculine. But it was a woman who strengthened the use of technology in Colombian music. A risky bet that sadly represented a high cost: Nova was relegated during her lifetime, but her noises managed to shake and question the comfort zones of the Colombian musical establishment." Includes a booklet with extensive information written by Ana María Romano G.; edition of 300.

Starting at a very young age, Katrina Krimsky developed her musical self along a pathway of strong classical, pianistic training. Highlights of her playing on the classical side include her wonderful recording of Samuel Barber’s monumental Sonata for Piano, Op. 26, (Transonic Records 3008, 1975), a composition that is a virtual dictionary of early and mid-Twentieth Century composition techniques, first performed by Vladimir Horowitz in 1949 and 1950. Another example is her equally wonderful recording of A próle do bébé (The Baby’s Family) by Heitor Villa-Lobos, (1750 Arch Records, S-1789, 1982). After studying at the Eastman School of Music, Krimsky toured with the Ars Nova Trio and soon found herself becoming immersed in the European contemporary classical scene and with composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luc Ferrari, and many others. The later 1960s brought collaborative performances and recordings with gradual-process innovators, like Terry Riley and La Monte Young, and beyond that, great jazz musicians like Woody Shaw and others. Her musical world was opening even wider. Still, in all this, her advanced technical and interpretive skills were always evident, and her sense of lyricism in all music, quite profound. 1980 was a turning point for Katrina Krimsky. It was the year in which she burst out from the restrictions of her established career in classical and contemporary traditions into free expression through improvisation. Her individual style began to reflect a wide range of sources: jazz, non-Euro-American music, the new minimalism, and more experimental forms. In 1980, she was invited to do a workshop and give a concert at the legendary Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, NY. (CMS was founded originally in 1971 by Karl Berger and developed in its Woodstock home by Karl with Ingrid Sertso starting in 1973.) Katrina traveled from where she was living in Zürich at the time and found an open environment at CMS in which to create anew. The tracks we hear on 1980 were all recorded live in a concert at the CMS in June of that year. What emerged was an original musical style that has remained since then continuously recognizable as Krimsky.

Gavin Bryars was born in Yorkshire, England in 1943. His first musical forays were as a jazz bassist working in the early 1960s with improvisors Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley. Bryars later worked with composers John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, founded the Portsmouth Sinfonia and collaborated with Brian Eno on his famed Obscure imprint. The Sinking of the Titanic, Bryars' first major composition, was inspired by the tragic event of the British passenger liner's cross-Atlantic maiden voyage. Bryars eloquently reconstructs the passengers' experience – at once forlorn and eerily calming – through assemblages of understated strings and indeterminate elements. A core principle of the piece is that the ship's band continued to play as the vessel went down. One of the most sublime works in the modern classical canon, Titanic remains Bryars' magnum opus. Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, the album's second sidelong track, is based on a tape loop of a London street singer captured in the early 1970s. Featuring Derek Bailey, Michael Nyman and John White, Bryars' composition gradually builds around the cripplingly poignant voice until its emotional force is almost too much to bear. It's no surprise that Jesus' Blood is known as Tom Waits' all-time favorite piece of music. Produced by Brian Eno in 1975 as the inaugural release on Obscure, The Sinking of the Titanic draws the listener in to a majestic world. While these exquisite, hymn-like recordings have not changed in nearly 50 years, their deeply personal nature and the audience's attention to their subtlety have only strengthened over time.

Magic Square, by French composer and pianist Melaine Dalibert, is a fantasy journey. Epigrammatic as it is melancholic, this piano suite is born from and designed for introspection.

Across the album’s eight tracks, the French pianist and composer takes listeners on a “fantasy journey”. Travel is at the heart of Magic Square, but not of the physical kind. Instead, his emotive and intriguing piano pieces inspire inward travel and daydreaming, reflecting the past two years of pandemic and introspection.

Having received his training in Rennes and the conservatories of Paris, Dalibert has a musical background that is naturally entrenched in the technical aesthetic of classical music. However, experimenting with algorithmic ways of writing and other mathematical concepts such as fractals, Dalibert’s music combines emotion and logic for captivating results. His music has been played on BBC Radio, Radio France and NTS Radio, among others.

James Rushford tops over a decade of solo and collaboratibve work with Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Klaus Lang on this fathoms-deep, psychedelic treat, a next-level arrangement of microtonal drone, decaying concréte fuzz and windswept, somber melancholia recorded for the Shelter Press label.

James Rushford impressed earlier this year with his excellent Black Truffle collab with Will Guthrie "Real Real World", and he here heads further into the nether-realm on 'Lakes From The Louvers’, an album that draws its inspiration from the interplay of shadow and light he observed on the surface of the lake and through his window while at an artist residency at La Becque on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Rushford's detailed sound particles and concrète world-building echo the tantalising shimmer of light on water, with amplified movements, synthesized squawks, pings and harp notes rippling across the length of each track. It’s music that accurately represents the landscape but is far from ambient - instead Rushford sculpts soundscapes that demand patient, attentive listening. 

The slow-moving, deliberate processes that Rushford has been honing over the last 15 years betray a sensitive ear, swerving pretentious, exclusionary art for arts sake nonsense. This is electro-acoustic experimentation with a beating heart, designed to trigger thought and self reflection. Just clap yr ears around 'Hyaline Apples' as it melts buzzing clouds of synth into jagged harp plucks and woodblock percussion, or standout track 'The Bise' and its disquieting haze of microtonal bliss. When the album comes to a satisfying close on 'Dents Du Midi', it feels like the finale of a muticolored odyssey, as tangled synth notes fold in on themselves like an MC Escher painting. Futuristic and ancient, 'Lakes From The Louvers' is a breathtaking album that unspools with the patience it no doubt took to create.

There are certain works by minimalist pioneer Terry Riley that are rightly celebrated as classics, paradigm-shifting masterpieces that exerted a wide influence within classical music, but also well beyond its often hermetic borders. Hello, “Baba O’Riley!” But there is so much more in his repertoire deserving the same accolades. On “Terry Riley: Keyboard Studies”, released by Another Timbre, one of the premiere contemporary music labels of our time, three mid-1960s masterpieces are interpreted by the brilliant pianist John Tilbury - known well for his long-time membership in AMM, to say nothing on his authoritative readings of music by Morton Feldman and Cornelius Cardew - sometime in the early 1980s, offering dazzling evidence of his inventive interpretations and Riley’s boundless importance. The British pianist John Tilbury has been intimately connected with AMM for more than four decades, joining the legendary improvising group back in 1980. He filled the chair once held by Cornelius Cardew, who left the group a year earlier (and who died in a tragic bike accident in 1981). Long before joining the group Tilbury had established himself as one of England’s finest contemporary classical musicians, with a particular expertise int the work of Morton Feldman, John Cage, and Howard Skempton as well as Cardew. Apart from recording the latter’s music, he also penned an authoritative book about his life and music, publishing “Cornelius Cardew - A Life Unfinished” in 2008. Tilbury is a pianist of rare erudition and technical precision, surveying long-form works with a keen architectural knowledge, and his refined skills as an improviser are rooted in high-level listening abilities. He has thrived in collective enterprises, giving and taking in varied contexts in a way that emphasizes collaboration, care, and sensitivity while downplaying bald virtuosity. Outside of his brilliant work in AMM (and outside of it with core members Keith Rowe and Eddie Prevost) he’s improvised with a broad array of sonic explorers including Oren Ambarchi, Marcus Schmickler, John Butcher, Evan Parker, and Derek Bailey. He cleaves to an immaculate strain of austerity, operating with remarkable restraint and rigor that generally has no interest in excess or virtuosity for its own sake. Over the years he’s made several recordings for Sheffield’s Another Timbre imprint - one of the best, most thoughtful labels devoted to a post-Cagean music landscape - including one as part of the collective Goldsmiths in addition to titles featuring the music of Feldman, Cage, and Terry Jennings. Another recording for the label features his clavichord playing on work by John Lely and Christian Wolff. While working with Another Timbre capo Simon Reynell on a different long-term project, Tilbury played him some old recordings featuring several keyboard works by minimalist pioneer Terry Riley, an old and dear acquaintance of the pianist. Tilbury doesn’t recall the exact provenance of the recordings, but it seems likely they were made in Hamburg in the early 1980s. “Keyboard Studies” offers a crucial facet of Tilbury’s musical world, one that’s poorly represented by recordings, while at the same time offering new interpretations of some of Riley’s most important work. A handful of pianists, such as Sarah Cahill and Steffen Schleiermacher, have recorded the first two of his seven “Keyboard Studies”, but getting to hear Tilbury’s ravishing, breathtaking accounts of these works reveals new perspectives. Riley himself never recorded the first study, while an attractively raw iteration of the second was made under the title “Untitled Organ”, released on the 1967 album “Reed Streams” on the Mass Art imprint. Riley only notated the first two of these pieces, composed between 1964-67, as they were designed largely as piano exercises for ideas he was working through at the time - during the same period he wrote his masterpiece “In C” - and each piece requires significant improvisation on the part of the interpreter. Naturally, Tilbury was up for the task. Both of these “Keyboard Studies” use a fixed but implied pulse, with a jaw-dropping rhythmic attack rooted in fifteen foundational three- or four-note phrases that cycle over and over, with the performer determining when to move forward, although the opening figure must always remain present. As far as I can tell Tilbury’s account of “Keyboard Study 1”, with its vaguely hocket-like alteration between two phrases at a time, is a single live take on piano, but the technical difficulty of these works has required overdubbing, and that’s what we get from Tilbury on “Keyboard Study 2”, which contains five separate voices, where he plays piano, electric organ, celeste, and harpsichord in dizzying cycles of rapidly swirling, rhythmically identical passages. The writing allows the listener to trace the ecstatic shifts between those core cells, even as the lines fly by at super high velocity. Phrases seem to emerge and disappear in almost psychedelic excess. The album’s final piece is a version of Riley’s “Dorian Reeds”, a 1965 work he composed for saxophone and electronic delay - and also included on the “Reed Streams” album - which shares many of the same concerns as “Keyboard Studies”, albeit with a far more limited harmonic profile. In Riley’s own recording of the piece, which incorporated his Time-Lag Accumulator system as a delay device to allow for the removal and introduction of phrases, he plays saxophone, although subsequently the piece has been adapted depending on the instrument as Dorian Voices or Dorian Brass. Although it sticks with the original title, Tilbury’s version is for electric organ. It’s a wonderful sonic mind-storm, as terse phrases stack up, phase in and out of each other, only to be pushed aside by new iterations, bouncing across the stereo field. Obviously, John Tilbury took his practice in a direction far removed from these minimalist gems, but here he not only proves his remarkable facility for this aesthetic frame, but he reveals a creative connection to the composer. He seems to inhabit these works with rare insight, a quality surely enhanced by his personal friendship with Terry Riley.

Another Timbre releases a new CD by Barbara Monk Feldman, wife of American avant-garde music legend Morton Feldman, featuring five chamber and solo pieces composed between 1988 and 1997. Performed by the "GBSR Duo" consisting of George Barton & Siwan Rhys and Mira Benjamin from Apartment House! This is a fantastic chamber music piece that envelops you in a very ethereal tranquility.

A 4-disc box-set with Apartment House playing all of John Cage's 'number pieces' for mid-size ensembles (from 'Five' to 'Fourteen', with 'Four5' as an added extra, along with alternative versions of three of the pieces). These extraordinarily beautiful works were all composed in the last 5 years of the composer's life, as Cage approached his 80th birthday. These recordings by Apartment House are the first recordings for 15 years of almost all of the pieces. An essential release of wonderful but somewhat neglected music. Downloads include a pdf of the 44-page booklet with extensive notes about Cage's number pieces, and the cover artwork