MUSIC

Human Remains follows Creatures of the Deep and Black Sarabande as the final installment of a trilogy of piano based recordings by Robert Haigh for Unseen Worlds. The trilogy marks the end of the late era of solo albums by Haigh before he steps away from music production. The title, Human Remains, was initially based on a painting of the same name by Haigh that is suggestive of an ancient structure resolute in the wake of overwhelming forces. As a metaphor for our current times, it could be interpreted as human frailty in the face of nature’s unyielding dominion. Conversely, it could represent the persistence of human spirit and resourcefulness in the midst of catastrophe and upheaval. The album opens with 'Beginner’s Mind' – a semi-improvised motif develops into an impressionistic refrain. This is followed by "Twilight Flowers" and "Waltz On Treated Wire" – intimate, monochrome piano portraits. Later tracks such as "Lost Albion" and "Signs Of Life" build on skeletal piano motifs with subtle electronic washes, textures and field sounds. The album ends with the elegiac "On Terminus Hill" where a stately piano refrain explores a series of sparse harmonic variations evoking a sense of closure.

Black Sarabande expands upon pianist-composer Robert Haigh’s beguiling debut for Unseen Worlds with a collection of intimate and evocative piano-led compositions.  Haigh was born and raised in the ‘pit village’ of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire, England. His father, as most of his friends’ fathers, was a miner, who worked at the local colliery.  Etched into Haigh’s work are formative memories of the early morning sounds of coal wagons being shunted on the tracks, distant trains passing, and walking rural paths skirting the barren industrial landscape

The album opens with the title track — a spacious, plaintive piano motif develops through a series of discordant variations before resolving. On ‘Stranger On The Lake,’ sweeping textures and found sounds lay the foundation for a two chord piano phrase evoking a sense of elegy. ‘Wire Horses’ is an atmospheric audio painting of open spaces and distant lights. ’Air Madeleine’ uses variations in tempo and dynamics to craft the most seductively melodic track on the album.  ‘Arc Of Crows’ improvises on a single major seventh chord, splintering droplets of notes as ghostly wisps of melodic sound slowly glide into view. ‘Ghosts Of Blacker Dyke’ is a melancholic evocation of Haigh’s roots in England’s industrial north — intermingling dissonant sounds of industry within a set of languid piano variations. ‘Progressive Music’  is constructed around a series of lightly dissonant arpeggiated piano chords which modulate through major and minor key changes before resolving at a wistful and enigmatic refrain. In ‘The Secret Life of Air’, a nocturnal, low piano line slowly weaves its way through the close-miked ambience of the room, nearly halting as each note is allowed to form and reverberate into a blur with the next. The ambitious ‘Painted Serpent’ calmly begins with drone-like pads and builds with the introduction of counterpoint piano lines and an orchestral collage of sound underpinned by a deliberate bass motif. ’Broken Symmetry’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ highlight Haigh’s gift for blurring the line between dissonance and harmony - opaque piano portraits of moonlight and shadows glancingly evoke the impressionistic palettes of Harold Budd, Debussy and Satie.

First volume of solo piano compositions by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, finally back in print. Born to an aristocratic family in Addis Ababa in December of 1923, Emahoy spent much of her youth and young adulthood studying classical music in Europe. She returned to Ethiopia in the 40s, where the war interrupted her musical studies. In 1948 during a church service in Ethiopia, she found her faith and began years of religious training. Throughout her physical and spiritual journeys, Emahoy continued to compose for the piano. She first released this album in Germany 1963 as small private press record. The tracks reflect her own travels, seamlessly moving between Western classical and traditional Ethiopian modes, evoking Erik Satie, the orthodox liturgy, and meditative Christian music all at once. Her work is like no one else in the world, lyrical, hypnotic, full of spiritual warmth and a direct connection to the divine. Emahoy is now 98 years old and still lives in Jerusalem. She continues to play, and the funds from her work go to the righteous causes to which she has dedicated her life. We are incredibly proud to present this music on vinyl again, mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk and presented in collaboration with the EMAHOY TSEGE MARIAM MUSIC PUBLISHER and Foundation. This black vinyl LP version includes a new reproduction of the original artwork, with the composer’s own notes, translated from the original German.

Minecraft - Volume Alpha is the work of German composer and musician Daniel Rosenfeld. Using C418 as his moniker, Rosenfeld crafted the sweeping soundtrack and vibrant sound design which helped breathe life into Minecraft's voxel-based universe. Fans and critics were universally enamored with his beatless, nuanced electronic pieces upon release. Popular gaming site Kotaku named it among The Best Game Music of 2011, calling the music "remarkably soothing," and The Guardian has compared Rosenfeld's delicate piano and sparse ambient motifs to legendary artists Erik Satie and Brian Eno. In an interview feature with C418, Polygon distilled Volume Alpha to its essence: "It's not bound by the retro aesthetic of Minecraft's graphics. It transcends them. The album is an attempt to uplift the combined game/music experience into the sublime."

“How to begin? No beginning... never ending reverberation,” Antoine Beuger writes in the accompanying notes to Leo Svirsky’s River Without Banks. Dedicated to his first piano teacher Irena Orlov, River Without Banks is a mesmerizing, emotional collection of pieces that are simultaneously complex and fluid. The title River Without Banks comes from a chapter of musicologist Genrikh “Henry” Orlov’s profound work Tree of Music. In said chapter, Orlov traces the history of sacred music from the Western and Eastern tradition and how the forms (of the chant, raga etc.) sought to eliminate the division between the physical and the spiritual--the bank and the river.

Arranged for two pianos with accompaniment from strings, trumpet, and electronics, this is Svirsky’s first piece to approach the history of the piano and the possibilities of the recording studio, and his deepest dive yet into exploring the instability of listening and its transformation of musical semantics and affect. Like Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project, Svirsky overlays romantic musical gestures to create a lush unfamiliarity. No sooner than each track begins the next moment unfurls beneath it, cascading time and blurring perception of past and present.

Akin to a multidimensional Rzewski thematic interpretation, Svirsky’s music defies genre-classification or classical ideology while its virtuosity clearly stems from somewhere from within disciplined traditions. Continuously revisiting, revising, and renewing its emotional core, River Without Banks is less an album of songs than songs of a singular, unlocatable album. Performed by the composer with assistance from Britton Powell, Max Eilbacher, Leila Bordreuil, Tim Byrnes, and recorded by Al Carlson.

180g heavy vinyl. Recorded in 1958, exactly one year before the legendary 'Portrait in Jazz' album, this is Bill Evans' second album as a leader. With Sam Jones on bass and Philly Joe Jones on drums, the cover features endorsements and signatures from Miles Davis, George Shearing, Ahmad Jamal, and "Cannonball" Adderley, four of the biggest jazz players of all time. Peace Piece', which is described as "quieter than silence", is Evans' quintessential masterpiece, expressing deep lyricism and life in a beautiful silence.

Found Keys is the debut album by American artist Ruth Maine. Although Ruth has been playing and composing music for over two decades, this is the first time she decided to record some of her varied compositions and share them with the public. But in times when it is the norm to clamour for attention, she prefers to go the opposite way. Ruth likes to let her music speak for itself and stay in the shadows.

The 16 short piano pieces heard on this album, each about two to three minutes long, were recorded remotely and purely surrounded by nature. Once a composition was found and Ruth considered it mature, she only recorded it once, embracing the beauty of doing something for the first time with all its little imperfections. Found Keys sounds anything but imperfect though. These compositions feel timeless, intimate and comforting, as if they have been around for a long time, like an old friend. Gently played keys slowly evolve into minimal pieces through repetitive melodies. There’s stillness as much as there’s brightness, sadness as much as joy; welcome to a beautiful journey through Ruth’s world of wonder.

In many ways, Found Keys is a deeply personal record that takes Sonic Pieces back to its roots. And it leaves a feeling of nostalgia while reviving memories of the past.

Deeply resonant spiritual music transmitted via piano, organ, and harmonium by beloved composer and Ethiopian Orthodox nun Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru.

Church of Kidane Mehret collects all the musical work from Emahoy’s 1972 private press album of the same name, alongside two additional unreleased piano recordings, exploring Emahoy’s take on “Ethiopian Church Music.”

Recording herself in churches throughout Jerusalem, Emahoy engages directly with the Ethiopian Orthodox musical liturgy. For the first time, we hear Emahoy on harmonium and massive, droning pipe organ, alongside some of her most moving piano work.

“Ave Maria” is one of our favorite pieces Emahoy ever recorded, her chiming piano reverberating against ancient stone walls. Her familiar melodic lines take on new resonance when played through the harmonium on “Spring Ode - Meskerem.” Two towering organ performances comprise the B Side, combining Emahoy’s classical European training with her lifelong study of Ethiopian religious music.

Nowhere is Emahoy’s unique combination of influences more apparent than on “Essay on Mahlet,” a meditative slow burner in which Emahoy interprets the free verse of the Orthodox liturgy note for note on the piano. This revelatory piece, alongside the dramatic piano composition “The Storm,” comes from another self-released album, 1963’s Der Sang Des Meeres. Only 50 copies were ever produced (and no cover). One of the only known copies was saved from the trash and shared with Mississippi by a fellow nun at Emahoy’s monastery when we visited for Emahoy’s funeral in March of 2023.

We are proud to work with the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation to bring you these rare spiritual recordings in what would have been the artist’s 102nd year.

Available in black and clear vinyl editions. Old-school tip-on jacket with metallic silver foil stamping along with a 12-page booklet featuring extensive liner notes from scholar and pianist Thomas Feng.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce the first-ever vinyl reissue of Alvin Curran’s classic Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri, originally issued in 1978 on Ananda, the cooperative label run by Curran, Roberto Laneri, and Giacinto Scelsi. Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri (Light Flowers Dark Flowers) – its title inspired by an intersection in Milan – is the second in the series of four solo recordings Alvin Curran issued in the 1970s and early 1980s, preceded by Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden (1975), followed by The Works (1980) and Canti Illuminati (1982).

Each of these solo works combines field recordings with performances on synthesiser, various acoustic instruments, and voice, arranged in languorously paced, dreamy sequences. Far from the bracing pointillism of much musique concrete, the elements encountered on the meandering course followed by Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri – whether a frenetic piano improvisation, dense layers of Serge synthesiser and ocarina, or a monologue from Frederic Rzewski’s five-year old son, Alexis – often occupy the foreground of our attention for minutes at a time. As Curran explains, his approach is like that of a filmmaker in the editing process, working with “whole blocks of recorded time”.   The purring of a cat, toy piano, a child counting, plaintive synthesiser tones, the cacophony of exotic birds at the London Zoo – each disappears into the next, until, on the LP’s second side, a solo piano performance takes centre stage, moving unexpectedly from percussive minimalist permutations to a halting rendition of Georgia on My Mind. A subtle yet stunning work that more than forty years on still seems charged with possibility, Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri arrives in a loving reproduction of the original sleeve, featuring Edith Schloss’ beautiful cover painting, remastered audio and with new liner notes by Alvin Curran and Francis Plagne.

A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever is a collection of nine solo piano works that explore resistance, resonance, and space with a distinctive spectral sensitivity. These pieces are nocturnes, written deep in conservation in Winter, in a small rural studio in Valens, Canada. A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever is the follow-up to From Where You Came that was released in May and earned a RA Recommend and The Guardian’s Experimental Album of the Month calling it a "quiet ecstasy from a composer without boundaries".

The second LP compendium of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s early solo piano works, recorded throughout the 1960s – finally available again. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru is a true original – her compositions and unique playing style live somewhere between Erik Satie, Debussy, liturgical music of the Coptic Ethiopian Church, and Ethiopian traditional music. It is some of the most moving piano music you will ever hear!

These original compositions, performed by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru herself on solo piano, were originally self-released in Germany in small editions as fundraisers for orphanages, support organizations for widows of war victims, and other philanthropic causes. We are humbled and proud to present this album in collaboration with the EMAHOY TSEGE MARIAM MUSIC PUBLISHER and Foundation, and to assist in continuing her life-long mission of using music as a vessel to care for those who have been abandoned by society, or harmed by strife.

Black vinyl LP comes in black inner-sleeves and heavy cardstock jacket with color printing and gold-foil stamping, and song notes by the composer herself. Restored and remastered by Timothy Stollenwerk.

From beloved composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, a revelatory new album of piano pieces, unreleased or virtually inaccessible until now!

Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru is a true original – an Ethiopian nun whose recordings have funded orphanages back home since the early ’60s. Her compositions and unique playing style live somewhere between Erik Satie, Debussy, liturgical music of the Coptic Ethiopian Church, and Ethiopian traditional music. It is some of the most moving piano music you will ever hear.

This is the first archival release of the great composer’s recordings since the Éthiopiques series reintroduced her music to the world in 2006. Drawn from original master tapes and a nearly impossible-to-find vinyl release, Jerusalem unveils profound new facets of Emahoy Gebru’s performance and compositions.

The record picks up where the last two Mississippi releases left off, with tracks from her 1972 album Hymn of Jerusalem, of which only a handful of copies are known to exist. These include “Home of Beethoven,” “Aurora,” and a true masterpiece that stands amongst her greatest compositions, the moving “Jerusalem.” “Quand La Mer Furieuse” is the first release featuring Emahoy’s singing voice, forshadowing a vocal album planned for fall 2023. The B-Side brings us the artist’s home recordings - tracks like “Farewell Eve,” “Woigaye Don’t Cry Anymore,” and “Famine Disaster 1974” mark a bridge from liturgical work to dark and intense classical material, a new mode.

This album is released in celebration of Emahoy Gebru’s 99th birthday on December 12, 2022. Mississippi is honored to work with the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Publisher to continue to introduce this visionary composer to the world.

Newly remastered recordings pressed on 160gm black vinyl, heavy jacket with reproduction of 1972 artwork, song notes by the artist. 

In the Fall of 2022, Phil Cook found himself living alone in a small home at the edge of field and forest in North Carolina’s Piedmont. For most of Cook’s life he lived near the hearts of the towns he had called home, near the groan of traffic and hubbub of coffee shops. Such close quarters helped make the gregarious Cook a prolific collaborator, from co-founding Megafaun to working with The Blind Boys of Alabama, Bon Iver, Hiss Golden Messenger, and endless others. But Cook’s closest neighbor now was a trailhead, so he went and listened, enraptured first by the stillness and then by the manifold birds. He began leaving his windowsill slightly cracked each night, so that the dawn chorus greeted him. Cook began recording these tangled bird songs, and he slowly joined them. With the sun finally high, Cook would listen to the day’s recordings and improvise in real time on the instrument that remains the first and most steadfast love of his musical life, the piano. When Cook left that cabin after a year, he moved into a home of his own in Durham, with plenty of space for his two boys to play and for something he’d never actually owned—a proper piano. Over the next several months, Cook spent untold hours drilling down on these pieces. During lessons with the Southern gospel great Chuckey Robinson, the pianist had challenged Cook to sustain fewer notes, to stop clouding and crowding his melodies by using the instrument’s pedals as crutches. His music suddenly had more clarity, with the sounds and the feelings they ferried given more room to function. Cook dug into the danger and delight, into the idea that we twist our bodies into knots trying to understand what is best for our hearts. In April 2024 Cook returned to Wisconsin’s Chippewa Valley where he was raised. His lifelong friend and bandmate, Justin Vernon, had just finished an overhaul of April Base, the studio compound where Cook has worked on more than a dozen records during the last 15 years. Cook asked Vernon to produce Appalachia Borealis as simply as possible—merely to listen and offer feedback in two extended afternoon sessions, to talk about the right takes and make sure that they’d captured the heart. It, of course, got more complicated, as they experimented with the process. Vernon would add or subtract the bird songs to Cook’s headphones, seeing how they impacted his playing. Or they would route his notes through a massive reverb chamber, Cook responding in gossamer improvisations. Appalachia Borealis is a deeply poignant and personal set of 11 piano meditations, built with the emotional range of a full and open existence. Inspired by those windowsill improvisations, it reflects not only the turmoil and sadness of a fraught time for Cook but also the hope, light, and joy of looking for the other side. You can sometimes still hear the birds whose tune and time helped to inspire so many of these songs. Even when they’re not within earshot, their essence remains.

Glenn Gould's great starting point is now available in Japan in analog form from monaural masters for the first time in 57 years.
Limited Edition] Analog / 180 gram weight vinyl version.
The debut album "Goldberg Variations" was released in January 1956 and made the young Glenn Gould's name known worldwide. The last album released before his death, "Goldberg Variations," was released in September 1982, about a month before Gould's death. This work frames Gould's life like a closing circle, and is indispensable in considering his unique music. When we think of Gould, we think of Goldberg, and vice versa.
The first of a special series of six analog reissues of four different performances of this important work is the debut recording, made over four days in June 1955. It is the most successful classical music album of all time and an icon in recording history. It was cut at Sony Music Nogizaka Studio in Japan, based on high-resolution recordings carefully transferred from the original monaural masters, which were never released out of the gate.

On the 6th of October 2023, the release date of her third solo album ‘Ghosts’, Hania Rani organised a special album release concert with a string ensemble in a very unique location - Witold Lutosławski's Concert Studio at the Polish Radio in Warsaw. “Over the years, the spaces of Polish Radio became an important part of my life - both privately and professionally. I visited it for the first time as a student of Chopin University of Music and came back to make my first recordings in late 2018, just before the release of the debut album ‘Esja’. Since then I have been a regular guest.” The building is located in the Mokotów district in Warsaw and has served generations of musicians and sound engineers for decades. For Hania it is a home from home; a beloved recording studio but something more important and resonant too. Nostalgia does more than just present a memorable concert; it celebrates a space and an idea as through the mediums of photography and recorded sound. Hania creates something profound and enlightening. “Some months after this special concert in Studio S1 I came back to the chambers of Polish Radio. This time not as a musician, but as an observer. It was one of the coldest Mondays of January and Warsaw was adorned with fresh, plush snow. The building seemed completely empty, so I was able to navigate freely with my camera from space to space without interruption. I relished each object and each room waiting patiently to be consumed by a film roll. The obscure lighting was putting things in a subtle movement, the strong white beams were making them still again” Through Nostalgia, Hania presents the studios in her own perspective, as somewhere unique and unknown. A place of work, but something more. A place of ghosts and hidden meanings, of inspiration and mystery; The deluxe LP comes with a 16-page booklet featuring Hania’s unique analogue photos, along with her thoughts on the recording process, studios, and the compositions themselves. The CD includes these photos in a beautifully glued-in 12-page booklet.

The tape Afrikan Klavierkonzert by Rolf Julius, recorded in 1980 and now reissued by Counter Culture Chronicles, reveals the German artist’s delicate approach to sound: sparse piano textures, environmental resonance, and a restrained poetics of listening that dissolve boundaries between music, silence, and space itself.

Counter Culture Chronicles is proud to reissue Afrikan Klavierkonzert, a 1980 recording that captures a rare side of Rolf Julius, the German artist celebrated for his “small music” and subtle environmental works. Known for creating soundscapes that merge with their surroundings rather than dominate them, Julius developed an approach that was at once intimate, fragile, and quietly transformative.

In this recording, the piano becomes less an instrument of virtuosity and more a source of resonance and atmosphere. Notes unfold slowly, placed with restraint, allowing silence and space to shape the listening experience as much as the sound itself. The title hints at a distant geography but functions more as poetic suggestion than cultural borrowing, underscoring Julius’s interest in imagery that evokes listening beyond the familiar.

Afrikan Klavierkonzert is not a concert in the conventional sense but a meditative work in which music and environment blur into each other, extending Julius’s lifelong pursuit of sound as a form of presence. This reissue offers a rare glimpse into the early 1980s period of his practice, reaffirming him as one of the quiet innovators who redefined the relationship between music, space, and attention.

The studio at 122 West Loveland Avenue was not an unfamiliar space for Steve Okonski, the leader of his eponymous trio Okonski. Ever since the Colemine label set up shop in Loveland, Ohio it has been a host to a number of groups passing through town, including Durand Jones and the Indications who all of this trio’s members have connections to. After setting aside some time in winter of 2020, Okonski, trained initially as a classical pianist, invited Michael Isvara “Ish” Montgomery and Aaron Frazer to work on an album that was initially planned to be beat driven and fully composed trio instrumentals. After finishing this first session with some improvisations, a second week was booked in the summer of 2021 to try and capture some more of that spontaneous energy. During this session, the tracks were all improvised and recorded live to a Tascam 388 during several late nights at the Colemine HQ. They were structured to allow the group’s collective intuition to fully shape the melodies and arcs of the music. The album opens with Runner Up, where a triumphant yet melancholic melody in the piano leads to a more reserved B-section driven by the drums and bass of Frazer and Montgomery. As you journey through the remainder of the album you are met with a plethora of evoked and explored emotions. The calmness one has walking down a moonlit street after midnight, the connection one has for a person who comes into their world for just a moment or a lifetime, and the nerves and catharsis one feels when starting upon a new, unknown journey. Magnolia closes with Sunday, a track that was recorded late into the night at the close of their first recording session. Without the spontaneity of Sunday, the remainder of Magnolia would likely have never come to fruition. Magnolia was composed from the heart and from the spirit of those in the studio those late nights in Loveland. It is the culmination of an emotional and artistic release that was not afforded or recognized before the band sat at their instruments, and because of that it is introspective, meditative, spiritual, and new.

Minecraft - Volume Alpha is the work of German composer and musician Daniel Rosenfeld. Using C418 as his moniker, Rosenfeld crafted the sweeping soundtrack and vibrant sound design which helped breathe life into Minecraft's voxel-based universe. Fans and critics were universally enamored with his beatless, nuanced electronic pieces upon release. Popular gaming site Kotaku named it among The Best Game Music of 2011, calling the music "remarkably soothing," and The Guardian has compared Rosenfeld's delicate piano and sparse ambient motifs to legendary artists Erik Satie and Brian Eno. In an interview feature with C418, Polygon distilled Volume Alpha to its essence: "It's not bound by the retro aesthetic of Minecraft's graphics. It transcends them. The album is an attempt to uplift the combined game/music experience into the sublime."

A new album of piano driven ambient music from British composer Robert Haigh. Following in the path of his albums for the Japanese Siren label, Creatures of the Deep is an underground vantage of a meeting between the musical worlds of Harold Budd and Erik Satie. With a storied musical career that has ranged widely in style ― from his industrial-avant-garde works on Nurse With Wound’s United Diaries label as SEMA to his legendary ambient drum and bass records as Omni Trio on Moving Shadow ― Robert Haigh's work occupies a space between music and mystery. With Creatures of the Deep, Haigh is at the peak of his powers. Among noir, minimal, neo-classical landscapes are robust scatterings of bright reflection and a musical expression that is subtle and elusive yet uniquely Haigh’s in its voice and masterful execution. The closer we examine, the more is revealed, and the less is defined.

Aleksandra Ionowa (1899–1980) was a Finnish-Russian artist, mystic, and largely self-taught pianist whose music feels like a transmission from another realm.

Her artistic life began in 1946, after what she described as a mystical experience of heavenly union—“Heaven was in me, I was in heaven.” In its wake, she began to draw obsessively, eventually creating thousands of visionary works that she considered guided by the Theosophical Masters. The same experience also led her to start improvising on the piano, shaping music that, for its time, was unusually free and abstract.


Recorded on a November day in 1978, when Aleksandra Ionowa was 79 years old, Improvisations on the Grand Piano is a meditative and deeply intuitive album, shaped more by timbre and tone than by melody. Her shimmering playing unfolds like flashes of light through leaves, or sunbeams playing on rippling water: a music of transience and transformation, yet carrying a timeless stillness at its core. To today’s listener, her pentatonic piano stylings might feel kindred to the spiritual intimacy of artists like Laraaji and Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, while remaining wholly her own.

Originally self-released on vinyl and cassette, the album is reissued for the first time in co-operation with Ultraääni Records and Puro Recordings. This new edition is available on standard black 180g vinyl and a limited splatter-colored 180g version. The release also includes additional artwork and a newly commissioned essay by Samuli Huttunen, offering historical and spiritual context for her work.

Minecraft - Volume Alpha is the work of German composer and musician Daniel Rosenfeld. Using C418 as his moniker, Rosenfeld crafted the sweeping soundtrack and vibrant sound design which helped breathe life into Minecraft's voxel-based universe. Fans and critics were universally enamored with his beatless, nuanced electronic pieces upon release. Popular gaming site Kotaku named it among The Best Game Music of 2011, calling the music "remarkably soothing," and The Guardian has compared Rosenfeld's delicate piano and sparse ambient motifs to legendary artists Erik Satie and Brian Eno. In an interview feature with C418, Polygon distilled Volume Alpha to its essence: "It's not bound by the retro aesthetic of Minecraft's graphics. It transcends them. The album is an attempt to uplift the combined game/music experience into the sublime."

The studio at 122 West Loveland Avenue was not an unfamiliar space for Steve Okonski, the leader of his eponymous trio Okonski. Ever since the Colemine label set up shop in Loveland, Ohio it has been a host to a number of groups passing through town, including Durand Jones and the Indications who all of this trio’s members have connections to. After setting aside some time in winter of 2020, Okonski, trained initially as a classical pianist, invited Michael Isvara “Ish” Montgomery and Aaron Frazer to work on an album that was initially planned to be beat driven and fully composed trio instrumentals. After finishing this first session with some improvisations, a second week was booked in the summer of 2021 to try and capture some more of that spontaneous energy. During this session, the tracks were all improvised and recorded live to a Tascam 388 during several late nights at the Colemine HQ. They were structured to allow the group’s collective intuition to fully shape the melodies and arcs of the music. The album opens with Runner Up, where a triumphant yet melancholic melody in the piano leads to a more reserved B-section driven by the drums and bass of Frazer and Montgomery. As you journey through the remainder of the album you are met with a plethora of evoked and explored emotions. The calmness one has walking down a moonlit street after midnight, the connection one has for a person who comes into their world for just a moment or a lifetime, and the nerves and catharsis one feels when starting upon a new, unknown journey. Magnolia closes with Sunday, a track that was recorded late into the night at the close of their first recording session. Without the spontaneity of Sunday, the remainder of Magnolia would likely have never come to fruition. Magnolia was composed from the heart and from the spirit of those in the studio those late nights in Loveland. It is the culmination of an emotional and artistic release that was not afforded or recognized before the band sat at their instruments, and because of that it is introspective, meditative, spiritual, and new.

Soft piano notes kiss trippy electronic tones: “Kossaiko”, the only collaborative record that japanese piano player Saiko Tsukamoto and globally known electronic producer Kuniyuki Takahashi ever produced, is an unmissable profound soft classic music burner.

Together they composed and produced an eight-chapter strong deeply absorbing narrative, whose enthralling story arc dives profound into authentic drama zones, that sound like they jumped right out of a Claude Sautet movie.

Originally released in 2007 as cd only, the perfectly put together longplayer now enters the world for the first time in a vinyl edition that is tragically hip. deeply starry-eyed composi-tions full of minimalistic piano melodies that creep, twist, and dance around unobtrusive electronic notes who never call the tune, but always elevate the spectacle into higher elec-tronic spheres.

In the center of each between five- and nine-minutes long composition is the piano play of Saiko, gently hitting the keys, giving space to each note to vibrate in an endless “Pauline Oli-Veros” way, drifting until the very last sound vanish. around them, Kuniyuki plays his charming electronic tricks, opening the space for tones that sometimes pulsate, sometimes flow the ambient way.

Furthermore, occasionally a guitar notes pop up or accordion melodies cover the sorcery with a severely romantic veil.

Modern classical music, that has no fear of electronic meltdowns, that embraces digital tones while staying organic in its very inner circle.

A wise man once said: when words leave off, music begins. Those who fall for the eight poems of Saikoss will lose their speech and in return get pleased all agitations of their soul.

Described as "one of the greatest musical achievements of the 20th century," The Well-Tuned Piano is the most important and revolutionary musical monument of La Monte Young's oeuvre. With the mysteries and traditions of the Orient, natural overtones, a Bösendorfer tuned to pure tuning over several weeks, and the ethereal lighting of Marian Zazeela, this is a unique opportunity to engage in the full scope of historical music that will probably never be performed again. A 52-page booklet is included to help you decipher this work, and although this is a large DVD (over 6 hours), the sound quality is good enough to be played as audio, even for those who have the Gramavision version. The link to the sound source is the Gramavision version.