Mechanical puzzles such as canons were not dry exercises for Aldo Clementi but spurred his creative interest in movement, time and space. In these four works he creates intricate counterpoint from twelve flutes; four pairs of waltzing violins; a mixed quartet; and an ensemble of tuned percussion, which summons a bustling cityscape in the heat of summer. The binaural format heightens the sense of music that moves in space as well as time.

Canoni circolari

Aldo Clementi: l’Orologio di Arcevia (binaural excerpt — for headphone listening)

In *gwneud a gwneud eto / do and do again*, Angharad Davies allows us to hear the violin almost from within, revealing the granular detail of what she describes as the instrument’s ‘endless wealth of possibilities’.

gwneud a gwneud eto / do and do again

Angharad Davies: gwneud a gwneud eto / do and do again (excerpt)

Evan Johnson consistently characterises his music as ‘absolutely private’; secretive, even. As a result, the listening experience can feel almost voyeuristic, as if looking over the pianist’s shoulder, catching the piano in an otherwise imperceptible whisper.

lists, little stars

Evan Johnson: qu’en joye on vous demaine

Armstrong uses Rachel Carson’s imagery as a prompt to contemplate 'the interactions between the momentary and the vast, and of endless process as a form of saying’. Performer and listener are invited into this contemplative state in which musical materials, like ocean sediments, drift in semi-regular motion.

The Book of the Sediments

Newton Armstrong: The Book of the Sediments (binaural excerpt - for headphone listening)

‘Music in one place.’ Lolavar’s description of how she thinks of this series of pieces at first seems counterintuitive. The musicians involved are based in different cities (Lolavar in London, violinist Sarah Saviet in Berlin) and their creative process draws together practices from Iran and Europe. Yet this is music about shared experience; of creating a particular sound-world together.

Every Strand of Thread and Rope

Soosan Lolavar: Undone (binaural excerpt – for headphone listening)

What may seem like conventional objects and situations are turned inside out in Einbond’s Xylography and Cosmologies. Closely and ambiently miked, physically and electronically manipulated, from these instruments issue the sound of their materials and of their human music-makers. Listeners feel as up-close as the players, and perhaps even closer, as if they are virtually inside the instruments.

Cosmologies

Aaron Einbond: Graphology (excerpt)

The potential for disorientation is enormous, as the sensation of the air throbbing (whether in the room or in the ear) overwhelms the sense of stable pitch. The microtonal tuning here is no melodic affect but, rather, an exercise in a scientific phenomenon. Through the course of Wave Songs the pitches of the sine tones move ever closer together, seemingly hemming the singer in until she changes the rules of the game.

Wave Songs

Alvin Lucier: Wave Songs (binaural excerpt - for headphone listening)

This album features three works from a four-work cycle, each of which has as its starting point a canvas by Wassily Kandinsky and travels on to reflect and refract mythological and scientific views of astronomical phenomena. The common thread is one of perspective: Lind observes a similarity in ‘the way the eye approaches either Kandinsky’s painting or scans the vastness of the sky in search of stellar focal points of light in the black sea of night’.

Kandinsky Kunstwerke

Rosá Lind: Trente: Lyra – Aquila – le Cygne

In this new survey, Matthew Shlomowitz continues to explore the composition of ‘a real-world scene with a musical component in it’. He melds samples and field recordings with instrumental ensemble and percussion to uncanny and often irreverent effect.

Matthew Shlomowitz: Avant Muzak

Popular Contexts 8: 3. Session Drummer

Matthew Shlomowitz: Session Drummer

Well known as a commissioner and interpreter of new repertoire for the cello, this is Séverine Ballon’s debut disc as a composer. The eight tracks emerged from her long-standing discipline of improvisation, and display an intense interiority and an undeniable physicality.

inconnaissance

Inconnaissance

Séverine Ballon: cloches fendues 1

Feldman’s 75-minute work dedicated to his friend John Cage was written in 1982. In this new version, Aisha Orazbayeva (violin) and Mark Knoop (piano) set out to draw the listener into the charged space between the performers.

For John Cage

Morton Feldman: For John Cage (excerpt)

La fabbrica illuminata was conceived as a new form of ‘virtual sonic theatre’ that would expose the ‘lives in danger of fetishisation by technology’. Composed in 1964 for voice and 4-channel surround sound, Nono entwines the noise of factory plants and workers’ voices with pre-recorded and live soprano. Mastered for headphone listening in surround-sound binaural format.

La fabbrica illuminata

La Fabbrica Illuminata

Luigi Nono: La fabbrica illuminata (binaural excerpt — for headphone listening)

A to B | Late lines

Georgia Rodgers: A to B | Late lines (binaural excerpt — for headphone listening)

Excerpts from Traveller Song, Tracery : Lazy, Rocking and Bel Canto

Songs about Singing

Cassandra Miller: Songs about Singing

Excerpts from 2016 Last Piece, piano piece 2015 and 2016 No.2

Piano Music 2015–16

Tim Parkinson: Piano Music 2015–16

KONTAKTE

Karlheinz Stockhausen: KONTAKTE (binaural excerpt — for headphone listening)

A sense of communication beyond the frame can be felt in the collaborations between Anthony Pateras and Erkki Veltheim. Their practice as a duo concentrates their shared interest in experiencing the materiality of music; of the way sounds become music and how that music can come to feel to be a tangible force.

Duos for Other Instruments

Anthony Pateras, Erkki Veltheim: Ersatz (excerpt)

wave/forming (astrum) continues some of Lamb’s experimentation with pointillism, in which short articulations — points — interact and build towards lines that lengthen into what Lamb calls a ‘more total form’. Surface figures are spirited away yet patterns emerge in time, through long arcs of harmonic transformation, and in space, as sounds shift between foreground and background of the stereo fields.

wave/forming (astrum)

Catherine Lamb: wave/forming (astrum)(excerpt)

all that dust is a new independent record label producing a small number of high-quality contemporary music releases each year. It is run by Newton Armstrong, Juliet Fraser and Mark Knoop.

allthatdust

Popular tracks