The music Phil and I played during the concert recorded here was not determined in advance (except in respect to when and where we would play, and that in general Phil would mainly sing and I would mainly play the double bass); as this implies, we improvised both the form and content of the performance. But contrary to what some writers often assume, this doesn’t necessarily denote elements of stream-of-consciousness, or moment form, or indeterminacy. Indeed I would suggest this is composed music in many senses of the term, but not composed in advance of performance. It is certainly ‘determined’ in the sense that on the whole we decide what will happen, it doesn’t just happen to us. As experienced improvisers Phil and I know what we are doing (although we don’t always know what we are going to do). Admittedly, every now and then we might also do something we didn’t even know we could do, but in the main we draw on our considerable individual vocabularies and structuring strategies to spontaneously produce unforeseen and unrepeatable constellations of sound with a malleable yet form-aware structure. For me this represents one of the ideal possible states of music-making - a musical voyage of discovery, without a map but with an erudite and companionable fellow-traveller!

The Knowledge Of Its Own Making

Knotted Properties

HCR08 | Phil Minton & Simon H. Fell: Knotted Properties [excerpt]

Each of the pieces on πτελέα| Ptelea was written for clarinettist Heather Roche in the spirit of intense collaboration: six pieces by six composers from different parts of the globe - the United States, Japan, the UK, Norway and Chile - each composer engaged in a deep relationship with the clarinet and its performer, each piece illuminating the unique musical language of its composer.
Including soundscapes of softly emerging dyads (Bauck), elusive sounds that sit on the border of inaudibility (Morishita) and pre-recorded human voices that emerge from inside the clarinet's bell (Einbond), all these composers have made careful and intriguing selections of materials – there are no ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ here. Rather, this collection is concerned with aspects of resistance or limitation and the exploration of margins and boundary zones.

Ptelea

HCR09 | Martin Iddon: Ptelea [excerpt]

In the CD Shrouded Mirrors, Chilean virtuoso Diego Castro Magaš champions recent British guitar music. In this repertoire, made of challenging pieces of radical aesthetics and highly suggestive content, Diego explores the evocative quality of the instrument through its extremes of both intimacy and violence. As a result of the collaboration with the composers involved, the recording includes innovative and authoritative versions of pieces by Brian Ferneyhough and James Dillon, as well as world premiere recordings of music by Matthew Sergeant, Bryn Harrison, Michael Finnissy and Wieland Hoban.

Shrouded Mirrors

HCR10 | James Dillon: Shrouded Mirrors [excerpt]

Zeta Potential is the seventh publication of Huddersfield Contemporary Records and features the work of 21 young composers who took part in hcmf//’s European Composers’ Professional Development Programme. The collection was recorded at the festival by Nieuw Ensemble (NL), Ensemble 10/10 (UK) or Icarus Ensemble (IT) and includes works by CeReNeM composers, Matthew Sergeant and Chikako Morishita.

Zeta Potential

bet giyorgis

HCR07 | Matthew Sergeant: bet giyorgis [excerpt]

Released to celebrate composer Michael Finnissy's seventieth year, Beat Generation Ballads presents the premiere recordings of two of Finnissy's recent major piano works - First Political Agenda (1989-2004) and Beat Generation Ballads (2014) - both performed by internationally acclaimed pianist, Phillip Thomas.
 
"Listeners who have been following closely the music and development of Michael Finnissy over the past half-century, or who are familiar with his wide-ranging and prolific output, will be accustomed to being wrong-footed when hearing a new work. Finnissy is a master of counteracting supposed stylistic traits, continually enlarging his gamut of references, forms and notational practices. The two works presented here will likely prove no exception. Yet they also serve as ideal introductions to the composer's vision, methods and language. Typically evocative (and provocative) titles combine with a diverse set of musical references, from Bach to jazz, Irish republican song to Webern. Though it is Beethoven that looms most large..." - Phillip Thomas

Beat Generation Ballads

First Political Agenda: i. Wrong place. Wrong time.

HCR11 | Michael Finnissy: First Political Agenda - i. Wrong place. Wrong time. [excerpt]

Ten years in the making, Caerulean presents the stunning results of commissions and collaborations between renowned clarinettist Carl Rosman and some of the most cutting-edge composers of our times, with eleven world premiere recordings on one disc, including composers Georges Aperghis, Richard Barrett, Aaron Cassidy, Rebecca Saunders, Chikako Morishita and Mauricio Kagel.

Caerulean

HCR12 | Rebecca Saunders: Caerulean [excerpt]

Verkündigung (“Annunciation”) is one of the earliest works in Peter Ablinger's catalogue, and a cornerstone for connoisseurs of his work. Composed in 1990, in Verkündigung the groundwork for his subsequent work is laid out. In exploring noise and densification, Ablinger thematises perception itself: raising awareness about listening and, through listening, about the listener.

Verkündigung

Verkündigung (studio recording)

HCR14 | Peter Ablinger: Verkündigung [excerpt]

This release is the first major survey of the music of Michael Parsons. Spread across two discs, Patterns of Connection features chamber and solo music dating from 1962, whilst Parsons was still a student at the Royal College of Music, to the present day. The music presented here spans a wide range of writing - tonal and chromatic, simple and complex - but always coheres to the rigorous ordering principles underlying the music, while displaying a striking sensitivity for sound, line and texture. Parsons has composed for, and worked with, the members of Apartment House for the past 20 years, and this album reflects their long-standing, deep engagement with this inquisitive and bold music.

Patterns of Connection: Instrumental Music 1962-2017

Dispersal

HCR15 | Michael Parsons: Dispersal

Sixty years after John Cage began composing his most extensive and ambitious compendium of indeterminate and graphic notations, the Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58) remains something of a mystery. Often discussed for its stunning array of unusual and elaborate notations, it is all too rarely performed. As this recording testifies, it is a rich, dazzling and mesmerising work; carnivalesque, a 20th-century masterpiece.

As a companion work to the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, celebrated American composer Christian Wolff - a close associate of Cage and fellow member of the ‘New York School’ - was commissioned to write a new work for Apartment House. The result, Resistance, was premiered in July 2017. Both works celebrate performance as a unique event, and the openness of the scores produces music which resists repetition. Both works question the nature of an ensemble, how musicians and sounds relate to one another, and the functions of musical form in ways that, like Wolff’s title, seem vital to contemporary life.

CC by Apartment House with Philip Thomas (piano) marks a long and rich engagement with the music of both Cage - in particular the Concert for Piano and Orchestra - and Wolff, whose music they have enjoyed performing for 15 years.

Concert for piano and orchestra

HCR16 | John Cage: Concert For Piano And Orchestra [excerpt]

Phantom Images celebrates the intertwining of improvisation and electronics. Its four tracks present innovative approaches to instruments, novel deployment of electronic processing, and what might be the strangest ‘orchestra’ ever recorded. The disc is at times serious, at times chaotic, at times sinister, but the underlying character is one of ‘play’: adventure, joy, exchange, even a certain mischievousness.

Phantom Images

Phantom Image

HCR17 | Chris Mercer: Phantom Image [excerpt]

Beyond Pythagoras is the result of a five-year collaborative project between composers Paulina Sundin and Monty Adkins, exploring a new method for developing harmony in electroacoustic music inspired by the writings and techniques of William A. Sethares. The project emerged from Sundin’s exploration of Sethares’s writings from the early 90s which formalised the relationship between the notes of a tuning system, the partials of a timbre, and their relationship to sensory consonance. Sethares’s work facilitates the construction of bespoke microtonal scales from an analysis of instrumental sounds whilst retaining a coherent sense of consonance. As author Luca Turin wrote of Sethares’s work, “Physics had built a prison round music, and Sethares set it free.”

The works on display here, realised over a four-year period, present a dynamic and dramatic exploration of Sethares’s thinking. From the formal rigour of ‘Emergence’, to the intricate harmonic development of ‘Splintered Echoes’, these pieces demonstrate a detailed and colourful sense of sound design allied with a meticulous structural balance – immersive, patient, timbrally rich, and often quite elegant, with intricate interplay between the acoustic and electronic sound sources.

Beyond Pythagoras

Splintered Echoes

HCR18 | Monty Adkins, Paulina Sundin & Jonny Axelsson: Splintered Echoes [excerpt]

Bozzini+ combines Montreal’s famed Quatuor Bozzini with pianist Philip Thomas and Scottish fiddler Sarah-Jane Summers in world premiere recordings of piano quintets by Bryn Harrison and Mary Bellamy and a work for string quartet, fiddle, and electronics by Monty Adkins. The double-CD release is the culmination of a three-year project that included collaborative development residencies, workshops, performances, and recordings scattered between Huddersfield, Canada, Scotland, and Norway.

The three compositions presented on Bozzini+ represent diverse aesthetic approaches and working methods. Bryn Harrison’s Piano Quintet features rapid, tangled, filigree cycles and not-quite-repeating loops across its nearly hourlong duration, particularly through its dense, intricate piano writing. Continuing Harrison’s interest in the role of memory in our temporal perception of music, these cycles are more varied than in his previous work—they are layered and intertwined, presented forwards, backwards, often at the same time or at subtly slower or faster rates to produce a multi-dimensional view of time passing. Mary Bellamy’s beneath an ocean of air draws its inspiration from the artwork of James Turrell, and specifically his Deer Shelter Skyspace from the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Bellamy creates a musical analogue that replicate the experience of light and air inside of Turrell’s sculpture through high, untethered whistles, flickers, wisps, and slides, created through a collection of novel performance techniques developed in conjunction with the work’s performers. Finally, Monty Adkins’ Still Juniper Snow is an electroacoustic reworking of instrumental material composed for Summers and the Bozzini Quartet inspired by the Norwegian landscape where Summers lives as well as the Scottish and Norwegian folk traditions she blends in her work. Adkins takes these audio documents as a starting point and reuses, alters, effaces, and obfuscates the original material, extending, freezing, and stretching it into a texture that becomes suspended, glacial, and timeless.

Bozzini+ celebrates the longstanding relationship between the quartet and Huddersfield. They have been a regular presence at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival since 2002, including extended residencies at hcmf// from 2011–14 for their Composer’s Kitchen programme for emerging composers.

Bozzini+

beneath an ocean of air

HCR19 | Mary Bellamy: beneath an ocean of air [excerpt]

London’s Riot Ensemble present works by four of the most important composers in contemporary music today—Chaya Czernowin, Liza Lim, Rebecca Saunders, and Anna Thorvaldsdóttir—alongside rising star Mirela Ivicevic, who was commissioned as part of the ensemble’s 2017 Call for Scores. Four of the works are recorded here for the first time.

Inspired by the poetry of Jalaluddin Rumi, Liza Lim’s violin concerto Speak, Be Silent, featuring American violinist Sarah Saviet as soloist, explores ideas of union and connec on, as well as the ecstasy that comes at moments of change or transition. The atmospheric Ró—the Icelandic word for serenity—by Anna Thorvaldsdóttir is a piece of quiet but threatening moods that eventually comes to convey a fragile sense of identity and wholeness. In stark contrast, Mirela Ivicevic’s Baby Magnify/Lilith’s New Toy features the capricious demon and seductress Lilith experimenting her way through a series of alchemical transformations.

Raw sonic materials come to the fore once more in Chaya Czernowin’s Ayre ..., a study in forms of instrumental resistance, friction, and flow. Despite its title, it is not a song in any conventional sense but is instead a bare impression of musical line, extended, elongated, and unadorned. Finally, Rebecca Saunders’ Stirrings Still II continues a longstanding fascination with the writings of Samuel Becket, sharing its title with Becket’s final work of prose. Through its fragile and haunting soundworld, the piece’s brittle textures and distant keening explore minute musical activities on the edge of extinction.

Riot Ensemble is one of the UK’s most ambitious new music ensembles. With an Artistic Board of 20 members and a wide network of performers, curators, commissioners, and collaborators, Riot Ensemble are dedicated to creating and producing a diverse array of projects in the UK and Europe. They are particularly active in bringing emerging international voices into the British new-music scene, and since 2012 have given 184 world and UK premieres by composers from more than thirty countries. An annual call for scores has resulted in almost twenty commissions. Riot Ensemble has performed at hcmf// (UK), Dark Music Days (Iceland), Tampere Biennale (Finland), Nordic Music Days (Sweden), Spitalfields Music Festival (UK), and Música en Segura (Spain).

Speak, Be Silent

Ayre: Towed through plumes, thicket, asphalt, sawdust and hazardous air I shall not forget the sound of

HCR20 | Chaya Czernowin: Ayre ... [excerpt]

An expansion of the notion of music itself is necessarily linked to an extension of the instrumental boundaries; the piano cannot be spared from this process, lest it permanently becomes a “piece of furniture,” as Helmut Lachenmann had already characterized it in the late 1970′s. Which paths the extension can take is demonstrated by Sebastian Berweck on this album, with compositions which approach the dissolution of ossified pianistic convention from a variety of perspectives.

extended piano

splitting 16 für Klavier

HCR01 | Michael Maierhof: splitting 16 Für Klavier [excerpt]

ELISION is Australia’s premiere contemporary music ensemble. Its musicians have established a reputation for delivering authoritative and virtuosic interpretations of complex, unusual and challenging aesthetics, often developed in close collaboration with the composer. In recent years Liza Lim has been drawn to the hidden economies of ritual, authority and ownership expressed in Australian Aboriginal art. It is tempting to draw parallels between this secret culture and Lim’s two-decade involvement with the ELISION ensemble, one of the most musically invigorating composer-ensemble relationships in today’s music. Bryn Harrison’s relationship with ELISION has also informed surface forms (repeating), which contains a density of surface detail rarely found elsewhere in his music.

transference

surface forms (repeating)

HCR02 | Bryn Harrison: Surface Forms (Repeating) [excerpt]

Because of their age and their cultural ubiquity, brass instruments, more than most members of the Western orchestra, carry a host of cultural associations: angelic trumpets, royal fanfares, hunting calls, Last Posts and Louis Armstrong. No composer can be insensitive of that back story, yet it need not impose sterility of conservatism… Hübler opened up numerous possibilities in the controlled, structured parametrisation of instrumental practice.  This disc records a recent period of attention to virtuoso brass music, to which Cercar is an ancestor.

Strange Forces

Disfix

HCR03 | Timothy McCormack: Disfix [excerpt]

This album emerges from a group of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers working in electroacoustic media and computer music at the University of Huddersfield’s Centre for Research in New Music. The works display a great diversity in artistic practice and technical means, yet there are also common threads running through the collection: relations between the natural world and human ritual, the idea of sonic phenomena experienced as an embodied or spatialised presence, worlds of play and memory ‘in search of the miraculous’.

In Search of the Miraculous

Playing the Bones

HCR05 | Rose Dodd: Playing The Bones [excerpt]

Soundtrack excerpt from the film 'No Escape'

Nothing But The Hours

No Escape

HCR04 | Geoffrey Cox: No Escape [soundtrack excerpt from 'No Escape']

world-line presents the forces of ELISION on Huddersfield Contemporary Records for the fourth time, once again pushing the boundaries of instruments in search of visceral, expressive musical experiences. The three works present very different aesthetic approaches, crafting dynamic and innovative sound worlds from the ensemble’s instrumental resources. 

Expanding out from the explosive grinding of lap steel and electronics to an intricate interplay between lap steel, trumpet, flugelhorn, percussion, and electronics, Richard Barrett’s world-line recombines its overlapping movements and sections, continually recontextualising the lap steel guitar against the wider ensemble. The results are riotous and unpredictable, sometimes producing delicate and ethereal tones, other times forming dense and jagged musical interactions, the performers discharging fragmented motifs that ricochet off of one another. 

Timothy McCormack’s subsidence utilises two performers on a single electric lap steel guitar. Capturing the feeling of ongoing collapse, the guitar’s strings are gradually loosened, constantly lowering the pitch until the instrument begins to groan in protest. Gradually, noise occupies the space opened by the mechanical failings of the instrument, transforming the clean, crisp sound of the lap steel into a distorted tangle of sound before being subsumed by silence and the distant echoes of the now fallen strings. 

Finally, Liza Lim’s trumpet solo Roda – The Living Circle, performed here by its dedicatee Tristram Williams, references the energetic space within which the Afro-Brazilian martial arts practice known as capoeira is enacted. The capoeiristas spin and wheel in stylized combat: lyrical, celebratory, transcendent and joyous.

world-line

HCR21 | Richard Barrett: world-line [excerpt]

For many composers—Bach, Handel and Mozart among them—the fact that woodwind players need to breathe from time to time appears to be an inconvenience, an unwanted interruption to the long-flowing line, the continuous stream of activity. Breath breaks, becomes a barrier. But what if breathing itself was part of the music, rather than one of many hidden mechanisms that make it happen? 

Flautist Kathryn Williams has faced chronic respiratory conditions which caused the connections between her body, breath and musical expression to be severed. A successful sinus operation in 2016 enabled her to resume her performance career and Coming Up For Air began as a response to her recovery. Kathryn was forced to approach her performances one breath at a time, so single-breath pieces were able to demonstrate some of the ways she was able to stitch these relationships back together. The result is an ever-growing body of work that has proven to be therapeutic, both musically and physically.

This album collects 40 different responses to one straightforward question: what can be communicated in a single breath? This limitation has inspired a wide range of approaches—some composers have contributed a melody, some have foregrounded a physiological challenge, others have offered a single sound, and others still have created their own playful exceptions to the prompt. The contributions are from composers of all ages, backgrounds and levels of experience. The youngest composer represented is just eight years old, and the album brings together aesthetically diverse artists including Chaya Czernowin, Oliver Coates, Amber Priestley, Andy Ingamells, Larry Goves, Annie Hui-Hsin Hsieh, Newton Armstrong, Mary Bellamy, Stephen Chase, Sarah Hennies, Mauricio Pauly, and Brian Ferneyhough, who is represented here by the brief excerpt from Unity Capsule that provided the original inspiration for the project.

Coming Up For Air

HCR22 | Mark Dyer: Memento For Kathryn

spilled out from tangles invites the listener into an intimate space, to take a seat beside the singer, and to pause; to visit four delicate soundworlds, each of which explores in its own way the intimacy and physicality of the human voice. These four pieces were written for Juliet Fraser over the past five years. As a collection, they represent a partial survey of the solo repertoire for voice and tape/electronics Juliet has been building in recent years, but also of a generation’s compositional approach to the voice. Displaying an understated lyricism, these composers’ approaches show the breadth of creative possibility for crafting a sonic environment for the voice to inhabit.

Lisa Illean writes music of extreme sensitivity and refinement, of shifting shades and wide-open spaces. 'A through-grown earth' combines voice and pre-recorded lines for harp, strings, voice, electronic material and retuned zithers, resulting in an undulating texture that gently turns between microtonal modes and non-tempered tunings. 'Heave', by Sivan Eldar, is a work that questions the boundaries between matter and forms, and that tells a story of growth: out of the earth, into one’s own body and,  finally, memory, blurring all distinctions as the protagonist slips from earth into skin, body into light. Nomi Epstein describes 'collections for Juliet' as ‘a recording project piece for voice created from a detailed set of instructions and a small catalogue of ‘collections’ of three or four glissandi. A great richness emerges from this material through the detail heard at the micro-level and an overwhelming physicality is evident as the voice painstakingly rises and falls. Lawrence Dunn uses a twelve-note Just Intonation tuning system in 'While we are both', combining voice with fixed media that constantly drifts, reflecting perhaps the states (waking, awake, asleep) and times of day (light, morning, dark) found in Caitlin Doherty’s text. The effect is an uncanny combination of blazing harmonic brightness overlaid with long, aqueous ripples.

Soprano Juliet Fraser has a repertoire dominated by the very old and the very new. Juliet is an active commissioner of new music and has worked particularly closely with composers Rebecca Saunders, Bernhard Lang, Michael Finnissy, and Cassandra Miller. She regularly performs as a guest soloist with ensembles such as Klangforum Wien, Musikfabrik, Ensemble Modern, Plus-Minus, and Talea. Juliet is a core member and co-founder of EXAUDI vocal ensemble as well as the founder and artistic director of the eavesdropping series and symposium in London.

spilled out from tangles

A through-grown earth

HCR23 | Lisa Illean: A through-grown earth [excerpt]

New York’s Wet Ink Ensemble is a collective of composers, performers and improvisers dedicated to adventurous music-making. Named ‘The Best Classical Music Ensemble of 2018’ by The New York Times, Wet Ink’s work is rooted in an ethos of innovation through collaboration, extending from the ‘band’ atmosphere of Wet Ink’s core ensemble of composer-performers to projects with a broad range of renowned creators. Smoke, Airs brings together four works for instruments and live electronics from composers connected to Wet Ink and the Centre for Research in New Music (CeReNeM), exhibiting eclectic and innovative approaches to texture, gesture and musical time.

The essence of Charmaine Lee’s Smoke, Airs is suggestion—the material is made up of whistles, whispers, sandpaper, textual sensations and vocal utterances. Coalescing as hazy strata and organised blocks, Lee takes the listener through various sonic spaces, as if moving through the rooms of an abandoned house. Dead Time continues Bryn Harrison’s interest in challenging the listener’s perception of musical time. Here, Harrison sets up a dialogue between acoustic and electronic loops, building an interplay between live and sampled elements that results in an unspooling of melodic fragments, leading to one of Harrison’s most daring approaches to musical form.

Kristina Wolfe’s A Mere Echo of Aristoxenus is a set of two pieces based on the ancient accounts of aural architecture of two lost sites, a large Greco-Roman amphitheatre, as described by Vitruvius, and the Echo Stoa in the Olympic Sanctuary in Marathon, Greece. These works, emerging from virtual, digital reconstructions of the historical sites, expand and resonate, creating a shimmering three-dimensional image of a space long past. (un)weave, by Pierre Alexandre Tremblay, brings the record to a close, revelling in the beautiful complexity of the noise of busy, unfolding, and unwoven experiences. Fusing acoustic and electronic sound into a dynamic, fleetingly intertwined relationship of construction and disintegration, (un)weave reveals the great beauty in the complex dislocation immediately following sharp changes in musical trajectory, at the very moment when time feels elastic.

Smoke, Airs

(un)weave

HCR24 | Pierre Alexandre Tremblay: (un)weave

There is no more revealing a medium in music than the human voice. Coming from deep inside the body, carried on the breath, acquiring resonance in the head, shaped and channelled through the same mouth and lips through which we speak and with which we kiss – this sound, not filtered through wood, metal or gut, cannot be separated from the human being that made it. By the time it leaves the body, it is intrinsically, inextricably personal.

Exposure

A painter of figures in rooms

HCR06 | Aaron Cassidy: A painter of figures in rooms [excerpt]

Founded in 2009, Huddersfield Contemporary Records (HCR) is a label devoted to new music. Based at the University of Huddersfield, and established in partnership between CeReNeM (the Centre for Research in New Music), Huddersfield University Press, and hcmf//, HCR features both established and emerging artists at the cutting edge of music making, including diverse innovations in instrumental composition, electronics, and free improvisation. HCR releases have been recorded and produced both in-house at the university and with a broad selection of professional partners, including hcmf//, ZKM, and Radio Bremen, and have attracted exceptional press attention for a label of its size. HCR produces outward-facing compilations, internationally contextualised but centred on new music in the UK. The label develops concept-driven releases, typically featuring a single performing artist and multiple composers, often drawing on the resources of CeReNeM’s industry partnerships and its international research network.  
 
Since 2015, HCR has been exclusively distributed by NMC Recordings.

Popular tracks by HCR: Huddersfield Contemporary Records