"𝘛𝘩𝘦𝘯 the wind would stop blowing so hard. Kate watching a mist falling over the hills when they first arrived here, and running to tell her, it's history, to come and see history.”
—Ali Smith

“Nothing left but the fuzz ball, no more than that, nothing, nothing.”
—Juan Emar (tr. Megan McDowell)


In 1969, in Munich, Germany, Manfred Eicher founded the jazz label ECM Records. Over the next several decades, ECM put out records that, as much as they seemed to be normal jazz records—improvised ensemble recordings of acoustic and electric instruments—sounded more like studies, maybe even sculptures, of silence and space. You can always tell when you’re listening to an ECM record because all of the music seems to usher forth from an incredible stillness, like you might feel in a desert or the arctic. You may find yourself having to listen harder to an ECM record in order to discern its true character—otherwise it could come off as an impossibly smooth surface, a pebble in a riverbed, the texture of which reveals very little of the effort required to form it.

In 1984, ECM started putting out compilations of their artists’ various recordings for the label, all of them entitled Works...  more
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released November 14, 2024

Music by Music Area
Additional mixing by Tyler McKusick.
Liner text by Ivy Nelson.
Design by Andrew Walters.

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