Kindred spirits Passepartout Duo and Inoyama Land embody the essence of play – charting a new chapter and reinvigorating the environmental music and electronic landscape.Passepartout Duo is formed of Nicoletta Favari (IT) and Christopher Salvito (IT/US), who since 2015 have been on a continuous journey travelling the world’s corners, engaged in a creative process they term “slow music”. Having been guests of many notable artist residencies and with live performances in cultural spaces and institutions, their evocative music escapes categorisation. With no fixed abode their musical pilgrimage brought them to Japan first in 2019, which prompted a deep connection to Kankyō Ongaku ‘environmental music’, a genre in which Inoyama Land is often associated with, soundtracking the duo’s first immersive experience. In 2023 the duo revisited Japan and set out to reconnect in particular with the music of Inoyama Land, performed by Makoto Inoue and Yasushi Yamashita. The highly revered album ‘Danzindan-Pojidon’ (1983) produced by Haruomi Hosono amongst other well publicized and acclaimed reissues (Light in The Attic Records’ Grammy-nominated compilation ‘Kankyō Ongaku’), produced a global resurgence and admiration of the environmental music movement. Nicoletta took the lead to seek out Inoyama Land and in making contact successfully their intrigue and eagerness to meet was warmly reciprocated, and the group scheduled to meet in the form of a spontaneous improvisation session.“We’re deeply concerned with what it means to be a duo, and what it means for people to connect through music.”'Radio Yugawara' was recorded in 2023 in Makoto Inoue’s hometown of Yugawara where his family runs a kindergarten, whose space has doubled as a Sunday recording studio. Upon arriving a circle of four tables was set up in the school’s auditorium - the tables were carefully populated with children’s instruments: a full set of handbells, a glockenspiel, a xylophone, recorders, melodicas, and harmonicas. Surrounding the tables were racks hanging all sorts of bells and wind chimes and within this environment each performer set up their own electronic instruments. Dialling into each other, a simple set of playground ‘game rules’ was devised where time was divided into three separate sessions (1) ‘only electronic instruments’, ‘only acoustic’, and ‘a mix of both’, (2) ‘revolving duets’ each taking turns to play through a cycle of ‘four duos’ and (3) ‘anything permitted’, accumulating to more than three hours of material which was then carefully distilled into succinct tracks. The alluring album opener ‘Strange Clouds’ oscillates into view, setting a lush scenery built from a bed of synthesisers and the first glimpse of the chromaplane, the hand-built analogue instrument designed by Passepartout Duo, featuring a touchless interface and endless organic sounds that underpin the album’s 11-track inlets. Percussive pulses act as the heartbeat to ‘Abstract Pets’ before earthy sub-swells open the pathway to glistening glockenspiels and wind chimes. The atmosphere shapeshifts with ‘Simoom’ and ‘Tangerine Fields’ with swirling synth lines and subliminal beats resembling changes in weather patterns. At the centre points the idyllic ‘Observatory’ and ‘Mosaic’ could illuminate the deepest oceans before the hypnotic, arpeggiating synth lines in the otherworldly ‘Xiloteca’ propel the album towards ‘Solivago’, with its gentle lullaby of playful ambience. The reflective closer ‘Axolotl Dreams’ resolves their somewhat chance meeting with elegant pastoral chord strokes and uplifting synth swells, sending final signals upwards into the ether. 'Radio Yugawara' is a unique one-off transmission from a specific place and point in time, unlikely to ever occur again. The respective duo’s approach can really be described as “tuning in”, a tuning into each other, to themselves, and to the surrounding nature of Yugawara. Like waves that travel off-world, sounds travel through the universe and can be lost forever if we don’t seek them out. In finding a harmonic affinity within their instruments and a spiritual kinship in their interwoven performance, Radio Yugawara at its core is an interpretation of feeling, of close human interaction and the true essence of discovery. “The album is both a transmission from a location, but also a tuning into the surroundings and to each other. Music in this kind of ephemeral moment is much less about active creation and more about discovering something which is already there in the air.”  

Brilliant Experimental album by the Merzbow co-founder, recorded in 1989 - with sticker and insert

Originally named „Merz“, this album should have been Merzbow's first vinyl release, but never came out on vinyl. So actually "Yantra Material Action" is „Material Action 1“, recorded in 1981 - with sticker and insert

After two and a half years out of print, Corsano/Orcutt's most popular album, Made Out of Sound, returns in a limited edition pressing. Best of 2021 — The Guardian, Pitchfork, Wire, Aquarium Drunkard, Stereogum, Magnet & Raven Sings the Blues.Pitchfork : "It’s a joyful noise. This is one of the more uplifting records of experimental music in recent memory. There’s something about how Orcutt and Corsano push each other that leads to work that pulses with the life force—these pieces bring to mind sunlight hitting a maple leaf, cells dividing under a microscope, a deep thirst quenched. Mark Richardson"Wire : "When you listen to Made Out Of Sound, you feel encouraged to immerse yourself in every note, cherishing the beauty of this otherworldly space. Joshua Minsoo Kim"

Finally on CD!!!  In a trajectory full of about-faces, Music for Four Guitars splices the formal innovations of Bill Orcutt's software-based music into the lobe-frying, blown-out Fender hyperdrive of his most frenetic workouts with Corsano or Hoyos. And while the guitar tone here is resolutely treble-kicked — or, as Orcutt puts it, "a bridge pickup rather than a neck pickup record" — it still wades the same melodic streams as his previous LPs (yet, as Heraclitus taught us, that stream is utterly different the second time around). Although it's a true left-field listen, Music for Four Guitars is bizarrely meditative, a Bill Orcutt Buddha Machine, a glimpse of the world of icy beauty haunting the latitudes high above the Delta (down where the climate suits your clothes). I've written before of the immediate misapprehension that greeted Harry Pussy on their first tour with my band Charalambides — that this was a trio of crazed freaks spontaneously spewing sound from wherever their fingers or drumsticks happened to land — but I'll grant the casual listener a certain amount of confusion based on the early recorded evidence (and the fact that the band COULD be a trio of crazed freaks letting fly, as we learned from later tours). But to my ears, the precision and composition of their tracks were immediately apparent, as if the band was some sort of 5-D music box with its handle cranked into oblivion by a calculating organ grinder, running through musical maps as pre-ordained as the road to a Calvinist's grave. That organ grinder, it turns out, was Bill Orcutt, whose solo guitar output until 2022 has tilted decidedly towards improvisation, while his fetish for relentless, gridlike composition has animated his electronic music (c.f. Live in LA, A Mechanical Joey). Music for Four Guitars, apparently percolating since 2015 as a loosely-conceived score for an actual meatspace guitar quartet, is the culmination of years ruminating on classical music, Magic Band miniatures, and (perhaps) The League of Crafty Guitarists, although when the Reich-isms got tossed in the brew is anyone's guess. And Reichian (Steve, not Wilhelm) it is. The album's form is startlingly minimalist — four guitars, each consigned to a chattering melody in counterpoint, repeated in cells throughout the course of the track, selectively pulled in and out of the mix to build fugue-like drama over the course of 11 brief tracks. It's tempting to compare them to chamber music, but these pieces reflect little of the delicacy of Satie's Gymnopedies or Bach's Cantatas. Instead, they bulldoze their way through melodic content with a touch of the motorik romanticism of New Order or Bailter Space ("At a Distance"), but more often ("A Different View," "On the Horizon") with the gonad-crushing drive of Discipline-era Crimson, full of squared corners, coldly angled like Beefheart-via-Beat-Detective. Just to nail down the classical fetishism, the album features a download of an 80-page PDF score transcribed by guitarist Shane Parish. And while it'd be just as reproducible as a bit of code or a player piano roll, I can easily close my eyes and imagine folks with brows higher than mine squeezing into their difficult-listening-hour folding chairs at Issue Project Room to soak up these sounds being played by real people reading a printed score 50 years from now. And as much as I want to bomb anyone's academy, that feels like a warm fuzzy future to sink into.. — TOM CARTER 

Originally released and sold on their fall 2009 US tour, Flower-Corsano Duo’s “The Chocolate Cities” stands as one of the group's most spirited releases. Recorded live in Cambridge, England and Geneva, Switzerland these recordings capture the power and energy being harnessed by the duo at a time of frequent touring, just after the release of their monumental double-LP “The Four Aims.”Michael Flower is perhaps best known for his work in Vibracathedral Orchestra, along with a slew of other bands, collaborations, and solo work. Meanwhile, Chris Corsano is well known as one of the premier drummers of modern times, and a frequent collaborator of Joe McPhee, Bill Orcutt, Bill Nace, Paul Flaherty, and many more. As a duo Flower and Corsano present an endlessly shifting and transforming sound, meshing elements of free jazz, drone, and ecstatic psychedelia into something all its own. While Corsano guides with his nimble and dynamic drumming, Flower plays amplified Japan Banjo (also known as a Shahi Baaja) providing melody, lead, and drone, often simultaneously. Gripping even in its quietest passages, thoughtful even in its most unrestrained crescendos, “The Chocolate Cities” documents a duo at the height of their collective prowess.Saved from the obscurity of its original CDr format and presented for the first time on vinyl with stunning new artwork by Chris Corsano, “The Chocolate Cities” stands as testament to the power of two magnificent players even 15 years on.

This book is dedicated to the history of the music label Free Music Production (FMP), which from 1968 to 2010 achieved incomparable things as a Berlin platform for the production, presentation and documentation of music and decisively shaped the musical development of the '70s and beyond. Based on many conversations from over thirty years with key protagonists such as Peter Brötzmann or Jost Gebers, Markus Müller tells the success story of a musicians' initiative that emerged in the context of the 1968 ideas of self-organization and self-determination and worked successfully in an international network for over 40 years. Thematic focal points include the Total Music Meeting and the Workshop Freie Musik, the production of recordings, relations with GDR musicians, FMP and women, the internationally groundbreaking collaboration with Cecil Taylor. The book builds on the major FMP exhibitions in Munich and Berlin, but in many aspects goes far beyond them. Thanks to unrestricted access to the FMP-Publishing Archive in Borken, many first-published documents and photographs from the history of FMP can be found.

Adorno and the Aesthetics of Postwar Serial Music is the first book-length study of the relation between Theodor W. Adorno’s aesthetics and postwar serial music. Adorno’s extensive writings and lectures about serialism, his first-hand knowledge of the technique, and his personal acquaintance with leading serial composers did much to shape his philosophical work. That work, in turn, influenced postwar composers, and the signs of this influence are clearly visible in the compositional theory and aesthetic ideas of the period. This book presents a detailed examination of these ideas, and places them in their historical, philosophical, and cultural contexts. It will enable a better understanding not only of serial music and aesthetics, but also of Adorno and his aesthetic theory. As such, it will appeal to composers, music historians, philosophers, critics, and anyone interested in the aesthetics of modernism.

Cage & Consequences brings together analytical essays by scholars of different disciplines, artists“ contributions, and conversations with composers and associates of John Cage. They represent the diversity of Cage“s spheres of influence on the following generations of artists, as well as his significance for musicology, art theory, and media studies. The contributions are presented in their original language, English or German.

Karlheinz Stockhausen was one of the most influential and prolific composers of the twentieth century. His legacy extends far beyond his extensive catalogue of musical works to his achievements as a pioneer of electronic music, as a writer and thinker on music, and as a teacher. In this volume, various aspects of Stockhausen“s legacy are discussed, including his influence on the creative work of others, and the influences he likewise derived from some of his closest associates. Central theoretical tenets of his work are revisited and new evaluations made regarding the significance, impact and potential of Stockhausen“s contributions in this area. Compositions discussed in the volume extend across the whole span of the composer“s life, with several essays dealing explicitly with the musical, conceptual and theatrical background to Stockhausen“s work from the opera cycle LICHT onwards. Interdisciplinary in approach and drawing on a number of recent studies of Stockhausen“s music, many of which are not otherwise available in English, the volume is a significant contribution to Stockhausen scholarship which—looking forward—provides new impetuses for the future understanding of his musical legacy.

This book is the first pictorial monograph about the Korean-German composer Isang Yun, who was born in southern Korea in 1917 and died in Berlin in 1995. It was first in Germany, with influence from what around 1960 was then the avant-garde that he developed an individual musical language of his own. A little later Yun was drawn into the field of tension between political advocacy motivated by humanitarian, societal concerns and responding to ideological incitement, between imprisonment, torture, and reparation. It was in his compositional work that he found a place of refuge. His music proceeds from the primacy of melody and the sustained tone, which he found preformed in the traditional music of his native Korea and then succeeded in developing heterophonically and spatially. The resultant works were characterized by unusual intensity and rich tone colors.

The Hungarian-Swiss pianist Géza Anda (1921-1976), together with Annie Fischer, György Cziffra and György Sebök, is regarded as one of the most important personalities of 20th-century pianism to emerge from the great tradition of the Hungarian school. Anda’s interpretations of the Classical, Romantic and modern repertoire, especially of the piano concertos of Mozart and Bartók, have long been regarded as authoritative. As a teacher, he had a lasting impact on subsequent generations of pianists. The Concours Géza Anda, founded in Zurich in 1979, has achieved worldwide renown while successfully continuing Anda’s legacy as an artist and a pedagogue. This book, published by the Géza Anda Foundation in Zurich to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Géza Anda’s birth, offers a panorama of his life, work and legacy based on many biographical documents, some of which are presented here for the very first time.

The phenomenon of “graphic” scores has been a subject of fascination, controversy, and a flourishing of artistic talent since its inception in the aftermath of the Second World War. The scores of that age, despite their compelling visual presence, nevertheless remain elusive: the means of performance are obscure, and they resist conventional analysis. This study reconsiders graphic scores from the perspective of Information Theory, derived from studies of “ergodic” texts: the ergodic score requires non-trivial effort from the participants in its realization, becoming a cybernetic object that challenges our beliefs about what music is, how it works, and where to find its meaning. The sounds of a musical performance are the field in which a larger metamorphosis takes place: like the labyrinth, the journey to the heart of ergodic scores entails both risk and transcendence. This study illuminates ergodic scores from their theoretical foundations: the abstract theory of how they work, the history of exemplary figures from the postwar avant-garde—including such luminaries of the art as Yoko Ono, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Anestis Logothetis, Pauline Oliveros, and John Cage—and concrete analysis of selected repertoire. Using pioneering theoretical insights—and with the benefit of original archival research, interviews with the artists themselves, and decades of experience as a composer and performer of graphic scores—the author establishes one of the great attainments of the twentieth century as a living art.

For the first time this book in detail reconstructs the often blurred traces of the life of the Afro American piano virtuoso from Toledo, Ohio. Based on the stories of many contemporaries and fellow musicians and on countless reports in the daily press and jazz journals, a fascinating portrait emerges of a unique artist and the pulsating world of jazz of his time. Ever since his first appearance in New York City in 1932, Art Tatum has been regarded as the most important pianist in the history of jazz. His technique took the breath away even from concert pianists of the calibre of Horowitz, his touch was of unparalleled lightness and elegance, and his improvisations across the entire harmonic spectrum put him decades ahead of his time. 

Some think Eric Dolphy was an otherworldly apparition. His stellar career lasted little more than 5 years. He was one of the most important pioneers of the jazz avant-garde of the 1960s. As a multi-instrumentalist, Dolphy played flute, bass clarinet, alto saxophone and clarinet. He also composed and arranged. His brilliant solos in performances with the Mingus Band, among others, are milestones in jazz and music history. Guillaume Belhomme traces his biography in sketches. “For having been an innovator, Eric Dolphy became an original. The depth of his message then caught up with him. At the source he created, a lineage of individual musicians that has not yet faded out of sight has continuously drawn, searching, perhaps, for ways to cross to the other side, beyond the obvious and the easy.”Guillaume Belhomme “Finally we have an English translation of Guillaume Belhomme’s wonderful biography of Eric Dolphy. I can read just enough French to know that it is a heart-felt homage to the great man. This translation will make a fuller appreciation possible.” - Evan Parker

Composing While Black eröffnet einzigartige neue Perspektiven auf zeitgenössische afrodiasporische Komponist:innen, die zwischen 1960 und heute aktiv waren bzw. sind, ein Zeitraum, der von der Forschung, der Programmgestaltung von Konzerten und journalistischen Darstellungen vor allem in Europa bisher weitgehend ignoriert wurde. Diese interdisziplinäre Aufsatzsammlung befasst sich mit Oper, Orchester-, Kammer-, Instrumental- und elektroakustischer Musik sowie mit Klangkunst, Konzeptkunst und digitalen Intermedien und zeigt die afrodiasporische Neue Musik als einen interkulturellen, generationenübergreifenden Raum der Innovation, der neue Themen, Geschichten und Identitäten bietet. Composing While Black presents unique new perspectives on Afrodiasporic contemporary composers active between 1960 and the present, a period that academic inquiry, concert programming, and journalistic accounts have largely ignored up to now, particularly in Europe. This interdisciplinary essay collection engages with opera, orchestral, chamber, instrumental, and electroacoustic music, as well as sound art, conceptual art, and digital intermedia, revealing Afrodiasporic new music as an intercultural, multigenerational space of innovation that offers new subjects, histories, and identities. “Composing While Black is a brilliant collection of essays on the black presence in contemporary Classical music. From the poignant and richly resonant title through the editors‘ authoritative historical introduction to the mix of reflection, anecdote, analysis, and study of the compositional process across nine essays, the book illuminates black creativity on terrain previously figured as white. Timely, informative, and challenging, this bilingual text is a must-read for anyone interested not only in the work of Afrodiasporic composers but in the reach of the very notion of the contemporary itself.” KOFI AGAWU The Graduate Center, City University of New York “What an essential book this is: an invigorating corrective packed with bright sounds, big musical personalities and astute social context. The introduction alone is a terrific primer; the chapters are vivid case studies written with fresh and authoritative clarity. Above all, the music of this book demands to be heard. Its pages will send you down countless avenues of discovery and fill whole notebooks with names, ideas and intersections to pursue – the greatest thrill.” KATE MOLLESON, author of Sound Within Sound: Opening Our Ears to the 20th Century. “This brilliantly illuminating survey of twenty-first-century Afro-diasporic composition testifies to the countervailing powers of identity and difference. The modes of art-making that the editors place under the rubric “Composing While Black” are, in fact, a teeming, ever-expanding universe of musical possibility, one that resists, absorbs, and transmutes immense pressures. Composers are seen both as self-governing individuals and as figures within far-flung, intricately networked communities: the doubleness of vision honors the inward-outward ardor of human creativity.” ALEX ROSS

“In the spring of 1977, two musicians – Han Bennink and Peter Brötzmann – disappeared into the depths of a German deity named Dark Forest…” – David KeenanSchwarzwaldfahrt 1977 is a magical document of a moment out of time, a moment when the saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and percussionist Han Bennink made a series of journeys deep into the heart of the Black Forest with a bunch of cameras and some early portable recording equipment in order to capture the sound of the moment. The recordings that they made there were released as the Schwarzwaldfahrt album by FMP in 1977 and it remains a free music classic, recorded completely in the open air, with Bennink and Brö duetting with the birds, playing in the water, drumming on great natural xylophones made of logs and catching the sounds of airplanes strafing the skies. It is a music of eternal expansion, of elemental communion.This new book comes with the original recordings on a CD and is assembled round a treasure trove of newly-discovered photographs taken during the trip by both Brötzmann and Bennink – photographs of each other, of their lodgings, of their ritual communions, of their route into, and out of, the forest. To contextualize the photos – and the music – the award-winning author David Keenan (This Is Memorial Device/Monument Maker et al) contributes an evocative/poetic text that situates the duo’s radical musical action in the context of their work while riffing on the uncanny beauty and long-ago aura of these evocative photographs, photos that seem to echo the very sounds of the Dark Forest itself.“It’s so lonely, this music, these two friends, making music on their own, in all of this space, and back of time, now, too, a document of a world that seems less populated – by people, by ideas, by demands, by the tyranny of modern time, itself.” – David KeenanEdition of 1000 copies. 120 pages. 20 x 22cm.Published November 2022