Aaron Einbond

Cosmologies

Séverine Ballon

Alvise Sinivia

Riot Ensemble

Aaron Holloway-Nahum

atd16

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.

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Rósa Lind

Kandinsky Kunstwerke

Geoffrey Gartner

Laura Chislett

Mark Knoop

atd17

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’.

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Soosan Lolavar

Every Strand of Thread and Rope

Sarah Saviet

atd18 binaural download only

‘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.

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Alvin Lucier

Wave Songs

Juliet Fraser

atd19 binaural download only

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.

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Newton Armstrong

The Book of the Sediments

Juliet Fraser

atd20 binaural download only

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.

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Evan Johnson

lists, little stars

Ben Smith

Ian Pace

atd13

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.

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Angharad Davies

gwneud a gwneud eto / do and do again

Angharad Davies

atd14

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’.

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Aldo Clementi

Canoni circolari

Kathryn Williams

Joe Richards

Mira Benjamin

Mark Knoop

atd15 binaural download only

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.

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Anthony Braxton

Ghost Trance Solos

Kobe Van Cauwenberghe

atd10

Over the course of a long career spanning free jazz and experimentalism, Anthony Braxton has continually questioned the systems by which music is notated, named and played. There is a warmth and humour to Van Cauwenberghe’s response to Braxton’s Ghost Trance Music that seems fully in keeping with the project’s radical, friendly openness.

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Anthony Pateras

Erkki Veltheim

Duos for Other Instruments

Anthony Pateras

Erkki Veltheim

atd11

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.

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Catherine Lamb

wave/forming (astrum)

Bryan Eubanks

Xavier Lopez

atd12 binaural download only

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.

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Tim Parkinson

Piano music 2015-16

Mark Knoop

atd6

The piano pieces on this recording were composed between the summer of 2015 and the end of 2016. Tim Parkinson’s personal history with the instrument, and the way his music sometimes alights on familiar figurations or scatters them, feeds into bigger questions about what it means to continue to write piano music in the twenty-first century.

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Cassandra Miller

Songs about Singing

Juliet Fraser

Plus-Minus Ensemble

atd7

Voices cut across our inner and external experiences. In this first CD to feature exclusively the vocal music of Cassandra Miller, we encounter a variety of these voices, from those that we imitate, to those we hum along to, to those that emerge unbidden.

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Georgia Rodgers

A to B | Late lines

Serge Vuille

Séverine Ballon

atd8 binaural download only

These two works by Georgia Rodgers place the activity of a soloist under a sonic microscope, using amplification to render tiny performance details larger-than-life. Computer processing leads to the instrumental sound being layered with itself, creating new spaces and trajectories, and confusing the distinction between ‘source’ and ‘environment’. Mastered for headphone listening in surround-sound binaural format.

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Karlheinz Stockhausen

KONTAKTE

George Barton

Siwan Rhys

atd9 binaural download only

This recording of Stockhausen’s KONTAKTE (realised 1958-60 and enticingly catalogued in this version for electronic sounds, piano and percussion as ‘Nr. 12 ½’) captures in high-definition the technicolour ‘contacts’ between instrumental and electronic sounds and the many and varied forms of spatial motion that a listener experiences in live, immersive performances of the work. Performed by GBSR duo from memory and mastered for headphone listening in surround-sound binaural format.

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Morton Feldman

For John Cage

Aisha Orazbayeva

Mark Knoop

atd1

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.

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Matthew Shlomowitz

Avant Muzak

asamisimasa

Håkon Stene

atd2

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.

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Séverine Ballon

inconnaissance

Séverine Ballon

atd3

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.

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Milton Babbitt

Philomel

Juliet Fraser

atd4 binaural download only

‘Lost, lost in the wooded night,’ bruised and speechless, Philomel begins her song. Composed in 1964 for voice and pre-recorded 4-channel surround sound, Babbitt’s sound-world is one of disorientation, dislocation and, ultimately, transformation. Mastered for headphone listening in surround-sound binaural format.

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Luigi Nono

La fabbrica illuminata

Loré Lixenberg

atd5 binaural download only

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.

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