Double vinyl LP pressing. 2017 release, an album of Bach works recorded by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, mandolinist Chris Thile, and bassist Edgar Meyer. The album comprises works by J.S. Bach originally written for keyboard instruments, plus one sonata for viola da gamba. In 2011, Ma, Thile, and Meyer-along with Stuart Duncan-collaborated on The Goat Rodeo Sessions, which won two Grammy Awards. Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer's first recording together was the 1996 album Appalachia Waltz, which also featured fiddler Mark O'Connor; that album was followed by Appalachian Journey, also with O'Connor, in 2000. Thile then joined Meyer on Ma's 2008 holiday album, Songs of Joy and Peace, before the trio reunited, along with Stuart Duncan, for The Goat Rodeo Sessions, an album of original tunes drawing from the musicians' backgrounds in bluegrass, classical, and American roots music. As Ma told Billboard at that time: "How often do you work with people who are master virtuosos and also master improvisers and composers, who know at least two musical traditions unbelievably well?" He continued, "It's just extraordinary when you have people who can actually show on their instruments what they're thinking at any moment, without a delay. As soon as you think it, it gets transferred in your neuromusculature immediately into sound."
Since the release of his last album - 2017's Finding Shore, a collaboration with Brian Eno - pianist and singer-songwriter Tom Rogerson's life has undergone a number of dramatic transformations. While writing his new album Retreat to Bliss, Rogerson had a child, lost a parent, and received his own diagnosis of a rare form of blood cancer. The new decade brought him from Berlin to the Suffolk of his childhood, composing profound pieces of minimal songwriting in the church next to his parents' home. Rogerson studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music under mentors like Harrison Birtwistle, and he made his live debut as an improvising pianist in 2002, before releasing an improvised record with Reid Anderson (Bad Plus) and Mike Lewis (Happy Apple, Bon Iver) in 2004. He formed the band Three Trapped Tigers in 2007, expertly blending elements of electronic, jazz and noise rock into a cohesive whole. The band earned a reputation for innovative live shows and went on to perform and collaborate with artists like Brian Eno, Deftones, and the Dillinger Escape Plan. It was working with Eno, another Suffolk native, that eventually led Rogerson back to his roots and back to a place where he could write Retreat to Bliss, his solo debut album. "All my life, the piano has been my constant companion, my confessor, my best friend, and my worst enemy," Rogerson explains. "I've always written music on and for the piano, but it felt too personal, too private to release." Indeed, listening to Retreat to Bliss feels almost like eavesdropping, as though you're crouched in the belfry of a Suffolk church, bearing witness to a form of musical bloodletting. For the first time in his noteworthy career, Rogerson has combined masterful piano playing and subtle electronics with the texture of his own voice, an attempt to express deeply private emotions that were difficult to articulate using instrumental music alone. "The last few years have brought some struggle, some joy, and a lot of change. My response has been to retreat to what I trust the most: the piano, my voice, and the landscape I grew up in. That's how the album got it's title, and how I came to be ready finally to release a solo record." Secular yet devotional, intensely personal yet profound, the experience of listening to Retreat to Bliss seems to evade characterization. It's physical and emotional, a glimpse into the mind of an artist who has chosen exposure over withdrawal, who uses his command of the piano to chart an unflinching path forward, never looking back.
Jenny Conlee, the multi-instrumentalist best known for her 23-year tenure as a member of indie icons The Decemberists, is stepping once more to center stage this year with the release of Tides: Pieces for Accordion and Piano. The humble yet deeply emotional album of instrumentals finds Conlee pulling from her vast well of influences and knowledge to work in a more neo-classical mode. A1. Hawk (Dorian) A2. Dune Grass (Lydian) A3. Ocean (Mixolydian) A4. Sand (Aeolian) A5. Wind (Phrygian) A6. Shell (Locrian) A7. Sunset (Ionian) B8. Low Tide B9. Pinwheel B10. Sandpiper B11. Looking Glass (For Tiffany) B12. Shore Pine
Vivaldi's best known work, The Four Seasons is given new life in this Audiophile Direct to Disc recording from Chasing the Dragon. In order to make this D2D recording, the Interpreti Veneziani Chamber Orchestra performs each album side live in the studio, recorded via state of the art, all-tube valve microphones, fed to a Neve Desk, and then via a pure analogue path directly to the Neumann VMS80 lathe. 180 gram Audiophile Direct to Disc LP! A dynamic performance, pure analog delight!
The music of the saga has featured the work of the most recognized film composers, including John Williams (who received two Oscar nominations for the series), Patrick Doyle, Nicholas Hooper and Alexandre Desplat. The Greatest Harry Potter Film Music Collection includes 11 tracks performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra, which brings together for the very first time the most memorable music from the eight movies.
Rimma Sushanskaya conducts The Locrian Ensemble of London with Fiona Kelly on flute and Jean Kelly on harp. For many of the Chasing the Dragon albums they have been using 3 microphones used in a "Decca Tree" array to capture the main stereo image. Recently they have been experimenting with a Neumann Binaural Head. Although normal stereo sounds great on headphones, they found that when using the head, the effect can become almost three dimensional. Chasing the Dragon therefore decided to create a series of albums for headphone listeners. This is their 2nd Binaural release and they hope when listening, you will be transported to St. Martin in The Fields in London, enjoying the fun of Mozart by Candlelight! Binaural Recording on 180 Gram 33RPM Audiophile Vinyl!
Vinyl LP pressing. Fallen Trees is the new album by singular talent and literal force of nature Lubomyr Melnyk - known as 'the prophet of the piano' due to his lifelong devotion to his instrument. Cascades of notes, canyons and rivers of sound: there's something about his music that channels the natural world at it's most awe-inspiring. In Fallen Trees the connection with the environment continues, taking it's cue from a long rail journey Melnyk made through Europe. Glancing out of the window as the train passed through a dark forest, he was struck by the sight of trees that had recently been felled. "They were glorious," he says. "Even though they'd been killed, they weren't dead. There was something sorrowful there, but also hopeful." That sense of sadness touched by optimism infuses the album, too: rarely has Melnyk made music so shot through with melancholy and regret, but which sounds so rapt, even radiant.
Gramophone states, "A unique statement, one that can't fail to make an impression. Recorded in the sumptuous acoustic of the Jesuitenkirche in Vienna, there's a detectable flavor of southern European oratorio, ebulliently theatrical, immediate and free-breathing (...). This is the most culturally alert reading in years and a truly original and illuminating experience." This recording won a Grammy Award of Best Choral Performance and a Diapason d'or de l'annee in 2001, and it's one of the 100 Greatest Recordings from Gramophone: an absolute landmark of Bach's masterpiece, the Saint Matthew Passion.
Denovali presents Spark and Earth, the ninth full length album from acclaimed NYC-based composer and performer Mario Diaz de Leon. Long celebrated for his electroacoustic chamber music, Spark and Earth is the first of Diaz de Leon's solo albums to foreground his performance as a metal guitarist, alongside a vividly textured electronic ensemble of terse synth stabs, woodwind and vocal timbres, floor rattling synth bass, and propulsive kick drums. Since 2009, Diaz de Leon has released four recordings of his collaborations with chamber ensembles (International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea, TAK), while from 2012-2016 he produced three solo electronic albums under the project name Oneirogen. With the two-song album Heart Thread (2022), he began releasing electronic works under his own name. His music has been celebrated over the last decade for it's "hallucinatory intensity" (New York Times), "snarling exuberance" (Pitchfork), and "remarkable textures and vivid atmosphere" (New Yorker Magazine). As collaborator, he is guitarist and vocalist in the extreme metal duo Luminous Vault (Profound Lore Records), and performs synth and drum machine in Bloodmist, an electroacoustic improvisation trio with Jeremiah Cymerman and Toby Driver. In 2023, he collaborated with Eartheater and members of Krallice in a performance of songs from her album Trinity. Since 2019, he has taught at Stevens Institute of Technology as Assistant Professor of Music and Technology. A1. Aqua A2. Cruces A3. Templo A4. Breath of God A5. Mirror Spirit B1. Lithic Flame B2. Carnelian B3. Kepha B4. Elemental
In the fall of 2021, Simeon ten Holt's "Canto Ostinato" was reborn in a 'solo version for seven keyboards'. During the weeks leading up to the birth of his son Lark, Erik Hall moved methodically among the instruments in his recording studio, conducting a multi-track conversation with himself and the piece's score. Ten Holt composed "Canto Ostinato" between 1976 and 1979. The rhythmic motif (ostinato) repeated over it's entire length has a limited number of printed notes. It is up to the performers how to play them, for how long, where to place accents, etc. In the score, the composer calls on musicians to interact and evaluate, to fuse sounds and colors into one cohesive musical universe. Then a cosmos is created. You can get lost in that. You want to get lost in that, like in the original live recording with four pianos. "That performance is deeply compelling, almost otherworldly," says Hall. He has always been drawn to music that is based on repetition, harmonically rich, and tonal. He previously added a groundbreaking dimension to Steve Reich's 1976 minimal masterpiece "Music for 18 Musicians", and- as again now with 'Canto'- his motivation is the love of the music itself. "When I first heard the piece, I was captivated." Then the plan emerged to undergo the same focused practice as before. He stacked seven total layers of his 1962 Hammond M-101 organ, a 1910 Steinway grand piano, and a 1978 Rhodes electric piano, each performance informed by those that preceded it. Erik Hall's "Canto Ostinato" lasts for one hour, and from the sheer joy of playing this wondrous composition emerges an elegantly meandering journey. In it, music rises above itself, higher and higher, like a lark jubilating freedom in the sky.
After doing three solo albums, the challenge of interpreting Eric Satie's music seemed challenging, appealing and also like a good way of finding new angles and flavours in my own music. What struck me while digging deeper in his catalogue was how modern and progressive he still appears, beside the soothing and calming mellowness that I think we all associate his music with, I found very brave, sometimes stubborn minimalism and besides the blue harmonies that we now associate with jazz, I found really salty, almost cluster-like colours that must have been extremely challenging for the end of 19th century ears. I humbly thank Satie for letting me borrow his music for a while (he didn't have a say though), giving me both the meditative peace I hope you will also experience while listening and, like in the Nocturne, challenging my ears and fingers to reach new territories. - Martin Hederos
Patrick Higgins' new album TOCSIN is full of thrilling opposites. It is a masterclass of visceral genre-bending sounds that are physical and delicate at the same time. Over the course of three large compositions, the listener is brought on a journey of constant surprise, as when the sound of violins dissolves into a halo of pure noise, more at home in an underground electronics show than anything that appears on a concert stage. The performers include the Wet Ink Ensemble, hailed as the "Best Classical Ensemble of 2018"; acclaimed pianist Vicky Chow, "one of our era's most brilliant pianists,"; and the Mivos Quartet, "one of America's most daring and ferocious new-music ensembles. 1. Aletheia 2. Encomium 3. Passagio 4. Fugue (Burial) 5. Tocsin 1 6. Tocsin 2 6. Contrapunctus XIV
