Deeply resonant spiritual music transmitted via piano, organ, and harmonium by beloved composer and Ethiopian Orthodox nun Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru. Church of Kidane Mehret collects all the musical work from Emahoy's 1972 private press album of the same name, alongside two additional unreleased piano recordings, exploring Emahoy's take on "Ethiopian Church Music." Recording herself in churches throughout Jerusalem, Emahoy engages directly with the Ethiopian Orthodox musical liturgy. For the first time, we hear Emahoy on harmonium and massive, droning pipe organ, alongside some of her most moving piano work.
Deeply resonant spiritual music transmitted via piano, organ, and harmonium by beloved composer and Ethiopian Orthodox nun Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru. Church of Kidane Mehret collects all the musical work from Emahoy's 1972 private press album of the same name, alongside two additional unreleased piano recordings, exploring Emahoy's take on "Ethiopian Church Music." Recording herself in churches throughout Jerusalem, Emahoy engages directly with the Ethiopian Orthodox musical liturgy. For the first time, we hear Emahoy on harmonium and massive, droning pipe organ, alongside some of her most moving piano work.
The 2-LP set includes highlights from Bach's greatest masterpieces performed by first-class musicians: Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Mstislav Rostropovich, Ton Koopman, Alexandre Tharaud, David Fray, Sir Neville Marriner, Fabio Biondi, Emmanuel Pahud, Beatrice Rana, Sigiswald Kuijken
Vinyl LP pressing. 2024 release. Nonesuch Records releases Rectangles and Circumstance, an album of ten songs co-written and performed by Caroline Shaw and So Percussion. The album follows their 2021 Grammy Award-winning Nonesuch debut, Narrow Sea, and their first record as a band, 2021's Let the Soil Play It's Simple Part, with Shaw on vocals backed by So-Eric Cha-Beach, Josh Quillen, Adam Sliwinski, and Jason Treuting. Grammy-winning engineer Jonathan Low (The National, Taylor Swift) co-produced with them on both Let the Soil... and Rectangles and Circumstance. Sliwinski says. "For this album, Caroline, Eric, and I sourced a group of nineteenth-century poems that shaped it's expressive mode [and] ended up using verses by Christina Rosetti, Emily Bronte, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and William Blake... The lyrics on this album by members of the band contain wordplay that explores the same profound feelings explored by Blake and Dickinson."
Two years after his #1 classical crossover hit Piano Piano, cofounder of The Lumineers and multi-instrumentalist Jeremiah Fraites is back with a breath-taking follow up record Piano Piano 2. With arguably bolder and more genre-bending instrumentation, Piano Piano 2 features a stunning vocal performance by Grammy-nominated folk artist Gregory Alan Isakov on a reimagined orchestral cover of the Radiohead classic "No Surprises."
The first vocal album by beloved Ethiopian nun, composer, and pianist Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru - profound and deeply moving home cassette recordings made amidst political upheaval and turmoil. These songs, recorded between 1977-1985, are different from anything previously released by the artist. Rich with the sound of birds outside the window, the creak of the piano bench, the thump of Emahoy's finger on the record button, they create a sense of place, of being near the artist while she records. Emahoy dreamt of releasing this music to a larger audience before her passing in March of 2023. We are proud to release this music, in collaboration with her family, now, in what would have been her 100th year. LP comes with a 16-page booklet full-color booklet. Gold cover first edition, pressed in both black and gold vinyl editions.
The first release to document the solo cello work of musician and composer Lucy Railton, the 40-minute composition Blue Veil recorded at Eglise du Saint-Esprit in Paris invites listeners into the realm of precision-tuned states of resonance: states made manifest through Railton's careful traversal of her cello's most subtle acoustic characteristics as they harmonically interlock with mind's embodied modalities of attention and imagination. Blue Veil arises out of, is sustained in and finally dissolves back into Railton's momentary presence with her intimate connection to the cello, a way of hearing that allows for a deeper engagement with harmonic resonance, one that opens a space for immediate encounters of mind and sound. Railton's exploratory practice of harmonic perception emerges from a focus on the physical qualities of intervallic and chordal sounds, their textural qualities, degrees of friction, and inner pulsations. Composing in the moment guided by resonances within the cello's body, her own, and their shared vibrational space, Railton moves through Blue Veil by giving sounds what they ask for: sounds of pure texture manifesting as a move through temporal transparency, sounds of rough texture marking regions of dimensionally dense space. Railton's creative and highly refined use of just intonation harmony deforms sound's inner movements in ways that suggest a mode of listening that actively supplies imagery of sounds implied or completely absent rather than merely savouring those fully present. This active mode of "listening-with", playfully and semi-metaphorically referred to by Railton as "sing-along music", allows listening to reflexively participate in the music's movement as it gradually passes through richly saturated domains of harmonic imagination. And just as the precisiontuned tones of Blue Veil lose their individuality when fusing multifaceted uniformity, listening's structures of reference and recognition dissolve into nameless waves of intensity, continuously unfolding themselves upon and merging with the listener. Blue Veil is the result of a deep exploration of the inner worlds of tuning, an undertaking in turn informed by and emerging out of Railton's realisations of the music of Catherine Lamb and Ellen Arkbro, her collaborative work with Kali Malone and Stephen O'Malley as well as her interpretive practice in performing the work of Maryanne Amacher, Morton Feldman and others.
The orchestra of Le Consort, in the course of it's exploration of Vivaldi, reveals the many facets of this inexhaustible cycle. To achieve this, Theotime Langlois de Swarte has held up a subtle mirror to other works by the 'red-haired priest'. All of them perpetuate the seasons in their own way, through shared memories and impressions; in the background Lambranzi's Venetian dances complement this musical picture awash with colors.
Charlemagne Palestine's newest record pairs two energetic works for carillon bells. On side A, a new piece recorded at his studio in Belgium-a high-ceiling, stuffed animal paradise he calls Charleworld-among friends and divinities. On the flip side, Blank Forms Editions' very first and long out-of-print release appears on vinyl for the first time: a cathartic street recording of his 2018 musical eulogy for his late friend Tony Conrad, performed on the bells of St. Thomas Episcopal Church where the two first met. Two mesmerizing "klanggdedangggebannggg" sessions in the Quasimodo of 53rd Street's unmistakable improvisatory style.
Kali Malone's The Sacrificial Code is the 2019 breakthrough album of the acclaimed composer's pipe organ pieces. Her temporally informed studies of harmonics and intonation breathed life into a suite of compositions which leaves the heart moved and mind still. This 2025 edition was mastered by Rashad Becker and features a new track Sacrificial Code III. Pitchfork praised the album for it's �time-stretching properties� and �clean minimalism�. Resident Advisor described the album as an �exercise in concentration, restraint, and focus�. Tiny Mix Tapes emphasized the �intensity and intimacy� of the album, pointing out how Malone's close miking technique brings out every textural detail of the organ, creating a highly focused and immersive listening experience.
The compositions on this album, written between 2022 and 2024, form a conceptual suite and an observance of the mental dances that we construct to understand acts of passage; the ways that we commune, memorialize, and carry symbols back into the world beyond representation. To this end, The Head as Form'd in the Crier's Choir engages two references to the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus: Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, a collection of poems from 1922, and Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, an early baroque opera from 1607. The Head as Form'd in the Crier's Choir follows on from the last two albums, which were attempts to begin bridging the gap between the fixed electroacoustic pieces that emerge in Davachi's home studio and her slow-paced, somewhat open-form chamber writing, in which each performance presents a new structure and each iteration offers the path to a new composition and deeper meaning.
In his "Pulse Music" compositions of the mid-1970s, composer John McGuire forged a unique interpretation of European serialism. A student of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki and Gottfried Michael Koenig, McGuire moved to Cologne, Germany in 1970, where he become associated with the world-leading Studio for Electronic Music at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne. Like Stockhausen, McGuire found his musical imagination both constrained and inspired by the technology that was available to him. A conversation with sculptor Hans Karl Burgeff led McGuire to think beyond the horizon and into limitless space. For "Vanishing Points" (1985-1988), McGuire used an entirely digital set-up for the first time: a digital sequencer, eight Yamaha DX-7 synthesizers and a Studer 24-track digital tape recorder. The piece was conceived as a "sequel" to the Pulse Music series, but also a step forward from it. Whereas the Pulse Music pieces had employed steady streams of pulses, with Vanishing Points McGuire employed pulse layers that accelerate or decelerate against one another, vastly increasing the resulting rhythmic complexity. McGuire's exploration of music technology continued in "A Cappella" (1990-1997), written for his wife, the soprano Beth Griffith, known for her recording of Morton Feldman's "Three Voices" made in 1983. Using samples, he created a four-voice choir of voice samples and arranged them into interacting parts. The composition faced challenges due to the organic nature of the human voice compared to the precision of synthesized sounds. This process involved extensive editing and a negotiation between the "material" and the "original conception". This sort of negotiation applies as much to the composition of a single piece as it does to the work of two decades.
At it's core, Grandbrothers' music represents a communion between the old and the new. On their extraordinary new album Late Reflections (out April 14), the German-Swiss duo place their art in communion with an institution so old it predates their music by seven centuries: Cologne Cathedral. The iconic monument of Gothic architecture, which is both a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Germany's most visited landmark, served as an unorthodox recording studio for Grandbrothers' fourth album, marking the only time the Cathedral has ever permitted a recording of this kind. The resulting album pulses with a rare sense of history and architecture, allowing the spatial properties of this magnificent building to shape and deepen the timbre of the duo's swelling compositions. Grandbrothers have made a career out of spurning tradition. Formed in Du¨sseldorf, Germany, more than a decade ago, the piano duo creates richly textured music that straddles the boundaries between ambient, minimalism, and electronica. A1. Daybreak A2. Infinite A3. On Solid Ground A4. Golden Dust A5. North/South B1. Adrift B2. Yokohama Rascals B2. Bloom B4. Vertigo B5. Boy In The Storm
My Strong Will is a new album of "Ethiopian Classical Music" by Girma Yifrashewa. Recorded with Bulgarian musicians and the Sofia Philharmonic Orchestra in Sofia, Bulgaria, the album is a return to where Yifrashewa completed his own conservatory training in the late 1980s and early 1990s, across both sides of the fall of Communism. Guided by Yifrashewa's piano, these chamber works bring the music of Ethiopia into a Western Classical format, uncovering meditative and emotional new vistas for both traditions.
For her debut concerto album, violinist Veronika Eberle revisits a work that has endured more than two centuries, and shares a fresh interpretation featuring new cadenzas by composer Jorg Widmann. "May listeners hear the Violin Concerto-in all it's stark radicalism, it's brazen beauty and it's love of experimentation-in a new way with these cadenzas: as contemporary music of today." (Jorg Widmann) Not only is Beethoven's Violin Concerto a particular favorite of Veronika, it has been central to her career to date-most notably alongside Sir Simon Rattle, who has been Veronika's long-time supporter and collaborator. When she was just 16, Sir Simon introduced her at the 2006 Salzburg Easter Festival, where she performed this very concerto to a packed Salzburg Festpielhaus. On this album, the pair reunite to bring this sublime masterpiece to life, and to celebrate the work that first brought Veronika to international attention.
On her fifth album, Ellen Arkbro brings her instincts for structurally elegant songwriting to extended improvisations. Her durational works move like water: They can be choppy on the surface, disturbed by harsh gusts of wind, or suspensefully still, belying the roiling forces deep below. Her towering organ chords billow and undulate, seeking internally discordant phrases and resolving them incrementally, slipping against one another with a luxuriant friction. While Arkbro's For Organ and Brass (2017) took a formalist approach, testing the mechanical limits of it's instruments, and Sounds While Waiting (2023) took a contextual one, offering up an explicit (if tongue-in-cheek) social-spatial function, Nightclouds is unabashedly Romantic and representational. Arkbro, steering directly into the storm, conjures the mortal awe of the sublime. LP
Two organists and a sound poet walk into a studio. What results is not a punchline, although it is often funny: How do I know if my cat likes me?, the first record from Swedish musicians Ellen Arkbro and Hampus Lindwall and Norwegian artist Hanne Lippard, is a collection of existential meditations on the uselessness of language. "Modern Spanking," adapted from an existing text of Lippard's, free-associates it's way from the phrase "online banking" toward "breathing down your neck banking / stabbing an open wound banking" and "sexy but bankrupt"-you guessed it-"banking." "The long goodbye" imagines an excruciating dialogue between acquaintances who can't politely disengage: "It's always enriching to explore new ideas with you!" deadpans Lippard, who replies to herself, "Definitely! I hope to see you soon! / I hope so too! / I'm really looking forward to the next time! / I couldn't agree more!" Punctuated by Arkbro and Lindwall's majestic organ chords, which thwart their own grandiosity with impeccable comic timing, How do I know if my cat likes me? extends the lineage of Roberts Ashley and Barry's droll concept poetry, hammering at the sounds of language until they dislodge all signifiers through pleasurably numbing repetition. It's like doing a Captcha over and over until all the characters fuzz to hieroglyphs, or finding oneself mired in an endless, tautological customer-service argument, but after you dead-end at nonsense, you stumble into an unexpectedly transcendent beauty, where language flips from pure function to pure aesthetic, shimmering with possibility.
Layers of Afternoon is meant to reflect a certain experience of time-something both tangible and vague, felt yet not easily described. These moments often emerge in patterns, sometimes brief, sometimes sustained, but always formative. We recognize their uniqueness, yet something subconscious in us yearns to identify and indulge in these patterns. Perhaps we avoid discussing them for fear of sounding mundane or inconsequential, yet they return to our memories often, offering collective comfort. For Keith Kenniff aka Goldmund, language does little to convey these experiences; only art and music seem to come close to capturing what makes them special. Kenniff explains, "My aim for the music in Layers of Afternoon was to find this in-between place and write from there, hoping to communicate my experience of the world as ideal-free from goals, musical training, or emotional complexity. I wanted to visit this space and let the moments float freely within the act of creation." Working with violinist Scott Moore, Kenniff crafts a sonic landscape that lingers between nostalgia and fleeting presence, allowing listeners to drift through the blurred edges of memory.
