Mark Molnar has been a linchpin of the Ottawa experimental music scene for over two decades, spanning contemporary classical, electroacoustic, industrial/noise, and improv. As a string player in a wide range of projects, an organizer and curator of innumerable shows, and via his own avantgarde label Black Bough Records, Molnar's unflagging contributions to independent music culture in Canada's capital city have been significant. EXO is his Constellation debut: a remarkable and bracing suite of post-classical composition on which Molnar plays every instrument. Meticulously self-recorded, primarily with strings, harp, and piano, EXO balances thematic melodicism, polytonality, and dissonance across three elegiac pieces of exquisitely expressive dynamism. This is exacting modern chamber music that blends formal and harmonic complexity with a solemn emotive sensibility accessible to a broad audience. Listeners that yearn for some edge and disquietude in a landscape of often all-too-approachable post-classical music should find EXO eminently worth their time and attention. While Molnar is a highly trained string player, and studied music under Aubrey Wolfe, microtonality with James Tenney, and composition with R. Murray Schafer, his trajectory has been entirely and intentionally outside the academy, signalling a socio-artistic commitment to DIY culture, forged from an early passion for the sonic worlds of post-hardcore, post-punk, no-wave, free improv, power electronics, and other independent/underground musics. His classically-informed works have been described as "tense currents of musical modernism invigorated with punk's raw vitality." EXO carries an undercurrent influenced by dark industrial and ambient metal in particular, with microphones purposely placed to pick up the low-end frequencies of the piano body, and of a bass drum positioned as a resonant skin in the acoustic space; an electroacoustic strategy organically meshed to the crisply defined and pristinely recorded pointillisms and polychords of strings, harp, and piano, which feed into this noisefloor of crepuscular sub-bass disquietude and decay. It's a production aesthetic that lends EXO a distinct undertow of tension and feeling, a sort of roiling maximalism where the chamber instrumentation traces arcs and waves of form and flow as if drawn from a dark, impervious ocean below. It also reinforces the profound hermeticism of Molnar's process, as a forbiddingly solitary creative act of immersion and navigation. The album artwork, featuring semiabstract stills of the sea by British photographer Ed Allen, further reifies this metaphor.

Vox Clamantis - "Part: And I heard a voice". Estonian vocal ensemble Vox Clamantis and their leader Jaan-Eik Tulve have established themselves among the leading interpreters of Arvo Part's music over a quarter-century of close collaboration with the composer - a relationship that builds on the almost half a decade-long artistic partnership between Part and producer Manfred Eicher. 'And I heard a voice' was recorded in Haapsalu Cathedral, Estonia and is released as Arvo Part turns 90.

The Rite of Spring: Scenes from Pagan Russia in Two Parts. It was Igor Stravinsky who dragged classical music, kicking and screaming, into the twentieth century. Sure, his contemporaries had paved the way. No longer was the Romantic melody-rich work the dominant force. The new way was about orchestral colors and tone painting. But it was Stravinsky who broke altogether with the Romantic past and created Modernism. It was almost as if all the old rules had not just been bent but completely destroyed. In the modern world, anything goes. Stravinsky made a name for himself at a very early age. In his twenties, his work, Fireworks brought him to the attention of Serge Diaghilev, director of the Ballet Russes, who commissioned from Stravinsky a ballet based on the Firebird legend. It was a huge success and Diaghilev commissioned two more. The results were Petrouchka and The Rite of Spring. The story of the premier of The Rite of Spring is famous. The audience was first treated to Les Sylphides, a ballet based on the music of Chopin. The Rite of Spring was to follow. No doubt lulled into a pleasant, dreamy state by the earlier work, and expecting something similarly pastoral with the Rite, named after all about the most pleasant of seasons, they were in for a rude shock. A clue comes from it's subtitle: Scenes from Pagan Russia. It opened with a bassoon bleating way higher than any bassoon was ever supposed to go and then descended into 30 minutes of barbarism and pagan ritual sacrifice. The music was jarring, dissonant, difficult. The huge percussion sections pounded out primitive rhythms, and Nijinsky's provocative choreography challenged the audience's sensibilities. This version was recorded at the Ballroom of the St. George Hotel, Brooklyn, NY, January 5 & 6, 1960 with The Columbia Symphony Orchestra. TRACKLIST: SIDE A: Premier Tableau : L'adoration de la Terre Part 1 - Adoration Of The Earth 1. Introduction 2. Augures Printaniers - Danses Des Adolescentes 3. Jeu Du Rapt 4. Rondes Printanieres 5. Jeu Des Cites Rivales 6. Cortege Du Sage 7. Le Sage 8. Danse de la Terre SIDE B: Second Tableau: Le Sacrifice Part 2 - The Sacrifice 1. Introduction 2. Cercles Mysterieux Des Adolescentes 3. Glorification de L'elue 4. Evocation Des Ancetres 5. Action Rituelle Des Ancetres 6. Danse Sacrale (L'elue)

Immerse yourself in the tranquil beauty of the countryside with Beethoven's beloved "Pastoral" Symphony, brought vividly to life by Herbert von Karajan and the legendary Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. This exquisite 1LP release captures one of the most iconic interpretations of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, a deeply expressive, masterfully balanced performance that has stood the test of time. From the gentle rustle of the first movement to the dramatic storm and the joyful, hymnlike finale, Karajan's interpretation is both intimate and grand, revealing new emotional depths in every listen.

Unfolding is Jessica Moss' most meditative and plaintive solo album, and perhaps the first in the Montreal violinist/composer's decade-spanning discography that might properly be called ambient. The ex-Silver Mt Zion and Black Ox Orkestar member draws from post-classical, drone, minimalism, industrial/metal, power electronics, Klezmer and other folkways. This is not abstract ambient music; layers of violin melody, electroacoustic processing, intermittent voice, and percussion from The Necks drummer Tony Buck, bring forth deeply emotive genre-defying compositions guided by a spirit of searching and summoning that unfold in a prevailing atmosphere of incantation and mournful restraint. The inseparability of the personal and political has wrung ever tighter for Moss over the past two years. As a core member of the Montreal chapter of Musicians For Palestine, she's co-organized and played several benefit shows, and released the solo album For UNRWA in spring 2024 (garnering over 800 supporters and raising thousands of dollars). Later that year, her long-term long-distance relationship melted down over politics. Working closely with producer Radwan Ghazi Moumneh (Jerusalem In My Heart), Moss notes "Unfolding was made slowly, over the last 12 months, the second full year of genocide in Palestine, in direct response to our collective witnessing, our collective grief, as a portal to collective mourning, as a searchlight through our internal weather systems, seeking one another out in the dark." Moss was already moving towards heightened fragility and deep listening, her music becoming increasingly durational and ceremonial. Despite the plummeting financial viability of touring, her devotion to holding space, conjuring entanglement, and connecting with intimate live audiences became her creative lodestar, her solo praxis shaped by committing to and communing in these rooms. Recent political and personal upheavals have only intensified these ritualistic, reparative musical processes. The two longform tracks on Side One of Unfolding embody this sensibility. "Washing Machine" weaves layers of string drone and filigree, gently noised by distortion pedals and amplification, with indecipherably blown-out spoken voice intermittently enveloping the mix as fragmentary palimpsests of shrouded recitation and ineffable feeling. The piece traces it's origins to a phone recording of a European laundry machine, captured by Moss as she sat next to it, heartbroken on the bathroom floor, finding solace by humming a melody along to the mechanical harmonics of the washer working through it's cycles. Album centerpiece "One, Now" begins as a delicate invocation, with bass pulse, chimes and bells, plucked strings, and doleful lead violin lines influenced by Jewish and Arabic modes. Ambient noise, field recordings, and wordless vocals are added to the brew, as violin melodies layer and coalesce towards a mesmerizing dronescape: a semi-improvised living composition further vitalized by Tony Buck's paintbrush drumming throughout, and Moumneh's "yell into the void" at the end... Side Two is a work in four parts titled "no one / no where / no one is free / until all are free" that moves through ambient noise, elegiac post-classical strings, and distorted harmonic drones, towards a denouement of liturgical organ, ritual bell, and shimmering electronic tracers that set the stage for the album's closing song: the devastating choral composition "until all are free", a secular hymn comprised of Jessica's multi-tracked vocals (but which she looks forward to singing with others in concert). Unfolding is dedicated to "a free Palestine in our lifetime." Thanks for listening.

Limited silver colored vinyl LP pressing. 2025 release features 12-tracks of instrumental piano mastery from the legendary yes keysman. With 'Melancholia', Rick Wakeman completes a remarkable trilogy of solo piano works that began with 'Piano Portraits' (2017) & continued with 'Piano Odyssey' (2018) - both landmark albums that found him reaching new heights of popularity & critical esteem as a solo artist. But while those records looked outward, reinterpreting beloved melodies & exploring sweeping themes, 'Melancholia' turns inward, inviting us into the most personal, introspective & perhaps profound music of Wakeman's storied career. The album began, as so much of Wakeman's finest work has, with a quiet moment at the piano. One afternoon, his wife Rachel overheard him playing a contemplative piece - what would later become "Garo" - & was struck by it's quiet emotional power. And because she knew well that he often turned to the piano in times of sadness or inner turbulence, using music as a kind of emotional compass, she encouraged him to share it. What followed was not a conceptual record in the traditional sense, but a deeply cohesive suite, written intuitively at first & later shaped in collaboration with long-time producer & engineer Erik Jordan at The Granary Studio in Norfolk. Recorded on a beautiful Steinway Model D, the sound of 'Melancholia' is rich, resonant & stripped bare in the most delicate way.

Vortex introduces a bold new chapter for the oboe and English horn, instruments too often overlooked as chamber soloists. Oboist Ari Cohen Mann, praised for their "brilliant virtuosity" (The Whole Note), joins pianist Benjamin Smith, guitarist Daniel Ramjattan, and composer-pianist Kevin Day in a program spanning wit, lyricism, turbulence, and introspection. Vortex introduces a bold new chapter for the oboe and English horn, instruments too often overlooked as chamber soloists. The journey begins with Stravinsky's Pulcinella-here newly transcribed for oboe and piano by Cohen Mann and Cornelia Sommer-where Baroque elegance collides with Stravinsky's tongue-in-cheek neoclassicism. From there, Jennifer Higdon's poignant Aria leads into the album's title track, Kevin Day's electrifying VORTEX, premiered to a standing ovation at the International Double Reed Society Conference. Works by Rodney Sharman (Famous Last Words), Jean Coulthard (The Enchanted Island), and C. Tyler Nickel (English Horn Sonata) reveal the expressive depth and modern versatility of the English horn, while Jocelyn Morlock's Verdigris, arranged for oboe and guitar, offers a gentle closing meditation. Vortex celebrates the oboe and English horn as instruments of colour, drama, and lyricism-capable of anchoring an entire sonic world.

With his new album Farming (out this fall via Deathbomb Arc), Ted Hearne - the composer and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist praised by Pitchfork for creating "some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory" - confronts technology's ominous encroachment upon humanity's very being. Created in collaboration with the GRAMMY-winning choir The Crossing, Farming tackles the long-tail impact of settler colonialism and it's philosophical motivations on agricultural degradation, big tech utopianism, corporate religiosity, and the abstraction of community. Hearne dives headfirst into the Uncanny Valley, conjuring a soundworld fraught with neck-breaking shifts and stylistic contradictions. It's unholy marriage of ersatz Americana, digitally altered choral arrangements, and hyperpop's synapse-frying maximalism inverts technology's smoothing impulses in favor of an unwieldy, knotty expression of modern ennui and alienation. Upon it's 2023 live performance debut, The New York Times called Farming "a suggestive, chaotically ambitious, often poignant reflection on colonization, consumption, marketing, entrepreneurship." It's certainly intellectually audacious: In repurposing primary texts from William Penn and Jeff Bezos, Farming contends with the mythological constructs humans erect to justify their participation in an economy's unfeeling entropies - and reveals the ethical void at their core.

Jana IRMERT « Portals » Produced entirely from sounds recorded in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Colombia, Portals evokes the hidden world of sounds that lie beyond our perception. Whether concealed in ultra-sonic frequency registers or in the depths of the aquatic medium, these sounds bear witness to an unsuspected and teeming animal activity. Insects, frogs, bats and freshwater dolphins move about, hiding from our eyes and ears. Revealing this palette of sounds, in particular through transposition, and placing it back in the realm of the audible, Jana Irmert invites and guides us on a fascinating exploration of an unsuspected, speculative and non-human world of sound, which she exposes and recomposes in a way that is both respectful and personal, accompanying this teeming and fascinating sound material in a musical gesture of great clarity. Portals is an attempt to access the evocative power of an Amazonian forest on the brink of catastrophe, through a decentring of the listening experience delicately composed by Jana Irmert. 7038634357 « Rope » With uncommon mastery and precision, Rope unfolds in a suspended time that seems nonetheless ominous. As it's title suggests, Rope explores the formal figure of the rope, as an interweaving of synthetic and natural fibres that hold and amalgamate, held together by the forces of tension and friction. The rope itself, as Neo Gibson explains, is knotted at regular intervals along it's entire length, so that you can hang on to it. Rope unfolds slowly, evolving from the threshold of the perceptible towards denser, more ballasted electronic textures, but always on the brink of an upheaval to come. Then a melodic motif appears, seeming to carry within it an impossible consolation. In this respect, Rope balances strikingly between formal elegance, sonic gravity and an emotional charge that is almost uncontainable.

According to Karajan's own account, it was during the summer of 1965, while he was working on Boris Godunov, that he had a vision of the future: "I suddenly sensed a burning desire to stage and conduct Wagner in Salzburg." His dream, very much in the spirit of Wagner himself: "My baton shall teach future ages which road they have to take." The Original Source Series from Deutsche Grammophon features celebrated recordings reissued on vinyl. Remastered by the renowned Berlin-based Emil Berliner Studios using 100% pure analogue techniques to create versions of the highest possible audio quality. Produced on 180g virgin vinyl by Optimal and housed in deluxe gatefold editions, featuring additional photos and/or recording documentation. For the first time, OSS will use the original stereo master 2-track tape as source. Starting with 4-track in 2023 and expanding to 8-track in 2024, the year 2026 will see the first 2-track OSS release.

David Bowie Narrates Prokofiev's Peter And The Wolf (1978) is a classical music album containing David Bowie's narration of Sergei Prokofiev's 1936 composition Peter And The Wolf. The music is performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormandy. The album reached number 136 on the US Pop Albums chart. Side One contains the narration by David Bowie of public domain material originally written by Prokofiev. The second side of this LP features Eugene Ormandy conducting Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide To The Orchestra with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Ormandy and the aforementioned musicians from Philly also back up Bowie on side one. Critics lauded the album, saying Bowie 'found his most charming guise since Hunky Dory.' He tells the well-known fable with his usual eloquence and style, and gives instructions at the beginning for kids to understand how the music corresponds to characters in the story. The accompaniment from the Philadelphia Orchestra is first rate. The Music On Vinyl re-release includes detailed liner notes on the project by Mary Campbell, specifically geared to 'introduce children to the sounds of the individual instruments in the symphony orchestra.' Both Prokofiev and Britten wrote their respective pieces with this aim in mind. David Bowie Narrates Prokofiev's Peter And The Wolf is available as a limited edition of 2000 individually numbered copies on yellow colored vinyl. The record comes in a deluxe sleeve finished with linen laminate and includes an insert with liner notes. LISTEN: *180 GRAM AUDIOPHILE VINYL *DELUXE SLEEVE FINISHED WITH LINEN LAMINATE *INCLUDES INSERT WITH LINER NOTES *SERGEI PROKOFIEV'S CLASSIC PETER AND THE WOLF NARRATED BY DAVID BOWIE *PERFORMED BY THE PHILADELPHIA ORCHESTRA UNDER EUGENE ORMANDY *GRAMMY-NOMINATED ALBUM *LIMITED EDITION OF 2000 INDIVIDUALLY NUMBERED COPIES ON YELLOW COLORED VINYL Track listing: Side A 1. Peter and the Wolf, Op. 65 (A Musical Tale for Children) Side B 1. Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 3

Performing music from Baroque to new commissions on both modern and period instruments, Alina Ibragimova has established a reputation for versatility and the "immediacy and honesty" (The Guardian) of her performances. Alina has performed with orchestras including the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, London Philharmonic, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Swedish Radio Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Tonhalle-Orchester Z?rich; and conductors Vladimir Jurowski, Sir John Eliot Gardner, Jakub Hrusa, Robin Ticciati, Daniel Harding, Edward Gardner and the late Bernard Haitink, among others. Her 2020 album of Shostakovich violin concertos with Vladimir Jurowski and the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia 'Evgeny Svetlanov' won a Gramophone Award and Diapason d'Or and was one of The Times's Discs of the Year. This 2-LP set is pressed on 180g vinyl.

The music of CPE Bach makes complex stylistic demands of the performer like little else of it's time, the extraordinary drama and intensity tempered by Enlightenment elegance and the influence of the Baroque. Marc-Andre Hamelin's performances set new standards in this endlessly absorbing repertoire.

For his 2011 recording of the Grieg & Liszt Piano Concertos, Sir Stephen Hough travelled to Grieg's hometown of Bergen to join forces with Andrew Litton and the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra. Upon it's original release, the Sunday Times named Hough's album "one of the Liszt bicentenary's prime releases, from Britain's greatest living magician of the keyboard." Available on 180g vinyl.

Irida Associates U.S.A., an obscure and short-lived record label formed by composer-performer Jerry Hunt (1943-1993), offers a glimpse into the revelatory world of new music and composition in the artist's native Third Coast. Based first in Dallas and later in Hunt's home outside the rural town of Canton, Texas, Irida presented the innovative and daring experiments-into aleatoric methods, environmental acoustics, improvisation, homemade technologies, and more-pursued by Hunt and his select collaborators, primarily working in or near Texas between 1979 and 1986. Irida's brief and compact output-seven non-sequentially numbered LPs released in unknown quantities-shared work by artists whose practices often challenged the limitations of vinyl recording. Originally reissued by Blank Forms as a set of seven LPs plus an eighty-two-page booklet, these seven LPs are now available individually. "Mapping" here refers to the interest of composer Larry Austin (1930-2018) in the adaptation of external structures (such as mathematical figures or shapes observed in nature) for the purpose of generating compositional material. This concern was shared by his PhD composition students at the university of North Texas, three of whom-Rodney Washka II, Gene de Lisa, and Robert Michael Keefe- are represented on Cartography. Each experimented with the possibilities of the Synclavier digital music system at the university's Center for Experimental Music and Intermedia, where Hunt was devising his own work, "Fluud," on the synthesizer at the same moment. Throughout the '80s, Austin developed a particularly strong interest in fractal geometry and the work of French mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, an excitement that is reflected in the naming of de Lisa's "Missa Fractalis" and Keefe's "Fractalis Balinesus." de Lisa adapted his piece from data collected by parsing Latin text, while Keefe, a jazz guitarist, structured his work around the Pythagorean monochord. Waschka's "Euwe Suite" translates a number of chess games by the Dutch player Max Euwe into five uncanny short-form compositions, where each square on the board is assigned a different pitch and is sounded at a distinct timbre depending on the piece that lands on it. His "Runes," accompanied in performance by 35-mm slides, was adapted from the ancient symbols of it's namesake. The three composers, occasionally joined by fellow student Gary Cattley, performed these and other works throughout Texas in 1986 and 1987, including during a short tour in summer 1986 billed as the "New Cartographers."