Prophecies of Fire' is sublimely moving and exciting percussion music (for bass drums, timpani, tom-toms, snare drums, tam-tams, and orchestral bells) performed by the celebrated Sandbox Percussion ensemble. It's waves of seismically rumbling low drums and shimmering metallophones wondrously wash over the listener. Adams writes:?'Prophecies of Fire is a celebration of the elemental power of sound itself to touch, to move, and perhaps even to transform human consciousness.' Composer John Luther Adams's music has won a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award, and has been performed by such prominent ensembles as the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Seattle Symphony, and the JACK?Quartet. 'John Luther Adams... one of the most original musical thinkers of the new century.' (Alex Ross, The New Yorker) 'His music becomes more than a metaphor for natural forces: it is an elemental experience in it's own right.' (Tom Service, The Guardian) 'His music perfectly echoes the landscape he loves: impersonal, relentless, larger than human scale, yet gorgeous.' (Kyle Gann, Chamber Music magazine) Sandbox Percussion is a highly lauded, award-winning, Grammy-nominated percussion quartet dedicated to championing the work of living composers through it's unwavering dedication to contemporary music. Sandbox Percussion's performances have been hailed as 'exhilarating' (The New York Times) and 'virtuosic... utterly mesmerizing' (The Guardian).

Nothing and everything. Nowhere and everywhere.

Somewhere in the distance two pianos are playing. Slowly, very slowly, the sound comes towards you, and just as inevitably the sound recedes. This takes twelve and a half minutes. No development, no real movement, but no stasis either. What’s going on? Nothing and everything. Where’s the music going? Nowhere and everywhere. This sound world is our universe. It exists solely for itself. It’s electrifying.

So begins Dark Waters, the first track on this new John Luther Adams CD.

Before we go any further let’s get one thing clear, this is not the well known John Adams, the laid-back, new music guru, California-based composer of The Chairman Dances and The Transmigration of Souls, this is Meridian, Mississippi-born and, for the last thirty years, Alaska-based John Luther Adams. Starting as a rock drummer he discovered Frank Zappa, from Zappa’s notes he discovered Edgard Varèse, from Varèse’s sleeve-notes he discovered John Cage, but it was his discovery of Morton Feldman that gave him his epiphany. He studied at Cal Arts and after graduation started working in environmental protection, which took him to Alaska in 1975 where he moved permanently in 1978. If he’s known in this country at all it’s because he had a piece broadcast as part of the Masterprize competition some years ago.

Among Red Mountains, for a solo piano, is a study in clusters and opposing registers. Hard and brutal, unrelenting, yet strangely spellbinding and impossible to ignore. Just like Dark Waters, there’s no development of material as we understand the concept of development in the classical sense but this music does progress, if only in a very basic way, through repetition of the material. It’s hard to believe that there’s only two hands playing, considering the number of notes the poor pianist has to play.

Qilyuan is a duet for bass drums, and here the concept of minimal movement/maximum progress fails. Without actual pitches on which to hang our perceptions we’re left a bit at sea. And the bass drum isn’t renowned for its variety of timbre. True, it can play loud or soft, rolls can be executed, it can be hit with different sticks, but, and the percussion mafia isn’t going to like me for this, it isn’t an expressive instrument, it’s something you hit. One of the most impressive things about the other works on this disk is just how expressive they are; Dark Waters is quite beautiful in its hypnotic way. Just as Dark Waters and Among Red Mountains seem too short for their material, Qilyuan seems interminable.

Red Arc/Blue Veil, which gives the CD its title, is, in form, similar to Dark Waters. Starting quietly as a neo romantic nocturne for piano and vibraphone, it builds in intensity and volume, as the percussionist changes to crotales, and a big climax is built. Then a return to the music of the beginning, piano and vibes, gentle, restrained, beautiful. If the work has one fault it’s that there’s an overuse of the crotales – the overtones from the high frequencies over a period of time can be quite painful to listen to.

All in all, a very exciting issue from a composer who’s been working quietly and methodically for some time and he should be investigated because his music is haunting and quite unforgettable.

I assume that the performances are as good as we could ever hope for and the recorded sound is clear and very bright, oh yes, very bright indeed. There are no notes on the music, merely the names of the works and the performers, though the six sides of the “booklet” are very colourful. There are nine other CDs of Adams’s works and they are all worth investigating.

Lou Harrison called Adams "one of the few important young American composers," and he might just be right.

-- Bob Briggs, MusicWeb International

This exquisite, mobile-like, ever-focus-shifting music for three pianos is wonderfully performed by noted new-music champion Sarah Cahill. A 25-minute CD EP/Single. “If this is a long night, let it go on and on.” [Marc Geelhoed, Time Out Chicago] “It’s a beautiful and original piece, with ‘family’ links to such composers as Harry Partch, Henry Cowell, Conlon Nancarrow, and John Cage, and with allusions to ‘nature’ and the ‘East’.” [Int'l Record Review] “A commanding presence in the landscape of American music.... his music is passionate, fiercely intelligent and one of a kind. Gann’s music embraces a broad range of influences but sounds like no other.” [John Luther Adams, NewMusicBox (American Music Center)] “Long Night was intended to evoke Martin Heidegger's phenomenology of mood swings. Three unsynchronized piano lines flow parallel through sections of indeterminate length, overlapping like ripples from raindrops splashing into a pond in slow motion…. Sarah Cahill plays all three parts on this economical CD single, heightening the music’s gentle equanimity.” [Steve Smith, Time Out New York] “Best Albums of 2005.... The composer-turned-critic dusts off a minimalist piano sketch from his apparently not-so-misspent youth.” [K. Leander Williams, Time Out New York]

This three-CD reissue of the noted series of seven 10-inch vinyl EPs that Cold Blue released in the early 1980s (during the label’s short-lived initial incarnation) was a Gramophone magazine “Critic’s Choice” in 2004. Extraordinary music for violins and percussion, electric guitar, electronic keyboards with voices, solo and duo pianos, cello, pedal steel guitar, wind instruments of pre-Columbian design, readers, and more from composers Peter Garland, Rick Cox, Barney Childs, Read Miller, Michael Jon Fink, Daniel Lentz, and Chas Smith. John Schaefer, longtime producer of WNYC’s New Sounds called the series of 10-inch EPs “Cold Blue’s little ‘ism’-skirting discs…a whole wonderful world of new sounds.” (This boxed set includes a 24-page full-color booklet.) In Arts Journal, Kyle Gann wrote about the reissued set, “A new three-disc set reissued from the hip southern-California label Cold Blue has me so mesmerized I can hardly quit listening to it.” Josef Woodard writing in The Santa Barbara Independent declared the boxed set “Decidedly cool—in hipness quotient and emotional temperament. Beguiling.” Roger Thomas, writing in Int’l Record Review called the set “My favorite item this month . . . the work of composers whose work might be described as avant-garde but which also exhibited the back-to-fundamentals approach which is so often an aspect of the best American music…a striking set…. This spare, uncluttered music is a compelling listening experience, sounding as fresh today as when it originally appeared.” And Gramophone magazine wrote, “The sounds are spare, wistful, innocent and soft-spoken, often beautiful in a way no other music is.”

Six elegant, dark, sensuous soundscapes in which emotions seem to bubble just below cool surfaces. Harmonically rich and texturally subtle music that features idiosyncratic electric guitar playing techniques developed by composer/performer Cox, whom noted guitarist-composer Ry Cooder has called “a hidden master of the crepuscular and the diaphanous.” On this CD Cox is joined by celebrated composer/trumpeter Jon Hassell, popular film composer Thomas Newman (piano), and composer/performer/instrument designer Chas Smith (pedal steel guitar). The Wire magazine wrote of this album, “Gently undulating melodies are held in soft focus, without becoming cloying; [Cox’s] enveloping harmonies are less innocent than they first appear. Prettiness with a tough core.” And Fanfare magazine wrote, “If you imagine floating through the night sky on a large abstract tapestry, you’ll get a feeling for what Cox’s music is like.” Motion (UK), opined, “Quiet music of consummate musicianship…an achingly beautiful suite of pieces featuring slowly, oh-so-slowly shifting soundscapes. One of a kind and clear candidate for every ambienteer’s ‘Best of 2001’ list.”

Adams, a Pulitzer-winning composer, writes music that draws much of it's inspiration from earth's primal forms and forces. These large, elemental concepts are never far below the surface of the music on Four Thousand Holes. The two works that comprise this album-constructions that grew from a blending of process and intuition-maintain a tight focus on music's inherent sensuality. The title piece, a bold, wonderfully quirky work, amasses and blends multiple tempo streams of simple triads with electro-acoustic "auras" to create a sense of beautifully suspended time. The other piece,... and bells remembered... for percussion quintet, spins forth a quiet and gently clangorous world of ringing tones. "I can't stop listening to John Luther Adams's Four Thousand Holes." [The New Yorker critic and author Alex Ross, Twitter] "John Luther Adams is a major figure and this disc-small but perfectly formed-is a notable addition to his discography." [International Record Review] "Four Thousand Holes may simply be Adams's best work to-date.... So far, 2011 has had it's lion's share of exquisite recordings, but this disc stands out as required listening... Album of the Week." [WQXR/Q2] "Despite a rather majestic climax, Four Thousand Holes unfolds at a measured pace, like a kind of contemplative walk in the woods in which the landscape changes slowly but dramatically over time. There is a spontaneous feel that belies the careful craftsmanship. Drury's piano part is made up exclusively of chords based on major and minor triads, with Deal's vibraphone and orchestra bells adding an extra sonic glitter. On top of it all, Adams generates a processed electronic 'aura,' derived from the piano lines, and it spreads out like a canopy of sound: dense, rich, and enveloping." [Josh Shea, Boston Globe] "In Four Thousand Holes... John Luther Adams explores an extended progression of radiant, overlapping triads glowing with a resigned majesty until they support a slowly ascending line leading to an ecstatic climax that caps off it's 32-minute journey. The effect is meditative and spiritual, absorbing, and probably in it's essence more overwhelming than it's modest scoring allows." [American Record Guide]

This CD contains four of Adam's beautifully shimmering, texturally rich compositions for various combinations of one or two pianos and various percussion instruments. Features performances by noted pianist/conductor/new music champion Stephen Drury, who is on the faculty of the New England Conservatory and has recorded for Tzadik, New Albion, Mode and more.

Australian composer Whittington’s subtle, sublime, and beautiful work for string quartet alludes to Erik Satie’s “furniture music” (musique d’ameublement). The composer writes, “I was interested in the airport departure lounge as an arena for human emotions—boredom, apprehension, hope, despair, loneliness, the tenderness of farewells—all taking place within a bland, often desolate space.” Recorded by the Zephyr Quartet, an award-winning Australian ensemble dedicated to the performance of contemporary music. A 23-minute CD EP/single. “Music for Airport Furniture…a taut, refined, barely evolving piece.” [Int’l Record Review] “Belying its Satie-esque title, this work unravels to reveal a music of sheer elegance and eloquence.” [Peter Garland] “Luxurious and comfortable, I could sit and listen to Music for Airport Furniture for hours.” [Richard Friedman, host of Music from Other Minds, KALW] “Music for Airport Furniture is open and airy, contrails elegantly criss-crossing a sky-blue background. Ever elevating, the viola sighs, the cello is occasionally plucked, an impatient passenger shuffling his feet. A beautiful piece.” [Stephen Fruitman, Avant Music News] “The opening notes of Music for Airport Furniture evoke that distinctive feeling of emptiness and regret that we have all felt while waiting for an airline boarding call. The music proceeds in a series of long, warm phrases, offset by the occasional pizzicato arpeggio in the cello. The minimalist texture is both smooth and luxurious and the sustained chords deftly unpack all the many emotions that accompany an extended absence from home and loved ones. The playing of the Zephyr Quartet is outstanding, investing just the right emotional content into each extended phrase and never letting the long tones stagnate.” [Sequenza21]

For more than two decades, Polansky, who the Village Voice called “the heir apparent to the Cowell/Nancarrow/Tenney genius experimentalist mantle,” has been composing a series of fascinating mensuration canons (a formal concept dating back to the Renaissance) that run the sonic gamut from wildly boisterous to serenely introverted. This disc collects thirteen of these canons with widely varying instrumentations that include marimbas, gamelan, electric guitars, children's voices, computer, choir, and chamber ensemble. Performances by and collaborations with William Winant, Jody Diamond, Daniel Goode, Nathan Davis, Nick Didkovsky, and others. The Wire magazine wrote about this CD, “An unashamedly tactile approach to musical material, forging an oblique angle to tradition… cool and elegant…. [I]t’s a mark of his resourceful mind that he can adapt the basic rules into a series of such complex and varied works.... Polansky’s canons show the extreme liberties that can be born from such exacting discipline.” International Record Review commented, “The music of Larry Polansky is as much fun to listen to as it is to think or get serious about…the results are dazzling as each canon defines its individual properties and unique sound world.... The transformations are ubiquitous and compelling…. With so much on offer, this is one of the best discs Cold Blue music has issued.” And ClassicalNet wrote, “Larry Polansky is the modern dean of the mensuration canon…. These canons are clever, mysterious, and comical—part theory of relativity, part Rube Goldberg.”

Composer/performer/instrument designer Smith’s exotic compositional textures here utilize the same unique instruments that he employed on his popular earlier recording Nikko Wolverine. These include resonators that sprout bowed and struck rods; large, clangorous titanium sculptures; and vibraphone-like arrays of metal plates. The music plays with the listener’s perceived sense of time as spare moments slowly drift into dense ones. Fanfare magazine wrote, “The sounds seem to go on to the brink of forever…. Aluminum Overcast is practically tactile as it presents its edges, both dull and razor-sharp, to the listener…. Smith’s instruments were born, I gather, in the welder’s flame and under the blows of a hammer…and the music they make, which can become Wagnerian in intensity, bears witness to their violent birth. And yet, like heated metal, there is a softer, more yielding side to Smith’s music…. Aluminum Overcast is a buzz that becomes a burr, and a burr that becomes a shower of sparks. The density of the music fluctuates, but it remains consistently involving.” And All-Music Guide wrote, “Some artists have a signature sound. Then again some inhabit a sonic realm that is their own. Visiting Chas Smith’s realm tends to be an unforgettable experience…. Smith hears beautiful overtones in his creations and he communicates them wonderfully. His soundscapes are engaging… haunting like Ligeti’s best works…. Careful listening reveals worlds within worlds of sounds where metal becomes an organic entity…. Strongly recommended.”

This recording brings together two of Los Angeles-based composer Fox’s haunting electro-acoustic works, The Copy of the Drawing, for spoken voice and electronics, and Last Things, for bass clarinet, pedal steel guitar, piano, and electronics. The Wire magazine called this CD “an austere, ethereal experience.” And International Record Review wrote of it, “Imagine a view of the sky on a brilliantly clear night, from an uninhabited part of the world: Fox’s music invites one to believe that if the stars, constellations and galaxies emitted sounds, these unearthly harmonics are what one might hear.” ClassicalNet commented that is was “Hypnotic…very impressive stuff.” The San Francisco Bay Guardian wrote that “the work is dreamlike, seemingly without beginning or end…it appears to exist outside of the realm of time.”

Michael Byron’s music is one of contrasts, noted for its intertwining of minimalist and maximalist techniques and rigorous processes with freely composed music. It uniquely reconciles traditional notions of beauty with boisterous, almost-out-of-control instrumental writing. This CD features performances by some of today’s most-respected new-music champions, including pianists Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera, synthesizer player Kathleen Supové, and the FLUX Quartet. International Record Review, walking its readers through the album, track by track, wrote: “Continents of city and love is a moving and sensual piece—a sort of timeless, impersonal, chthonic lovesong.... Evaporated pleasure...is emphatic music, with a machine-like insistence; objective and impersonal, it is heir to the legacy of Conlon Nancarrow.... Even more arresting is Awakening at the inn of the birds...a glorious polyphonic cacophony.... As she sleeps...creates a still space enclosed by great tenderness and a wonderful meditative calm.... Tidal...is a many-layered sonority in which the near and the far gradually change places. The performances are as good as one would expect from so stellar a group of players.... another admirable release from Cold Blue.”

Marty Walker performs music for clarinet and bass clarinet written for him by composers Daniel Lentz, Peter Garland, Jim Fox, Michael Jon Fink, Rick Cox, and Michael Byron. Performing with Walker are noted new music stalwarts William Winant, Wadada Leo Smith, Amy Knoles, and others. The music runs the gamut from a lush work for ten pianos and ten clarinets to a technically thorny solo and includes just about everything in between. Although the individual pieces are on their surfaces quite different from one another, they share a certain commonality—an embrace of music’s inherent sensuality. Critics have described Walker’s playing as “masterful,” “flawless,” and “true artistry.” Minnesota Public Radio’s Michael Barone called this album a “mild-mannered, soul-filling collection of contemporary ‘meditations’. . . think Satie and Morton Feldman, and you come close to the overall mood. Delicate textures prevail…the thinking-listener’s slow lane.” 21st Century Music magazine wrote, “If people are best known by the company they keep, then clarinetist Marty Walker is blessed indeed. He keeps wonderful company with an excellent series of composers…. Both the playing and the recording quality are sparkling.”

This album presents to of Australian composer Stephen Whittington's stunningly beautiful string quartets: his elegant, eclectic seven-movement...from a thatched hut and his evocative, haunting Windmill. Stephen Whittington is a composer whose very personal music combines elements of minimalism, polystylism, and indiginous musics from many parts of the world. As a pianist, he began championing contemporary music in Adelaide in teh 1970's, giving the first Australian performances of music by Morton Feldman, Terry Riley, Christian Wolff, Cornelius Cardew, Alan Hovhaness, George Crumb, and many other composers. Zephyr Quartet is a celebrated genre-defying Australian string quartet that, since 1999, has been expanding the boundaries of art music via diverse collaborations with artists from the worlds of theater, dance, literature, visual art, environmental art, film, and media art. ''If Australia has produced a classic piece of musical minimalism, [Windmill] is it.'' (Graham Strahle, The Australian)

Cold Blue Two is an anthology of fourteen new, previously unrecorded works—many of them written just for this CD. Enthralling music by John Luther Adams, Gavin Bryars, Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, Jim Fox, Peter Garland, Daniel Lentz, Ingram Marshall, Larry Polansky, David Rosenboom, Phillip Schroeder, Chas Smith, and James Tenney. Performers include Sarah Cahill, Guy Klucevsek, ETHEL, Formalist Quartet, John Schneider, and other fine musicians, including many of the composers themselves. It was a WQXR Q2 Music “Album of the Week” in 2012. “Darkly lyrical, evocative.... Whether plaintive, hypnotic, or enigmatic, this is music that is cool but not unemotional—and always a rich, twilit blue.” [John Schaefer, host of WNYC’s New Sounds] “This record pretty much kicks ass—an alluring, arresting document from a brilliant cast of composers.” [composer-performer Glenn Kotche] “The music by Daniel Lentz that opens this anthology, a solo cello line harmonically enriched through overdubbing, is graceful, understated and tinged with melancholy. The closing piece, Jim Fox’s filmic Colorless sky became fog, shares those qualities. They seem to define a Cold Blue soundworld, although these 14 previously unissued tracks, some specially commissioned, accommodate diverse and individualistic composers…. This is a post-experimental label, presenting work that subtly channels lessons learnt from radical sources into music that is unapologetically attractive and accessible.” [Julian Cowley, The Wire] “Superb…music that exemplifies refinement without at the same time being overly burdened by formality and convention.” [Textura (Cold Blue Two was on Textura’s “Best of 2012” list.)] “Listen closely: there is almost always a sharp edge hidden among these glistening surfaces…. The most casual listen to this haunted music-box, as often eerie or melancholy as it is soothing, is an unsettling experience, a quiet disquiet. Cold Blue the label and Cold Blue the anthologies are aptly named: cold and like a glacier or a clear winter sky, this music is as shiver-inducing as it is lovely.” [Daniel Stephen Johnson, Q2 Music, WQXR] “A sampler that confirms the tradition of American experimental music to be alive, well and in safe hands.” [Int’l Record Review] “A panoramic view of Cold Blue’s offerings, which are quite varied and yet make a powerful unified statement. These works could be described as beautiful oddities—some even devastatingly gorgeous, but always with a twist. Even if unapologetic beauty is not your cup of tea, worry not—upon close listen each one of these works sports frayed edges, chipped corners, or other subtle disturbances that turn it into a highly personal proclamation…. Each work contains treasures to be discovered within, and the heart-on-sleeve honesty of the works is not something one hears often.” [Alexandra Gardner, NewMusicBox]

Chas Smith, a maverick West Coast composer in the spirit of Harry Partch and Harry Bertoia, creates much of his music from instruments of his own design and own tuning. The first two pieces on this CD, beautiful and texturally dense, explore the often electronic/music-concrete-sounding world of Smith’s bowed and struck metal instruments. The leisurely paced last two pieces feature the composer performing on pedal steel guitar. Electronic Musician magazine wrote of this CD, “Smith creates unsettling music that is both beautiful and eerie.” International Record Review wrote, “This disc offers musical experiences utterly out of the ordinary…. Smith’s pieces are music of experiment and discovery: a way of enabling the physical world to ‘speak’ by investigating, harnessing and organizing its sonic properties. The extraordinary sound-world of Smith’s articulately structured music captivates from the start.” The Wire magazine commented, “With Smith’s music, the sounds are as compelling as his concepts and instruments.”