The Perfect Nothing Catalog is the debut album by Alaska-raised and Brooklyn-based composer Conrad Winslow, coproduced with Aaron Roche, featuring electroacoustic works commissioned and recorded by Cadillac Moon Ensemble. Cadillac Moon Ensemble- a uniquely mixed quartet of flute, violin, cello, and percussion- has a long working relationship with Winslow. They have commissioned two ensemble works and one solo percussion work. The Perfect Nothing Catalog is a record of their collaboration. The title of the album and its major half-hour work, composed in 2014, comprises 50 miniatures, obsessively categorized. The structure echoes Caryl Churchill’s 2012 play Love & Information, in which a large thematic arc is drawn by tiny non-repeating scenes. The idea of the work was also inspired by rising installation artist Frank Traynor’s The Perfect Nothing Catalog which interrogates the power of curation and restricted control in the making of things.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Taking it's name from the group Blanco founded in the '50s to promote the arts in Cuba (Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo), this album brings together significant works from the span of Blanco's career. 'Cirkus-Toccata' (1983) blends Blanco's percolating prepared tape part with the percussion of Cuban legends Guillermo Barreto (timbales) and Tata Guines (congas). Created with only one oscillator, tape splicing, feedback and basic overdubbing techniques, 'Musica para Danza' (1961) is presented here for the first time, a revelation of lo-fi electronics. The most recent work is 'Espacio V' (1993), part of a series that features Leo Brower and Paquito D'Rivera following an electronic score created with the Jupiter 8 synthesizer.

Outrages and Interludes features eight works documenting John Halle’s decade-long in¬volvement with radical left politics. Halle’s fusion of vernacular styles, kinetic rhythms, formal sophistication and subtle lyricism point to a new direction in music and political engagement that nevertheless maintains deep roots in the American musical tradition. Kyle Gann: “as one of the great unsung totalists…” Pitchfork Media: “Seethes with conviction…before burning off, disappearing into the distance.”

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• Dan Becker’s debut solo CD as a composer explores his fascination with process in all its forms. “Gridlock” is Becker’s most performed work and a predictable favorite with musicians and audiences alike. “Fade,” the title track, is something of a lullaby written for his yet-to-be born daughter. “Keeping Time” and “A Dream of Waking” show how process can be embodied in musical composition. Becker is Composition Chair at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Award winning composer David Kechley mines the intimate in order to find the dramatic, eschewing volume and mass in favor of tension and melodic invention of the works on this disc. This extends to the instrumentation, which includes creative percussion such as circular saw blades and pine planks cut to different lengths in "Design and Construction" or the pitched gongs, crotales, woodblocks, and exotic bells of the title track.

Sacred Heart cathedral in Duluth, Minnesota, is where the performances on composer Justin Rubin's latest album were captured. The building's hundred-year-old bricks and sandstone work their way into the compositions, imbuing the record with a timeless quality in an age that seems ever eager for the next technological innovation.

Classical Music

Classical Music

As the namesake of his innova debut, the Antikythera Mechanism is a fitting metaphor for composer Andrew McPherson’s musical approach. A kind of cogwheel computer designed to calculate astronomical positions, the Antikythera Mechanism was discovered aboard the sunken wreck of an Ancient Greek ship at the turn of the last century.

Since the 1980s, Robert Gibson has been working behind the scenes as an accomplished jazz and orchestral bass player, and as School of Music Director at the University of Maryland. He has also been an active composer. So it is high time he came center stage and we had a chance to hear his own chamber music. Flux and Fire features Gibson's works for stringed instruments that were inspired by poetry. The fluid boundary between music and poetry as art- and to specific poems as inspiration for instrumental music- is a deeply personal one for the composer and is a defining characteristic of much of his music. Some of the poets he draws from include Alain Bosquet, Stanley Kunitz, and Paul Muldoon, while the listener may discern allusions to the music of Debussy and Takemitsu. The title of the double bass quartet Soundings is a reference in part to the nautical term for measuring the depth of water. This term has an obvious connection to the double bass as the "deepest" sounding string instrument of the orchestra. As a professional bassist, the composer notes that this work is "a personal exploration of the instrument that is closest to me in my life as a musician." This recording showcases four members of the National Symphony. Two string quartets are the chronological bookends of this project. The quartets are framed in the album by three versions of Night Music, a solo work commissioned for the Third Triennial Johansen International Competition for Young String Players (2003) and written so that the work is suitable for performance on violin, viola, or cello without any instrument specific editing.

Classical Music

Classical Music