This is an essential collection of West Coast music that San Francisco’s Other Minds founder and longtime KPFA radio host Charles Amirkhanian called “a classic...

This is an essential collection of West Coast music that San Francisco’s Other Minds founder and longtime KPFA radio host Charles Amirkhanian called “a classic anthology of American new music.” Although bound together by a common concern with music’s basic sensuality, the pieces collected here are wide-ranging in style—process-driven works, through-composed pieces, ambient soundscapes, and music that glances in the directions of world music and avant-pop. In instrumentation, the music is also wide-ranging—from a celesta solo to a marimba quartet to a player piano solo to works for speaking voices and wineglasses to music for piano and bullroarer to music for pedal steel guitar accompanied by a choir of banjos to relatively traditional instrumentions. This anthology has something for everyone—and its incautious eclecticism is no doubt one of the reasons for its long-resonating popularity. International Record Review wrote, “Throughout, the music communicates the excitement of the new, the fresh, the experimental: most of the pieces convey a sense of delight and wonder in the sheer creative freedom of their approach to sound—an approach radically loosened from old rhetorics and rooted instead in a belief in the almost unlimited potential of texture and color…. a trove of small-scale pleasures and surprises, in which a sense of fun, curiosity, and the thrill of invention are never far away.” All-Music Guide wrote, “As avant-garde music at the turn of the century seemed confined to the extremes of noise and stamina on the one hand and the post-Feldman search for disappearance of sound on the other, one feels uncertain about how to approach the loveliness of the music on Cold Blue. Recommended.” And The Wire magazine called it “A rewarding snapshot of composition in the decade or so leading up to 1984… Cold Blue anticipates the new tonalities that characterize the post-minimal generation.”