Plain Songs: 'Love Comes Quietly' (after Robert Creeley) is composer Peter Garland's haunting seven-movement work for pipe organ, performed by acclaimed organist Carson Cooman on the Fisk organ at Harvard Memorial Church. Garland writes about "Plain Songs": "I wanted to write a piece for organ that would be intimate and mostly quiet, emphasizing the nature of the organ as a wind instrument capable of long, sustained tones. I wanted the musical textures to be open and transparent, rather than dense and massive. I also had in mind smaller historical organs and their music. The reference to the poet Robert Creeley is relevant to the above-mentioned goals. I greatly admire the simplicity and clarity of his poetic language; it's lucidity and how it rarely strays from the directness of popular, vernacular speech. I wanted to emulate those qualities in my music to the extent it was possible: to transfer the music of his poetry into the language of my music." Peter Garland is a composer, world traveler, musicologist, and writer whose music is informed by his well-traveled ear and strong sense of personal vision. He studied with Harold Budd and James Tenney and maintained long friendships with Lou Harrison, Conlon Nancarrow, Paul Bowles, and Dane Rudhyar. As a musicologist, he has focused on Native American, Mexican, and Southwestern American musics and 20th-century experimental composers of the Americas, championing the work of Revueltas, Partch, and Nancarrow long before their music became fashionable and regularly programmed. Since the early 1970s, Garland's music has been marked by a return to a "radical consonance" and simplification of formal structure influenced by Cage, Harrison, early minimalism, and a great variety of world musics. His unique and highly engaging pieces have been played around the world by such noted performers as pianists Aki Takahashi, Herbert Henck, and Sarah Cahill; percussionist William Winant; accordionist Guy Klucevsek; and the Kronos Quartet and released on the Cold Blue, Tzadik, New Albion, Mode, Avant, Toshiba-EMI/Angel, New World, and other labels. "Garland's music seems to be about the sheer expressive power of sound itself.... I feel he is one of our true originals." (Robert Carl, Fanfare magazine) "Garland is... a composer of mesmerizing music." (Kyle Gann, Chamber Music magazine) "A marvelous artist." (Harold Budd) Carson Cooman is an acclaimed concert organist who specializes in the performance of contemporary music-and more than 300 compositions by over 100 composers have been written for him by such composers as Kyle Gann, Jennifer Higdon, Jo Kondo, Robert Moran, Howard Skempton, and Linda Catlin Smith. His organ performances can be heard on a numerous of recordings. And as a composer, Cooman has written hundreds of works that have been performed around the world. He is currently Research Associate in Music and Composer in Residence at Harvard's Memorial Church. "Carson Cooman is one of the most versatile and active musicians of our time. Pianist, organist, composer, and improviser, he is excellent in every field." (Music and Vision) "Cooman's success as a composer for the organ is due in large part to his innate understanding of the instrument as a performer." (American Record Guide) "Carson Cooman is a nimble, nuanced, and eloquent advocate." (Choir & Organ)

The Music of...Larry Polansky is a marvelous combination of the mathematical and the expressive. The blend is so seamless, in fact, that it serves to point out the absurdity of regarding those two strains as opposite or even especially different.'' (Joshua Kosman, SFGate) This album of chamber music offers three pieces: Polansky's drifting, shape-shifting freeHorn and his pulsing ii-v-i - each of which consists of a continuous modulation between the three different natural-just harmonic series - and minmaj, Polansky's unusual ''translation'' or Ruggles's Angels. Larry Polansky is a prolific composer, theorist, performer, writer and teacher whose works are performed frequently around the world. Albums devoted exclusively to his music are available on New World Records, Artifact, and Cold Blue, and many of his pieces are anthologized on other labels. Recently, he wrote the score for Stacey Steers' Night Hunter, an experimental animation chosen for the Telluride, Sundance, Rotterdam, and New Films/New Directors film festivals.

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.”

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.”

A Sweet Quasimodo is a stunning work for two grand pianos played simultaneously by the composer in a tremolo style that Palestine calls “strumming,” a technique that has defined his piano music since the late 1960s. Starting from a quiet repeated pitch, the work grows into a roaring flurry of notes as it spins out a sonic tapestry in surges and ebbs and dense sonorities with hypnotically dancing overtones. It was recorded in concert at Maybeck Hall in Berkeley, California. Palestine precedes the piece’s performance with a short spoken reminiscence of his time spent in California 30 years earlier and a brief “ritual song” accompanied by the drone of a rubbed brandy snifter. “Palestine has a way of choosing notes so as to tremendously affect the thickness of the sound and create panoramic variety (and even microtonal anomalies) among the overtone masses he is creating, sort of a one-man acoustic Glenn Branca symphony.” [Village Voice] “Charlemagne Palestine…is among the most distinctive figures to have emerged as part of the late-Sixties counter-culture. Although he is often referred to as a Minimalist, his work has little systemic abstraction: indeed, its ritualistic and ceremonial qualities have more in common with John Cage and Lou Harrison.… A Sweet Quasimodo opens with a typically informal address to the audience, toasting them with a snifter of cognac and setting the mood with a raga-like vocalise sung falsetto. There follows a 36-minute piece played simultaneously on two Yamaha pianos…its rapid and parallel repetition of notes gradually fuse into a haze of harmonics which mutates into myriad timbres, accentuated not only by the detuning of the instrument but also by the ‘deep listening’ such a process of imperceptible change induces. When Palestine breaks off the performance, with the adage that he is really just getting going, there is indeed a sense of coming back to reality—albeit after an experience never less than pleasurable.” [Int’l Record Review] “Palestine's work offers sonic sculptures to be thoroughly inspected and savored at every moment.” [Wired magazine] “A sensuous and compelling sonic experience.” [All-Music Guide]

For thirty years, composer Peter Garland’s music has been marked by a radical consonance and a simplification of formal structure. These two spirited and enticing quartets, entitled In Praise of Poor Scholars and Crazy Cloud, draw on his well-traveled ear and great sense of personal vision. Both works move with a unique sense of grace and a sincerity of expression that is purely Garlandesque and receive sensitive performances by the celebrated British ensemble Apartment House, led by new-music cellist Anton Lukoszevieze. “[Garland] is an avatar of an experimental American tradition...a composer of mesmerizing music; and in many ways, the musical conscience of my generation…. Garland’s work always brings increasing cognitive involvement; it is much more intricate than it sounds at first.” [Kyle Gann, Chamber Music magazine] “Elegantly balancing sensuous melodicism and spacious austerity of form, Peter Garland’s string quartets are alluring and inviting, their carefully-wrought complexity often hidden within a luminous transparency.” [Dusted magazine] “While it is not stark or simplistic, the music has been pared down to only the most efficient gestures, and Garland’s affinity for Harrison and John Cage is at least as prominent in these two quartets as his work with Budd and Tenney. Garland’s music has also been described as “post-minimalist” because it shares several characteristics with minimalism, but not minimalism’s usual forms or processes…. Apartment House…I can’t imagine any group presenting this repertoire more sympathetically or with greater technical prowess. There’s not a lot of vibrato here. I don’t know if that is by Garland’s request or by the musicians’ choice, but I don’t miss it. It complements the music’s central paradox: how can the ordinary sound so strange? The up-close engineering lends every stroke of the bow both character and color.” [International Record Review] “There is much to admire in these remarkable works.” [American Record Guide]

Quiet, sometimes lyric, sometimes pensive music: John Luther Adams’s Dark Wind, for bass clarinet, vibraphone, marimba, and piano, joined with music for clarinet/bass clarinet and string quartet by Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, and Jim Fox. “In turns beautiful, expressive, contemplative and haunting. Recommended.” (Incursion Music Review) “Warm dronic music that shimmers in sensuality…. just plain old beautiful music…delicate music.” (21st-Century Music magazine) “Musical constructions that suggest, and invite, quiet, focused reflection.” (International Record Review) “The performances are about as ego-free as one can find, and they seem indivisible from the compositions themselves.” (Fanfare magazine)

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.”

Fragile, haunting music for trombones, strings and piano, a music of rarefied and quietly rumbling harmonies that, like drifting clouds, seem to float in and out of “view.” This 23-minute CD EP offers music that is both motionless and moving forward with a strange sense of inevitability. “Beautiful and evocative work.” [John Schaefer, WNYC, New Sound] “The City and Wind Swept Away…seems to linger in the air (and the ear)…. Delicate and open throughout.” [Molly Sheridan, NewMusicBox (American Music Center)] “Attentiveness to the integrity of slowly passing sound events can be a strangely moving experience. It is so here.” [Int’l Record Review] “Beautifully recorded music with suitably artistic packaging…. The City the Wind Swept Away is a beautiful, light instrumental presentation…. This is definitely music worth spending time with.” [Musicworks magazine] “Fox’s gorgeous meditation for trombones, strings, and piano.” [Andrew Ford, Australian Financial Review] “Music that…feels as if it could go on endlessly…music that comes from the classical tradition, but that feels like it belongs somewhere other than the concert hall…. texturally rich, meticulously crafted and delicately beautiful.” [Dusted magazine]

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.”

Descansos, past is moody, intimate “in memoriam” music featuring double bass amid a choir of nine cellos led by new-music-champion cellist Erika Duke-Kirkpatrick. A 15-minute CD EP/single. “Lush bleakness that evokes the windswept open spaces of the American West...brooding lyricism...music that seems to linger even after the recording has ended.” [John Schaefer, WNYC, New Sounds] “A work of noble mourning.... playing that is full-bodied and unerringly precise, the string textures glow warmly.” [Int’l Record Review] “Immediately appealing…. If Samuel Barber had been born a half century later as a forward-looking resident of the West Coast, his Adagio for Strings might have sounded a lot like Jim Fox’s Descansos, past.” [ClassicalNet] “Aural poetry, like an inscription on a tombstone to be read with a faint smile instead of tear-stained eyes.” [Paris Transatlantic] “Easily the most beautiful thing I heard all week, Fox’s haunting memorial for his friend, composer/performer John Kuhlman…is deep on so many levels…. You won't want to listen to anything for a while after you've heard this.” [Frank J. Oteri, NewMusicBox (American Music Center)] “The best artists sometimes give you what you didn’t know you wanted because you never heard it like this. Jim Fox and his Descansos, past does that…. It is heartrendingly beautiful music, a dirge with a profound feeling of loss…. Ravishing chamber music! Listen to this one! [Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review] “Descansos, past is an utterly beautiful, aching work…. Fox has a remarkable ability to balance darkness and light in his music; what seems at first a state of calm questioning might, as this work unfolds, open up the listener to a deeper sense of the awe and mystery at the heart of sound and thought.” [Dusted magazine ("most memorable recordings of 2005")]

Lush, casually evolving, elusively shaped music for guitar, piano, bass, and electronics. This 25-minute CD EP/single features the composer’s idiosyncratic guitar playing and performances by Thomas Newman (the noted film composer) and Peter Freeman. “One of the most engrossing records this year so far—and one of those instances when, in terms of duration, less is not more.” [Paris Transatlantic] “From its first inquisitive augmented chord, Rick Cox’s Fade is hard to pin down…. Edges and contours are all smoothed away, the music insinuating much more than it says…. But Cox's elusiveness soon becomes subtlety, and I came to admire his way of opening up spaces and filling them—patiently, softly—with music…. The word ‘ambient’ has served too long—or so Fade seems to say—as a catchall for quiet and dominantly electronic music of an impressionist bent…. Cox has more in common with, say, the classical Japanese shakuhachi repertory than he does with Eno…. The piece is a relaxing and most enjoyable 25 minutes, a gentle aural makeover.” [Gramophone magazine] “Rick Cox creates night music filled with echoes and murmurs, in the shape of a single piece stretching out into complete silence.” [Gérard Nicollet, Octopus (France)]

Chas Smith—composer, inventor, instrument builder, and performer—has created his own musical world, complete with its own instruments and “language.” It is a world of carefully sculpted textures that never sit absolutely still, but are always evolving. Critics have repeatedly compared Smith’s sometimes beautiful, sometimes brooding compositions to those of Ligeti. The three pieces on this new recording feature the composer performing works for pedal steel guitars, composer-designed-and-built crotales and sound sculptures, zithers, and a 1948 Bigsby lap guitar. “Chas Smith composes and performs epic soundscapes...music that reflects the wide-open spaces of the American West… [C]loser attention reveals his subtle layering of instrumental textures. The overall effect is of a shimmering, reverberating soundscape, extraordinarily evocative of the boundless spaces that clearly inspired it: an endless desert under a throbbing sun.” (The Wire magazine) “If anyone needed proof that Smith’s music runs deeper than the novelty impact of gigantic, multi-rodded creatures struck and bowed with odd-shaped apparatuses, An Hour Out of Desert Center nails it…. Smith builds shimmering soundscapes. He stacks track after track of crystal-clear notes and motifs…. Its beauties are immediately palpable, yet they don’t fade with repeated listens…. Beautiful.” (All-Music Guide) “For anyone interested in the music of today—and of tomorrow—this disc is essential listening.” (Int’l Record Review)

Music that combines equal measures of beauty and grit. Moody, elusively shaped textural music that is compelling from its very first violin note to its final shimmer of decaying cymbals. This 29-minute CD EP/single is scored for violins, cellos, percussion, and electronic/sampled sounds. “An impressive, beautiful CD single that offers up a seamless, elegant ‘cloud’ of sound.” [Gramophone magazine] “Dense, slowly changing sounds, atmospherically gloomy and harmonically quite subtle.” [The Musical Times (London)] “A Temperament is much darker than its title might suggest—informed, as it is, by the harsher concept of terrifying beauty written of by Rilke in the Duino Elegies... a steely sonic environment.” [NewMusicBox (Amer. Music Center)] “A miniature masterpiece.” [Sands-Zine (Italy)] “It too has a definite…impact on the listener in the way it constructs a slow moving, ever-changing, ever-present musical world…. A Temperament for Angels has a Zen kind of focus on the nature of complex tone clusters that has genuine merit and holds up well after many listens. Nice!” [Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review]

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.”