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.”

Spare, undulating music written for a dance/theater work entitled Shelter. Three violas casually stroll through their notes leading to an alluring voice and piano music that acts as an extended coda to the string music that preceded it. This is a 16-minute CD EP/single. “Pure, restrained and rigorously beautiful.” [Alvin Curran] “Long, irregular phrases evoke a kind of storytelling, and the use of multiple violas creates a panorama of shifting perspectives. The music is unadorned and plain-spoken, with no artifice whatsoever. My burning skin to sleep is scored for piano (softly chiming and sustained chords which hang in the air like stars) and the multi-tracked vocalise of singer Marghreta Cordero. Her singing is both mournful and erotic, and while the ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ feel spontaneous, one notes how perfectly the vocal parts are tuned to each other, as well as to Peters’s ringing piano chords.” [ClassicalNet] “Behind the West Coast spaciousness of this work, there seems to lurk the mind of a composer as scientific and intellectual in approach as American progenitor Charles Ives…. Cordero’s voice is electrifying, with a heart-rending vibrato on line-ending high notes, a sensuous and intimate dark-toned warmth in its lower ranges.” [Dusted magazine] “This is a gentle, social, considerate piece; each component supports and is supported, sheltered and given shelter, by the others.” [Int’l Record Review]

This collection of intimate, eerily beautiful music by Dutch composer Fahres weaves naturally occurring acoustic phenomena with the playing of celebrated performers. The title piece features the breathy sounds emitted by the rock tube formations on El Hierro (westernmost of the Canary Islands) and performances by Aboriginal musician Mark Atkins and Los Angeles-based composer/trumpeter Jon Hassell, The two other works on the CD are Sevan, recorded near Lake Sevan (Armenia), featuring Armenian singer Parik Nazarian, and Coimbra 4, Mundi Theatre, a soundscape of a city-wide festival in Coimbra, Portugal. “I was transfixed by the haunting sounds and the poetic pacing of Fahres’ music on this CD. Rather than the sound floating through the room, it was as if I was floating in the sound.” [Morton Subotnick] “An exceptionally well-composed album, comprising very well-thought out concepts that have been delivered in an utmost ingenious and abstract way.” [Unknown Public (where it was a “favorite releases of the week” pick)] “Fahres is skillful in creating drama and blending the recorded materials into intriguing, musically satisfying soundscapes. The Tubes…is an especially impressive achievement.” [All-Music Guide] “This is the kind of recording that lets you get wondrously lost in someone else’s sound world.” [Sequenza21] “A beautiful and interesting approach to soundscape composition.” [Musicworks magazine]

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.”

Composer/performer/instrument-builder Smith offers strangely beautiful and compelling soundscapes scored for his unique sound-sculptural instruments, steel guitar and electronics. Dan Warburton wrote in Paris Transatlantic, “Chas Smith's pedal steel and 12-string dobro are as evocative and quintessentially American as a crackling neon light outside a desert motel at sunset.” Dusted magazine called Descent Smith’s “most powerful and focused work yet.” The American Music Center’s NewMusicBox commented, “Listening to…Descent, is like sifting through space. It’s atmospheric and otherworldly, yet never stands still. Here and there are small craters and crescendos of electronic sound, and the harmonic landscape seems to suggest a tonic center, but then it slowly drifts into outer orbits to explore a much larger sound vocabulary.” And Signal to Noise magazine wrote, “Calling Smith’s instrumentation unusual is an absurd understatement. Aside from the familiar cry of his steel guitar, Descent’s three long pieces feature sounds produced by metal-based sculptural instruments (which he even names: Copper Box, Que Lastas, Pez Eater, and Jr. Blue) and a custom-built, three-neck steel guitar he calls Guitarzilla. Smith’s compositions are grandiose vistas teeming with twilight sonorities…. Though Descent's heaving masses may be alien in character, they're engrossing nonetheless.”

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.”

Music for solo piano, solo celesta, multiple clarinets, and electronic instruments. The fragile piano works and the celesta piece display Los Angeles-based composer Fink’s command of forms that are Debussyian in beauty (and occasionally in gesture) yet maintain a distinctly contemporary distance from their musical materials. The multi-clarinet work is a dark, slow-moving study in texture and tone color. The title piece is moody, insistent music that glistens with electric timbres. The Los Angeles Times has described Fink’s music as “lustrous” and “metaphysically tinged” and likened it to the work of composer Morton Feldman. Michael Barone of Minnesota Public Radio called this CD, “Spare, refined, wholesome, satisfying.… If Erik Satie had lived in the early 21st century, he might have written in this fashion…harmonically beguiling.” Incursion Music Review wrote of this album: "Works of stunning beauty and simplicity… they whisper to you in the night, a single solitary voice that echoes from within the silence.”

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]

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]

The three pieces by New York-based composer Byron that are collected here (two for strings and keyboards and one for four pianos) are dramatic, lush, insistent, and lovely and reveal their compositional processes as they unfold. Music of Nights . . . might be likened to the sound of rainfall on a roof—delicate, resonate, active, continuously changing while seeming to remain the same. Entrances starts with intermittent bursts of notes and builds to a dense barrage of sound. Kyle Gann writing in the Village Voice called the pieces collected here, “…lovely in their cloudy string textures and abrupt piano riffs… it all breathes the air of pre-Silicon Valley California.” Fanfare magazine wrote of this album: “Cascades of swirling music… sincere, technically challenging musical art with a distinct point of view.” International Record Review commented, “The deeply engaging pieces…are rigorously about process and implications…. Music of Nights Without Moon or Pearl is a piece to savor…. David Rosenboom’s realization of Entrances is a marvel of stamina and precision.” ClassicalNet noted, “Byron creates a maximalist effect out of minimalist means.” And the San Francisco Bay Guardian wrote, “One is reminded not only of the time-bound nature of sculpture (one must move around a piece to fully experience it), but the mobiles of Alexander Calder, which are both fixed and moving. And like Calder's work, Byron's music is immediately comprehensible and beautiful, while it remains experimental.”

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)

Peter Garland is a composer, world traveler, musicologist, writer whose music is always informed by his well-traveled ear and strong sense of personal vision. (His music has appeared on five previous Cold Blue CDs.) After the Wars, a resonant, sometimes clangorous four-movement piano solo performed by new-music champion Sarah Cahill, displays a unique sense of grace and a sincerity of expression. Garland writes about the piece: “Each of the transparent and self-contained movements takes as inspiration a Chinese poem or Japanese haiku.... I explore the quality of resonance in the piano: not just the notes played on the keyboard, but the sense of echo and fade produced by a very deliberate use of pedaling, and the sustaining and release of piano keys after notes and chords are sounded. It creates a sense of timbral color and acoustic perspective (proximity and distance).... Each movement is like a single image, simply stated with relatively little temporal or thematic development—very much like the poems they are based on.” After the Wars is a 20-minute CD EP/single. MusicWeb Int’l wrote of it, “There is an interesting use of space and time in this work. On the surface, it’s quite simple, but the sounds develop over the span of the four movements as you slowly grow accustomed to the underlying structure…and after listening to this disc several times, I wanted to hear more.” Julien Cowley wrote in The Wire, “Pianistic shell bursts interspersed with wounded reflection …. Garland’s After The Wars… alternates ruggedness and delicacy, oppressive weight fringed with luminosity in a powerful evocation of desolation and scarred hope.” And Gapplegate Classical-Modern Review wrote, “Garland weaves a web of expressive, muted magic and we readily fall under its spell. Very recommended.”

This boisterously churning music for three pianos is rich with dense, sometimes shimmering, sometimes rumbling tremolos set off by moments of light, twinkling quietude. (Written in 1984, Black Water was premiered the following year at the New Music America festival, its title was taken from an Alberto Manguel-edited collection of short stories.) An 18-minute CD EP/single. “Jim Fox is a singular composer. His music is deep, sparkling, ecstatic, and breathaking.” [John Luther Adams] “A nearly relentless shimmering movement that explores the full range of the keyboard. When the lines do linger a bit in a particular area of tranquility, the mood easily turns reflective, but the bulk of [pianist] Pezzone’s work across the three piano parts keeps ears pulled forward, the notes a school of silvery fish rapidly outpacing any ominous predators floating in the shadows.” [Molly Sheridan, NewMusicBox] “Driven alternately by furious staccato passages, strident chords and assertive arpeggios with the occasional oasis of restraint… it is an energetic whirlwind of a piece that captures and holds the attention.” [Int’l Record Review] “This is exciting music, carrying the listener along in unexpected directions.… The final crashing chord hangs in the air, slowly dissipating, to provide a fitting end to this high-powered work. [Pianist] Bryan Pezzone has done a fine job here.” [Sequenza21] “Black Water is a striking and effective piece which stimulates and deserves repeated hearing.” [MusicWeb Int’l]

Nakadai, which KPFA Folio/Other Minds Radio called “one of the most explosive LPs of the Eighties,” is a set of works that offer a veritable catalog of musical “waves”—from ripples to tsunamis. It features Smith playing pedal steel guitar (solo and overdubbed) with a quartet of mallet percussionists, all of whom are noted LA musicians. This CD reissue of Nakadai allows today’s listeners to hear prototypical Smith—music composed when his present style was in its nascent state. In addition to the original five Nakadai tracks, this release includes two "bonus" tracks: 2008's evocative Ghosts on the Windows and 1991's Joaquin Murphey, a tribute to the pedal steel legend of the same name. “Intense and drony, yet luscious. A welcome reissue of pieces by this important Los Angeles-based instrument builder and pedal steel guitarist.” [Electronic Musician magazine] “Chas Smith is a California original—an instrument builder, composer, and performer who creates psychedelic labyrinths of sound using stringed instruments fed through various electronic processors. For the uninitiated, Nakadai, his fifth CD of material released by the intrepid Southern California-based label Cold Blue, might just be the perfect place to begin since it offers a great overview of his work.” [Frank J. Oteri, NewMusicBox] “For lack of a better term, let’s say that when we produce or listen to sounds that an instrument was not principally designed to generate, we are playing or hearing ‘beyond the instrument.’ Give it to Bartok and his slap, Cage and his prepared piano, Frith and his alligator clipped strings: what was once a marginal aspect of expressive notation has steadily become an expected component of new and experimental musics…. Nakadai…performs well beyond the instrument and after some quarter century the work shows no signs of wear…. The five pieces—which string together in a suite-like seamlessness—possess a rich timbral depth and harmonic complexity…suspended and active states, moments that might infer Ligeti at one turn or the long and pitch-shifted sustains of Fripp at another. Beautiful stuff, shorn of prettiness and decoration to reach an absolute sound of almost continuous invention.” [K Leimer , Exposé magazine]

The composer writes about Ecstatic Descent: “Every note of the piano is altered (“prepared”) with bolts, screws, strips of rubber, cardboard, and paper- transforming the instrument into a miniature percussion orchestra… On this singular instrument I perform cascades of rapid-fire textures that start at the very top of the keyboard and wend their way down, bubbling and glinting as they descend.” Originally from San Diego and now residing in Brisbane, Australia, Erik Griswold composes for musicians, artists, dancers, and poets. He has collaborated with such well-known musicians as Steven Schick, Margaret Leng Tan, the Zephyr String Quartet, and many others. His music has been performed at Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera House, the Chengdu Arts Centre, the Melbourne Festival, the OzAsia Festival, and many other venues around the world.