The Promises of Darkness marks the next chapter in the visionary collaboration between Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Roger Reynolds and conductor/producer Mathias Reumert. Released by Ekkozone, this landmark album showcases world premiere recordings of four major works, tracing four decades of Reynolds's trailblazing contributions to contemporary music. The title work, The Promises of Darkness (1975), pays homage to Reynolds's mentor Roberto Gerhardt. Scored for an ensemble of 11 players, this piece masterfully conjures vivid colors and an almost cinematic sense of dread, revealing Reynolds as a composer unafraid to probe the edges of musical and emotional experience. From 1985 comes Mistral, for strings, brass, and amplified harpsichord. Although inspired by an encounter with the forceful Mediterranean wind, the piece is "neither illustrative nor programmatic," according to the composer. Mistral has previously been released in a lo-fi live recording, but the highly refined score - with it's crystalline articulate harpsichord - is finally brought to life in this new version, which Reynolds himself has hailed as "a triumph." A relentless exploration of the interplay between two harmonic strata, Dionysus (1990) involves "a blend of metaphor and pragmatics" and is captured in a breathtakingly precise performance, with expressive solos from flutist Helene Navasse and trumpeter Laszlo Molnar. Closing the album is the electroacoustic Positings (2013), where the Mathias Reumert Group is joined by computer musician and Reynolds collaborator Paul Hembree. Seamlessly blending live performance with electronic textures, Positings embodies Reynolds's innovative spirit, pushing the boundaries of sound and structure. This release follows the critically acclaimed Wind Concertos, the first in the Reynolds/Reumert series, which earned Album of the Year (The Five Best) from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation in 2024. With The Promises of Darkness, Ekkozone solidifies it's reputation as a home for groundbreaking contemporary music, curated with Reumert's exacting vision.

With three upcoming albums, Ekkozone Records celebrates the work of the trailblazing American composer Roger Reynolds and his collaboration with Danish musician and producer, Mathias Reumert.

The first album in the series, Wind Concertos, features the World Premiere recording of Reynolds’s oboe concerto, JOURNEY, combined with his landmark electroacoustic flute concerto, Transfigured Wind III.

The composer describes JOURNEY as a work that “does not give up its secrets easily”. Written for the pre-eminent modern oboist Jacqueline Leclair, who is featured as soloist on the recording, JOURNEY is a work of immense subtlety, in which the solo part weaves in and out of the polyphonic orchestral texture. The unusual harmonies of the ensemble writing are based on Leclair's trademarks oboe multiphonics, which are captured with stunning richness in this state-of-the-art recording.

Reumert conducts one of Scandinavia's finest ensembles, the Esbjerg Ensemble, whose flutist Kerstin Thiele interprets the extraordinary solo part in Transfigured Wind III. Widely considered a masterwork of the late 20th century, this large-scale concerto represents a pinnacle in Reynolds’ exploration of the potential of electroacoustic composition.

In a wide-ranging interview included in the booklet, the composer calls the new recording of Transfigured Wind III "revelatory" and discusses the collaborative process on JOURNEY: "In the best collaborations, each participant adds dimensionality and enriches the proposed content. In this case, it developed that I too had achieved something beyond what I had expected. Ultimately, Jackie, Mathias, and the ensemble brought the piece to life in a way that I had not imagined was possible".

EGUNGUN: EARTH-SHATTERING PERCUSSION

Ekkozone Records proudly presents the Valencia-based SoXXI Percussion Group and their decade-spanning collaboration with Louis Franz Aguirre (b. 1968), one of the foremost Latin American composers of today.

EGUNGUN features premiere recordings of Aguirre’s ground-breaking percussion sextets, a singular body of work which conjures up the composer’s mystical-religious universe. Elements from traditional Afro-Cuban percussion music, Indian classical music and Iannis Xenakis’s percussion writing are some of the sources that Aguirre draws upon, yet his musical language is wholly original.

Visceral and highly dramatic, the five compositions on EGUNGUN encompass every conceivable dynamic nuance, from evocative gongs and incantations of ancient Yoruba texts to terrifying textures, screams, and a profusion of drums and unconventional metallic percussion sounds, including the unheard-of and stunningly captured sound of electric hammer drills drilling into car rims!

EGUNGUN is the follow-up to Ekkozone’s latest release, ORULA, which was picked as one of the best albums of 2023 by the leading Danish music magazine Seismograf.

World-renowned Danish percussionists have teamed up with trailblazing composer, Philippe Manoury. The fruit of a multi-year collaboration, this album feature World Première recordings of Manoury’s work. Argumenta synthesizes, in a way, all my previous compositions for keyboard percussion. Written for the outstanding Reumert/Elten Percussion Duo (who perform my works from memory!), Argumenta incorporates many of the techniques and ideas I had experimented with in previous works. The title ‘Argumenta’ is quite abstract but implicitly evokes a kind of joust or conversation in which the two musicians exchange ideas and proposals that will serve as a basis for confrontations.

Sometimes the two protagonists ‘talk’ about the same thing in the same voice; sometimes they continue to talk about the same thing, but in more individual ways, and sometimes they oppose, pursue, interrupt, or influence each other. The marimba is a simple instrument: tuned wooden bars amplified by tube resonators. One would think that it wasn’t possible to create a legato phrasing with this construction. However, the virtuosity of today’s marimbists has transcended the limitations of the instrument. This extraordinary development has allowed me to articulate musical ideas that I previously wouldn’t have considered realizable. I am fighting against the fact that the marimba is a simple construction! (Philippe Manoury) Reumert and Elten also present Le tombeau de Couperin in an exciting new version. Maurice Ravel’s masterful hybrid — true to Baroque forms but unmistakably Ravel — was written for solo piano and then orchestrated by the composer. These adaptations, in turn, inspired Mathias Reumert to transcribe the suite for keyboard percussion instruments.

On this one-of-a-kind album, the outstanding Danish ensemble Mathias Reumert Group presents three of Cuban composer Louis Franz Aguirre’s strongest pieces, including the large-scale composition for percussion ensemble and flute soloist, Orula (Liturgia de la Adivinación), a journey in extreme sonorities, complex polyrhythms and searing microtonal melodies. "I come from a culture where rhythm is the rationale for life and death. Where the drums are a means to worship, to communicate, and to call the Orishas to come down to Earth", says the composer. According to percussionist/conductor Mathias Reumert, "learning these works took years and left us forever changed. Listeners will understand." A quote from musicologist Dr. Iván César Morales best sums up the experience: "Aguirres music has the power of an exorcism!" Louis Aguirre (1968) is a Cuban composer resident in Denmark. Aguirre was educated as a composer, violinist and conductor at the University of Arts in Havana, Cuba, under the guidance of Harold Gramatges and Roberto Valera . When he was 27 years old, he became the artistic director and chief conductor of the Symphony Orchestra in his birth town, Camagüey, as well as guest conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra and the Santiago de Cuba Symphony Orchestra. He also was a professor at the Camagüey’s Music Conservatory and artistic director and chairman of the International Festival of Contemporary Music (1996-2002) in Camagüey. Louis Aguirre is an award-winning composer whose music has been labelled as "Music from hell" and "Not for the faint of heart". He one of the foremost Latin American composers of his generation, yet only a handful of recordings exists.