Ravello Records proudly presents Escape X’s sophomore release, OUR FAVORITE THINGS. The album, which is the group’s first project with Ravello, features the music of contemporary composers and artists ranging from award-winning jazz artist Joe Locke to internationally-renowned New Zealand composer John Psathas and many others. Jazz, percussion, and pop all find a home on OUR FAVORITE THINGS. Escape X is a duo comprised of Annie Stevens and Andrea Venet specializing in percussion instruments like marimba, vibraphone, and much more. Their mission is to generate creative and diverse music within a variety of genres and timbral contexts in order to bring challenging, lasting works into the standard repertoire. OUR FAVORITE THINGS is a potent fulfillment of that mission. OUR FAVORITE THINGS showcases the talents of an impressive array of composers, and in so doing, flexes the duo’s versatility. Take the album’s first track, for one: Parkway is a programmatic piece starring marimba and vibraphone inspired by a road trip through New Jersey. Ethereal and abstract at first, the piece soon coalesces around bustling rhythms that simulate the open highway. Compare this to Clear Midnight; it is a continuous two-movement work featuring marimbas, drums, and voice. The challenging piece, inspired by the Walt Whitman poem of the same name, requires the musicians to sing while playing their instruments. The result is a rich, engulfing texture punctuated by percussive interjections. Likewise, behind every piece is a compelling story, and each work dares the duo in inventive ways.

Jeff Morris's second album, With Strings, explores the possibilities of 21st-century counterpoint. He builds up rich musical textures by sampling violin and cello live and folding them back into the mix, influencing the performers in turn. German electric cellist Ulrich Maiss, a former collaborator of Lou Reed and Al Di Meola, joins Morris on B4ch1007 ("Bach Loot"). The piece is a vivid, glitchy fantasy on J. S. Bach's music, with inspiration from Lou Reed's classic Metal Machine Music and a video graphic score reminiscent of early experimental film by Hans Richter. Morris uses sound to visually distort the manuscript of Bach's famous Cello Suite, yielding a new musical score to read. This audiovisual reimagining is native to our time while gleaning some underlying musical intuition from the flow of Bach's music. Eric KM Clark (Southland Ensemble, California E.A.R. Unit) performs a tryptich of improvised works in different interactive environments: a virtual string quintet, a tangled strand of echoes, and a microscopic journey inside the materials that make up the violin itself. Morris controls these musical constructs live, which are inspired by a house of mirrors and Einstein's daydream of riding beside a beam of light. Using control interfaces like a gamepad and Nintendo Wii Remotes (Wiimotes), Morris takes a variety of roles in the music, ranging from a performer alongside Clark to a digital conductor of his own software orchestra. This is not your ordinary laid-back "strings" music. Rather, it is a vibrant journey through the possibilities of digital-native chamber music that is sure to light up your imagination.

New from Ravello Records comes AUTUMN WINDS, a collection of chamber music composed by Kirk O’Riordan. The music, which features pianist and PARMA recording artist Holly Roadfeldt along with soprano Ann Moss and Peter Dutilly playing viola, is as challenging as it is alluring; O’Riordan takes listeners to the outskirts of tonality in order to elucidate questions of beauty, existence, and mortality. The first piece, Four Beautiful Songs, explores competing notions of attraction. It is the only piece featuring all three performers. A brazen, dissonant cluster of tones from the piano opens the curtain on this provocative performance, with Moss’s soprano line sung above a frantic accompaniment. The piece juxtaposes the rush of infatuation with the bitterness of rejection. Next is Prayer Stones, a marked departure from the first. The viola embarks on a series of short meditations over the piano, as if gently palming a sacred stone while contemplating the ineffable cosmos. Autumn Winds comes next—a setting of 15 haikus by Japanese poet Matsuo Basho. Each movement, only minutes long, reflects upon the phrase “autumn winds,” each time reinterpreting its meaning. The collection concludes with Beautiful Nightmares, a minimalistic take on the serialism of Schoenberg that portrays the transcendent surrealism of the dream world. Lovers of early 20th century art music will no doubt take great pleasure in Kirk O’Riordan’s AUTUMN WINDS, but they are far from the only ones who will; O’Riordan’s music will fire the imagination of all those fascinated by life, language, and the distinct challenge of expressing poetry and poetic themes in song.

In HEARING VOICES, his third album of electronic music with Ravello Records, Jeff Morris captivates the psyche with music that is equal parts space age and primeval. With Morris’s characteristic sensitivity, the collection harnesses the expressive power of digital glitches, sonic manipulation, and underneath it all, the human voice. In the Middle of the Room opens the album with what sounds like an other-worldly chorus of singers. In reality, the vocalizations are those of a single person, Elisabeth Blair, whose voice refracts at different pitches; Blair’s song is electronically contorted by Morris in real time using a technique he calls “live sampling.” The improvised lyrics, on the verge of unintelligibility, seem vaguely reminiscent, as if they have drifted from a long-forgotten songbook of old standards. Next, in Definition of A, singer Susanna Hood lends her voice to form a turbulent cloud of “proto-words,” which tantalize the brain, promising meaning without definition. Again, Morris wrestles with these vocal improvisations in real time, almost maniacally tugging and jerking at the electronic marionette strings. Later, we hear Jabberwocky—A Timbre Poem, which sets Lewis Carroll’s famous stanzas of nonsense words. Eerie and entrancing, the piece denies sense in exchange for sensation; voices whisper and rumble their strange incantations as digitized rhythms pound behind them. The album closes with Reprise (Hearing Voices). Here, through the prism of a machine learning algorithm, Morris revisits themes from earlier in the album, punctuated by static and expansive silence. In HEARING VOICES, Jeff Morris reminds us that often it is only by obscuring that which is familiar that we begin to recognize and understand it. There is little in life that is at once as pedestrian and, yet, as profoundly elemental, as the voice. Beyond the cacophony of digital synapses firing, beyond logic and language, Morris’s music strives to uncover our most fundamental humanity.

Allow composer Richard Carr to lead you through his tremendous global traveling experiences in his latest Ravello Records album PLACES I’VE WALKED. In each track, Carr interprets his adventures through composition and includes sonic elements of his travels to show listeners what these intriguing places are really like. Music creative & contemporary pianist /keyboardist Richard Carr is currently living in the Monterey Bay area. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, he spent 10 years living in the French Quarter honing his harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary into his improvisational creative approach to music. After Hurricane Katrina, Richard spent 12 years in his native St. Louis teaching and performing. Carr’s creative process is improvisatory by nature. Concerts frequently begin with a new creation / improvisation. Richard believes that this approach permits the passion and emotion of his music to come front and center. The majority of his creations fit in the New Age solo instrumental healing & transformational music genre.

With unique interpretations from soloists and instrumental flourishes, saxophonist Paul Cohen revives original works for saxophone that remained unknown for decades. On HEARD AGAIN FOR THE FIRST TIME, Cohen is joined by the Eastern Wind Symphony under Todd Nichols and an impressive roster of soloists to breathe fresh life into the centuries-spanning collection. The original 1949 version of Dahl’s Concerto for Alto Saxophone, long-lost manuscripts of works by Loeffler, Roesgen-Champion’s mid-century impressionism, and Steve Cohen’s contemporary Trio not only reveals a previously unknown depth of saxophone repertoire, but also showcases the instrument’s prowess at tackling a multitude of musical styles.

The Fuego Quartet, featuring saxophonists Nicki Roman, Erik Elmgren, Harrison Clarke, and Gabriel Piqué, makes their Ravello Records debut with the innovative MIGRATION, a collection that demonstrates the versatility and complexity of the saxophone as it migrates through genre boundaries. The album kicks off with Recitation Book, a set of five pieces by composer David Maslanka that transform Bach chorales, madrigals, Gregorian chants, and more into various forms and structures. These arrangements, as performed by the Fuego Quartet, bring listeners into a calm listening sphere that reflects the music of the past in the midst of our busy, technology-saturated world. This set leads into William Albright’s Fantasy Etudes, the more loosely-formed, jazzy arrangements by the late 20th-century composer. Standing as a threshold in the middle of the album, Fantasy Etudes welcomes listeners away from familiar audial experiences into the realm of the slightly less familiar, more experimental sounds. Albright’s compositions make for the perfect lead into Ornithology S, the work of contemporary composer Clay Mettens that is inspired by visual artist Juan Fontanive’s flipbooks of the same name. The saxophones recreate the sounds of birds singing as they fly, as well as using key clicks and slaps to imitate the turning of the mechanical book. Bringing the visual pieces to life while also showing the sonic possibilities of the saxophone, Ornithology S is a stunning conclusion to this fascinating collection. The saxophone has had a unique history as a classical instrument, from its challenges entering into that particular sphere to its welcoming in via jazz and rock music. With MIGRATION, Fuego Quartet demonstrates all that is possible with the saxophone, showing how it transcends musical boundaries with ease.

"With the arts we can keep faith with our ancestors, speak for justice, and even address the most tragic and painful issues. If you are hurt and angry don't use violence — write a poem or a song. Use your feelings to create something." These words by late composer Philip Koplow (1943-2018) perfectly encapsulate both his life mission as a composer and the mission of FOR THE PEACE OF CITIES. Released posthumously, this collection features Koplow’s masterpieces for orchestra as well as three 20th-century works that commemorate the lives lost in war tragedies. Koplow’s two pieces on the album, For the Peace of Cities and How Sweet the Sound, were both written from a place of desire to bring hope and healing into a violence-torn world. The title track, inspired by the Dayton Accord in Koplow’s home state, commemorates the lives brutally lost in Bosnian War at the end of the 20th Century. How Sweet the Sound, originally written for solo cello, is inspired by the tune “Amazing Grace” — a tune which has brought comfort and hope to generations of people in times of pain. The piece is filled with variations on the old hymn — as Koplow stated, “each variation is in a new key, implying that God's love and inspiration is available to all people in all times.” The music of Philip Koplow is complemented by three similarly-minded composers: Karel Husa, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Bohuslav Martinu. Each of these composers’ three pieces on the album honor the lives lost in three wartime tragedies: Husa’s Music for Prague 1968 which retold the story of the Soviet Union crushing the Prague Spring reform movement in Husa’s homeland; Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima which Penderecki dedicated to the Japanese victims after hearing the piece live and being moved by the emotional charge of the performance; and Martinu’s Memorial to Lidice honors the victims of the massacre in Lidice, Czechoslovakia in 1942.

The 15 tracks on Thad Anderson’s LINES & SPACES are from his Lines series, based on his compositional technique called “duration lines” that create both structure and polyrhythmic interest. Anderson integrates traditional instruments with fixed media, live processing, and tuned metals to create pieces that are infinitely malleable. For these compositions, Anderson draws inspiration from poetry, paintings, and some early writings that predict many of the technologies now integrated into daily life. His Route is loosely based on the Emily Dickinson poem, “A Route of Evanescence,” which explores the mesmerizing hummingbird during flight. On Route, one might imagine the interaction between saxophone and electronic playback as representing the hummingbird and its surroundings. Re-Cite was inspired by painter Ellsworth Kelly’s 1951 piece Cite, which used chance practices to create a random arrangement of black and white squares. The quintet for flutes and fixed media, Through-line, refers to a central theme or idea — an invisible thread that runs from the beginning to the end of work. In this instance, the through-line is both the duration lines that are used throughout the piece and a seven-chord progression that is used in the odd numbered sections. Using a duration line set, Outside, Looking In features layers of single line fragments that segue and weave between one another. On this solo piano piece, the composer effectively positions the piano as a percussion rather than string instrument. Both As We May Think and Mechanization were inspired by an article by engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush (1890 – 1974) that appeared in The Atlantic in 1945. In the former, the spoken component of the electronic playback audio derives from an archived interview with the author.

Ravello Records is proud to announce the release of FIRST LIGHT, featuring performances of two innovative works by composer Jackson Greenberg. In FIRST LIGHT, human inspiration and the machine mind come together to produce music of startling richness and beauty. The album opens with First Light, in which ethereal drones gradually dawn as seconds blur into minutes. Trance-like, this gentle meditation determinedly builds in dynamic intensity throughout the piece. Almost indiscernibly, instrument families join the accumulating harmonic roar like the rays of daybreak cresting over some desolate, faraway planet. The music was composed by feeding short compositions into a computer program that stretched them up to ten times their original length, creating vibrant distortions that stir the soul with their strange humanity. The second track is a musical setting of the Rainer Rilke poem, “The Panther.” Greenberg eschewed the use of a singer for this performance, instead composing music around a decades-old public domain recording of the poem, recited in its original German. In FIRST LIGHT, Jackson Greenberg constructs a series of musical cages from which the listener—scratching, clawing—yearns to escape. Yet, he also offers the hope of transformative progress and eventual freedom. Those who thrill at the mingling of human creativity with electronic manipulation will recognize and celebrate the powerful beauty of FIRST LIGHT.

GENETIC DRIFT, a 17-piece collection from electronic music composer Joel Gressel, is among the latest releases from Ravello Records. The various tracks featured on the album were composed over the course of 20 years, each using the same set of sophisticated compositional rules to produce their unique sounds. GENETIC DRIFT was created using a decades-old computer software that allows the composer to form a virtual “orchestra” of synthesizers, each “instrument” programmed with distinctive behaviors and timbral characteristics. Gressel’s compositions are inputted as code into the software, which is then manipulated according to complex mathematical operations churned out by the computer. There are no recorded instruments on the entire album—everything the listener hears comes from the mind of the machine, as ordained by Gressel’s programming. The music is as tantalizing and compelling as it is unsettling. Ethereal chimes, synthesized whistles, and warbling oscillators produce clouds of mind-bending tone clusters. Some of the pieces are rooted in concrete inspirations, like “The Final Approach,” which imagine scenes from the end of life. Other tracks on the album are wholly abstract artworks. The immersive soundscapes featured on GENETIC DRIFT are remarkable both for their compositional ingenuity and the uniqueness of their medium. Intrinsic to their musicality and profound emotive power are the age-old hopes, quandaries, and fears, regarding humankind’s relationship with the machine.

Welcoming the new day in the world of composer Maija Hynninen is not soft like early morning rays. In DAWN BREAKS, Hynninen does away with the cliches of warmth and comfort in the morning. Performing all of the electronics on this album, Hynninen characterizes everything in her world, presenting soundscapes that are truly unique. The first track, winnowing, sets the precedent for Hynninen’s vision of the morning by “separating the grain from the chaff.” The composition is comprised of experimental piano descending into an electronic noise collage which contains sound manipulations of nature. The composition was inspired by Hynninen’s observance of the movement of birds, from mating seasons to flocks migrating in autumn and spring. winnowing is followed by ...sicut aurora procedit - as dawn breaks. The composition represents a backwards travel through time from the sun sitting high in the sky to the first light of dawn. Composed for violin and electronics, Hynninen plays with the riveting moments of the first rays of light hitting the horizon. Created for female voice, ensemble, and electronics, Orlando-fragments reflects one’s perception of the world evolving over time. The piece includes four poems written by Henrikka Tavi and inspired by Virgina Woolf’s novel Orlando, a story involving one man (who eventually becomes a woman) who lives for three centuries. The last track, Freedom from Fear, involves Hynninen “transcribing” interviews of Burmese politician Aung San Suu Kyi through oboe. Based on the composer’s fascination with Kyi’s words, Hynninen’s composition builds an ambient, chaotic atmosphere, with the oboe echoing and creating wild feedback. The resulting sound is sublime and pushes the limit of what was once known about composition to its breaking point.

Legendary composer, author, and educator Herbert Deutsch presents his newest album, ENCOUNTERS: JAZZ, SONGS & CHAMBER MUSIC, on Ravello Records. The music, performed by the American Chamber Ensemble, is unflaggingly groundbreaking; Deutsch, who in 1964 collaborated on the development of the Moog Synthesizer and composed music for its first live performance, deepens his legacy of innovation with this latest collection. ENCOUNTERS is the result of Deutsch’s focus on composing for chamber ensembles over the past two decades. The program, which features a serious and somber jazz piece that breaks forth in moments of raucous exuberance, contemporary pieces featuring solo soprano and flute, and a fanciful and animated piece for piano and electric violin, includes works dedicated to Deutsch’s wife, pianist Nancy Deutsch, who performs on the album. Unencumbered by modal constraints, the instrumentalists explore and interact with absolute liberty. Herbert Deutsch’s acquired mastery is on constant display in ENCOUNTERS to the delight of students and contemporary chamber music fans alike; it is an album worthy of both careful study and more casual enjoyment.

Tower Duo, comprised of flutist Erin Helgeson Torres and saxophonist Michael Rene Torres, has selected the works of several notable composers for Crosswind, their first release with PARMA Recordings. The duo, whose particular interest lies in performing and premiering contemporary works by emerging composers, has premiered many of the pieces on the album, several of which were written specifically for the two artists. Erin Helgeson Torres is the Lecturer of Flute at Ohio Northern University, Muskingum University, and Ashland University. She performs regularly in various area orchestras including the Columbus, West Virginia, Central Ohio, Springfield, Westerville, and Lima Symphonies. Erin graduated with a Doctorate of Musical Arts and a Masters of Music from The Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. She received her Bachelor of Music Performance at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. She completed her Artist Diploma at the University of Cincinnati, College-Conservatory of Music. Michael Rene Torres, currently serves as Lecturer of Saxophone at The Ohio State University and Instructor of Saxophone and Composition at Muskingum University. He is also the founder and Artistic Director of the Columbus Ohio Discovery Ensemble, a contemporary music ensemble that is dedicated to the promotion, performance, and perception of new music in Central Ohio. Additionally, Michael is an Advisory Board member of the Johnstone Fund for New Music, which advances the performance of new music for the benefit of the Central Ohio community.

Characterized by orchestral flavors and electronic infusions, SYNCHRONIES by composer James Dashow blends contrasting musical conventions to be symbiotic: an approach indicative of Dashow’s ideologies of outward facing themes contributing to a singular purpose. Enjoy the precision and unique timbre proposed by electronic elements juxtaposed with classical instrumentation that challenges performers and delights listeners. James Dashow has had commissions, awards and grants from the Bourges International Festival of Experimental Music, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Linz Ars Electronica Festival,the Fromm Foundation, the Biennale di Venezia, the USA National Endowment for the Arts, RAI (Italian National Radio), the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Rockefeller Foundation, Il Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte (Montepulciano, Italy), the Koussevitzky Foundation, Prague Musica Nova, and the Harvard Musical Association of Boston. In 2000, he was awarded the prestigious Prix Magistere at the 30th Festival International de Musique et d'Art Sonore Electroacoustiques in Bourges.