Rolf Riehm is... an unconventional artist. Before him, nobody has ever sensualized in music such a complex cosmos of philosophical reflections, historical facts, myths, fairytales, memories, scientific arguments, the sublime and the trivial, current sociopolitical findings, very personal ingredients and contributions.' - Bernd Leukert. In a letter to Guy Braunstein, soloist at the world premiere, Riehm describes “Shifting” for violin and orchestra as 'a huge, sweeping melody. For me, it is like a river that continually gains new strength from the downhill slope of its landscape – the landscape here is the expressivity which gives impetus to the "melody" and drives it forward, "…moltissimo appassionato…". The third section is nothing other than a single suspension extended to almost five minutes. And then shortly before the end: no more restrictions, no excessive pressures, only free movement. This is the true beginning of the piece!' Riehm sees his composition “Archipel Remix” for orchestra with electronic playbacks as an 'archipelago, a complex of islands, consisting of differently sized islands. The piece starts at the beginning and ends at the end, unsurprisingly, but I want to avoid [the natural passage of time]. Hence the metaphor of the archipelago and the type of designation.' - Marion Saxer & Rolf Riehm)

Keiki Harada's music does not have to do with loudly articulated superficialities, but with a kind of communication achieved without words. This process is at the center of her work, and listeners can directly participate by opening themselves to the resulting sound. The composition "midstream+" for trombone and accordion (2004/2008) - like almost all the other works on this album - is an example of Harada's attempt to form a sense of musical commonality between two instruments with strikingly different sound qualities. Harada carefully develops situations for the collision of individual musical spaces. Working with Harada's scores requires from the performers not only enormous technical mastery, but also a completely open, concetrated, and communicative awareness of the performing partner. It also requires a high degree of self-awareness, which relates to the body's awareness of sound. Because the composer emphasizes that her work demands from the players - and one might add, from the listener as well - love and respect towards music.

It took the French composer Brice Pauset more than two decades to finish this monumental cycle that comprises 24 canons for piano. On the present album, the cycle is presented in its entirety for the first time by th eBritish pianist Nicolas Hodges. It is a mysterious quality of the canon that captivates Pauset: Here, technique can change into an aesthetic experience. Masters of vocal polyphony from the Renaissance like Johannes Ockeghem showed how it is done - and Pauset takes up this musical mystery in his multi-part cycle of canons for piano. During the long composition process, Pauset's split relation to the piano undergoes a change. In ''Neuf Canons'' he brings the isntrument to its limits, turning the keyboard virtuoso Nicolas Hudges into a pedal virtuoso. The historical canon technique is most radically applied in ''Perspective Sintagma I'' for piano and electronics. In this work, Pauset adjusts interpretation and musical text to each other live and then reincludes the differences in the composition.

In complex layers of sound, Sarah Nemtsov creates a polydimensional utopian vision of urban life - confusing, energetic, and sometimes nerve-wracking: "It has to do with the tension between consequence and chaos." In "Zimmer I-III", Nemtsov explores the extremes between an "aesthetic of fragility" and "the courage to be ugly", making use of analog effect devices and theatrical gestures to produce abstract visions of reality. Three of her chamber music pieces can be viewed as "extensions" of the "Zimmer" series. In these pieces, the electronic element of the music functions as "inherent counterpoint": "amplified imagination" juxtaposes various layers of acoustical reality, "drummed variation" evokes the patterns of technoid music, while "implicated amplification" uses a looping station to create manic worlds of repetition. In "white eyes erased", Nemtsov releases a flood of energy that pushes far beyond the academic propriety of much New Music. This recording brings together three of the most exciting New Music ensembles of our time: the Sonar Quartet, the Adapter Ensemble, and members of Ensemble Mosaik.

Clarity and structure. These are the terms that first come to mind with Tom Sora's music. The compositions of this Romanian composer from Bucharest seem vivid and literally graspable. The music radiates a kind of physical materality. As an uncompromising free thinker he pursues his artistic goals with diligence and concentration. Sora's compositions are based on simple, specific musical or extra-musical ideas. Intuition remains an important principle for his method of composing and is also a significant factor in his personal musical style. This applies to his composition "Heavy Metal" for electric guitar and percussion. Beyond that, the title reveals nothing about the composition. As is usual with Sora, the piece follows a consistent musical dramaturgy and has nothing to do with heavy metal. On the contrary: this instrumentation borrowed from another genre serves to reveal Sora's artistic individuality. "Gruppenzwänge" (Peer pressures) has to do with conformity, with absolute acquiescence. Violin, viola, and cello are tightly synchronized with the same rhythms and closely bound together melodically. This is unusual for string trio writing and conveys a rather constricted impression. His "Zweites Streichtrio" (Second String Trio) makes clear, that an allusive title is not essential. The listener is given no clue for orientation and is entirely dependent on the unfolding musical processes. But the music does not need the crutch of a story or title: the musical events are so clearly structured that on hearing the piece on ehas the feeling a story is being told.

Songs and Poems is a title that promises quite a lot: there are neither songs nor poems in the usual sense among these five instrumental compositions for the Trio Accanto: there is no singing in Hans Thomalla's Lied, Aldo Clementi celebrates the art of instrumental counterpoint, and if Wolfgang Rihm's Gegenst�ck were a song, it would be a manifesto against vocality. At least the title of Walter Zimmermann's trio is based on a poem by Robert Creeley, but the words are not heard in the piece. Also, the audience does not need to be aware of the Baroque verse structures upon which Andreas Dohmen based his work commissioned by the group. The title "Songs and Poems" nevertheless points in a certain direction. It reflects an underlying longing in these instrumental pieces for language, voice, and song, for the authenticity of singing, the simplicity of song, and the hidden meanings of poetry. Perhaps "Songs and Poems" is a song collection that only dreams of songs, just as the Trio Accanto - with it's unusual instrumentation of saxophone, percussion, and piano - is a jazz trio that does not play jazz.

When it was first heard in 1962, Mauricio Kagel’s organ piece Improvisation Ajoutée created a scandal. The cause was clearly the sounds the organist and his two assistants were required to produce in addition to the sounds of the instrument – speaking, coughing, laughing, whistling, clapping, and above all loud groans and shouts. There is a further revolutionary innovation in “Improvisation ajoutée”: the two assistants arrange the organ’s registration, and even have a system of their own in the score. As a result, there are very fast shifts in registration and color, which follow their own rhythm and are independent of the organist’s score. The sound world of Kagel’s second work for organ, the Fantasie für Orgel mit Obbligati, is less complex. However, Kagel gave the new work a social, cultural, and theatrical subtext in which the borders between “art” and “life” are crossed more resolutely, thereby establishing an entirely new type of complexity. The organ part is here supplemented by two tape recordings that acoustically depict the organist’s working day, somewhat like an audio film. Dominik Susteck reflects on his experiences with Kagel’s organ works. In the spirit of Kagel, Susteck takes the chance material of the letters of Kagel’s name – K-A-G-E-L – as a challenge to his fantasy, and the titles that capture the basic ideas of the five improvisations have a “kagelesque” quality.

Stormy sounds of widely varying "wind quality" blow through the pieces on the new release by Edition Musikfabrik. In Steffen Schleiermacher's Das Tosen des staunenden Echos (The roar of the amazed echo) the paradox of a "roaring stillness" unfolds in a kind of cantus firmus - echoing ritual recitations from Laos - which meanders amongst the various instruments and moves towards it's finale with sonic force. Kaija Saariaho's storm references are more literary in nature: Shakespeare's play The Tempest serves as a backdrop for her Songbook of the same name and provides the lyrics for the pieces sung finely nuanced by Olivia Vermeulen and Peter Sch�ne. In antagonisme contr�l�, by Michael Wertm�ller, the storm takes place in the formal structure of the work, where the different temperatures of free jazz and new music collide: Peter Br�tzmann - on of the leading free jazz-artists today - together with Ensemble Musikfabrik's percussionist, Dirk Rothbrust, on drumset and Marino Pliakas on e-bass create a high pressure system to face the headwind of the full ensemble. The booklet poster shows Gerhard Richter's Red-Blue-Yellow from 1973, which artistically comments on the thematic bundling of the programme from the highlights of the series "Musikfabrik i'm WDR". Richter has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Ensemble Musikfabrik since 2009.

Wilhelm Killmayer has written songs since the beginning of his career as a composer, and they are a prominent and essential part of his oeuvre. In the case of Killmayer’s songs, one can clearly see various musical effects influenced by the texts being set, yet these effects nevertheless retain a basic musical identity. A particular atmosphere is especially noticeable in these settings, to which Killmayer has devoted three groups of works of Friedrich Hölderlin. In general, Killmayer succeeded in finding a unique aura of sound for his almost complete setting of the poems, a sound quality that is entirely appropriate for this simple and hermetic poetry. In Killmayer’s two song cycles based on poems by Georg Trakl there is also a musical lyricism growing out of a profound and intense understanding of the text. In a manner appropriate to the poet’s tone of voice, Killmayer’s settings employ a richly varied sound texture to attain a deeper psychological perspective, something that Trakl’s poetry has in common with Hölderlin’s. Killmayer’s extensive song cycle based on poems by Joseph von Eichendorff can be performed in two ways: either as an alternation between songs for unaccompanied male chorus and songs for tenor with piano or as a conventional song cycle.

Shaped equally by her roots in China as well as European influences, Ying Wang, with her struggle for an individual musical language, embodies in an exemplary way the challenges of finding a point of balance between two cultures. Ying Wang mediates between the two cultures. She has achieved quite personal solutions in her works, integrating dramatic impulses and meditative sensual sonorities. She regards as especially fruitful the transferring of techniques for the creation of electronic sounds to acoustical instruments. Restriction and freedom are important criteria in "Wave in D", where Wang, out of extremely limited tonal material, draws a rich assemblage of differentiated sound colors from the possibilities of the traditional instrument and the electronics. In "Tun Tu" baritone saxophone and electronic sounds interact and come together in an imaginary sound landscape. The distorted sounds of the instrument, embedded in a cosmos of mysterious electronic colorations, seem at first almost improvisatory, but "Tun Tu" is rigorously organized. In "Coffee & Tea" Ying Wang reflects on contrasts between the cultures of Asia and Europe and uses coffee and tea as metaphors.

I need a musical discourse, Holliger once said. This is a good description of his characteristic way of composing. Unlike Boulez, he does not base his works on charts and tables, but neither does he employ carpets of sound in the manner of Ligeti or the Spectralists. Particularly in his vocal works, Holliger allows himself to follow the associations suggested by certain words, and these associations in turn generate still other connections. "Shir Shavur" [The Broken Song] is the title of a cycle for choir that Holliger wrote based on 12 of David Rokeah's poems. The idea of discourse can be seen in the fact that Holliger set both the Hebrew and the German versions of the text. This principle is also evident in the different ways the choral forces are handled. There are antiphonal or double choir settings, but also responsorial settings for solo and choir. In "Utopie Chorklang" [Choral Sound Utopia], he divided the choir into three groups of twelve voices each. These three groups are "tuned" in different ways, like registers of an organ. The second group sings it's pitches, but the first group sings a third of a tone higher than written and the third group a third of a tone lower.

The compositions on this album are about crashing, decaying and failing. The individual downfalls have very different qualities and consequences: Brian Ferneyhough's La Chute d'Icare is an allegorical fall: the divine punishment for the exuberant Icarus, who drowns in the sea instead of flying to the sun. Stephan Winkler's composition Von der Gewissensnot der Insekten, by contrast, refers to a fall with a more profane cause: excessive alcohol consumption and an open window lead to a fatal event. Eventually, the background of Oscar Bettison's piece Livre des Sauvages is a fall in a figurative sense, caused by the free fall of a supposedly scientific sensation. The booklet poster shows Gerhard Richter's Abstraktes Bild from 1983, which artistically comments on the thematic bundling of the program from the highlights of the series "Musikfabrik i'm WDR". Richter has been a member of the Board of Trustees of the Ensemble Musikfabrik since 2009.

A cycle of unaccompanied songs for solo voice, framed between two orchestral pieces, this release celebrates the 80th birthday of Aribert Remann. Remann rewrote this cycle of poems for orchestra without the voice, which resulted in Nine Pieces. This cycle took an entirely different direction than the nine poems originally.

Surging sounds of the sea, over them the whistling or even the calling of birds - or so it might seem. An instant later, we only hear the ebb and flow of choral sounds, with individual male voices whistling rubato glissando tones over them. These sounds are typical of Martin Smolka's style. He evokes magically realistic sounds with his compositions.

The final volume in Wergo's acclaimed series of recordings, Earle Brown - a Life in Music, completes the label's reissue of the eighteen LPs of Earle Brown's legendary Contemporary Sound Series, recorded between 1960 and 1973. These rare and historically important recordings have been carefully digitized and remastered by the Earle Brown Music Foundation. The first disc in this set contains works by John Cage and Christian Wolff from the early 1960s. Disc two presents the outstanding violinist Paul Zukofsky, brilliantly accompanied by the pianist Gilbert Kalish, performing works by George Crumb, Isang Yun, Charles Wuorinen and John Cage. The final disc contains works by the South American composers Gerardo Gandini, Cesar Bolaos, Marlos Nobre, Oscar Baz�n, Manuel Enriquez and Alcides Lanza, performed by the New Sound Composers-Performers Group under the direction of Alcides Lanza.