Edition ZKM is dedicated to productions from the ZKM-Institute for Music and Acoustics. The institute is part of the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, (ZKM) which also includes the Museum for Contemporary Art, the Media Museum, a Media Library and the Institute for Visual Media. Guest artists from all over the world are invited to work in the music studios to realize specific projects. The projects, ranging from digital synthesis and algorithmic composition to the integration of live electronics, from radio art to sound installation, encompass a broad spectrum of that locus where digital technology stimulates musical fantasy. This radio-play (in German) features Bernhard Wicki as protagonist searching the European capitals of Berlin, Paris, London, Vienna and Lisbon for "the stone". His obsession with the stone is driven by his deceptive hope that he could predict the journey of the stone. - The author and composer Martin Daske realized his work in co-production with German radio-stations in ZKM's music studios. Bernhard Wicki: narrator / Erwin Schastok, Ortwin Speer, Brita Sommer, Elisabetta Niccolini, Roberto Cornea da Costa, Anna Carewe, Gerhard K�nig, Marc Altmann: speakers.

The unusual musical and spatial arrangement of Valerio Sannicandro's composition "Ius Lucis" for two ensembles playing in separate rooms sets a double perspective at the centre of it's construction. Two chamber ensembles with different instruments simultaneously perform the palindromic (mirror-like) total score in two separate rooms, and the audience switches from one room to the other after the piece has been played in each. In addition to the playing of the live instrumentalists, the live-electronically processed result of their performance is also made audible. In both "perspectives" achieved by the spatially separate performances, the music produces a completely different effect, though the loudspeakers repeatedly emit familiar snatches, which then disappear again. This recording of ZKM Institute for Music and Acoustics represents the distinct spatial arrangement of the musicians and the live-electronic processes through a differentiated stereo and 5.1 panorama. Ensemble Musikfabrik / Pierre-Andr� Valade: conductor / Serge Lemouton, Valerio Sannicandro: live electronics.

In this portrait, the composer Marina Khorkova forms multilayered soundscapes full of contrasts from a wide range of multiphonics and noises. The composer lays the focus on the development of her own musical language, against the backdrop of various traditions of multitonality and the "musique concrète instrumentale". She meticulously explores the tonal properties and possibilities of the chamber music instruments by frequently using unusual playing techniques. As a pianist, Khorkova is particularly interested in the specific interaction of the natural multiphonics of the piano with multiphonics achieved by preparing this instrument. The tonal physiognomy of the compositions are "generally characterized rather by metallic harshness, inhospitable frequencies, raw and menacing sound-values than by tender harmonic whispering" - Dirk Wieschollek. The work VORderGRENZE focusses on existential sounds between life and death and on the struggle for breath. The trio klangNarbe, on the other hand, reveals a ragged soundscape. Metallic timbres and noise spectra of the percussion are fused with the multiphonics of the saxophone and the multiphonic (sometimes 17-tone) clusters of a prepared piano. The performers, including the ensemble Ascolta, the trio Accanto as well as the Kairos Quartet, are given substantial leeway through the sometimes graphic notation, which contributes essentially to the energetic effect of the pieces. The metrical freedom of the work 'a_priori', for example, is elementary for 'continuously flowing tonal movements fluctuating in colour which go in search of a kind of original tonal state'. The vast majority of the works was recorded by Deutschlandfunk in Cologne especially for this portrait.

Chinese Australian composer Liza Lim was inspired by the lyric poetry of the Sufi poet Hafiz for her work Tongue of the Invisible. Lim explains, "the way in which he mixes and shifts levels of meaning gives rise to complex and indeterminable frames of mind in oneself." This variety of meaning is first and foremost reflected in the juxtaposition and coexistence of precisely and meticulously composed textures and improvised elements. But the compilation of the text set to music also facilitates numerous variants and interpretations. These dialogues are superbly "narrated" here by the pianist Uri Caine, singer Omar Ebrahim and the soloists of the ensemble musikFabrik.

The piano works for two pianos or piano four-hands united here by the Klavierduo Huber / Thomet have quite a few inner connections. Each, in it's own way, breaks down aesthetic conventions and evokes vast historical and geographic horizons while demanding the highest level of virtuosity from the performers. Featured works include Debussy's en blanc et noir, Zimmermann's Monologue and a four hand transcription of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du printemps penned by the composer.

Orff's early lieder initially show the composer's engagement with the musical tradition of his surroundings. In choosing the genre of lieder with piano accompaniment, Orff was choosing a central Romantic genre, in which he could explore and elaborate on his late-Romantic tonal experiences. It is characteristic of Orff's artistic path that he began by setting texts to music. From the beginning the rhetoric of the language determines the means of the composition, the tendency toward narrative betrays the theatrical composer of later years, and in the piano setting traditional and time-tested piano accompaniments are frequently interrupted by gestures inspired by improvisation or abandoned in favor of orchestral effects.

Walter Zimmermann’s music is often introverted and sometimes broodingly hesitant, but it is also enigmatically intimate; turbulent atmospheres, large gestures, and emphatic forms are foreign to him. Zimmermann found his place apart from the avant-garde streams coming out of Darmstadt and Cologne. Seeking simplicity, he distanced himself from the neo-expressionistic tendencies that arose in the 1970s, orienting himself to the individualism of US composers and the diatonic character of the early works of John Cage. Zimmermann’s music is individual, as well as distinct and unmistakable. It does not pursue fixed architectonic forms, but rather crystalline expanses, a hovering openness. Zimmermann’s compositional motivation comes from unusual sources. He draws impulses from ancient mythology, Renaissance symbolism, philosophy, literature, and the visual arts. In the present recording, Nicolas Hodges plays piano works written in the five years between 2001 and 2006. Piano music facilitates the ordering of structural elements. For Zimmermann, it is a kind of laboratory for his compositional methods. “Voces abandonadas” is a counterpart to “Beginner’s Mind” for one pianist with singing voice (1975), which was inspired by Shunryu Suzuki and Zen Buddhism. “Voces abandonadas” is based on two collections of aphorisms by the Argentinian poet Antonio Porchia. Zimmermann formed brief emblematic sound representations out of the 514 sentences and aphorisms in “Voces abandonadas”. As Zimmermann writes, “The entire book with its two volumes has been translated into 514 piano ‘sentences’, most of which last only one measure, often only part of a measure, or the duration of a fermata. These ‘sentences’ follow one another without pause. In the compositional process, the sequence of the sentences or aphorisms reflected their sequence in the books.

The Other Paradise was originally going to be the title of a film that Harald Weiss wanted to produce with the legerity of the Italian dolce vita. Finally, when everything was underway, it became clear to everyone (150 people in all) that the film could never be made, because the associative and visionary power that each of those involved associated with it might be lost. The basic mood of that time rises to the surface again and again, new associations join it, mix with, then break with the old. The sounds remain.

Born in Ludwigshafen in 1936, the composer Barbara Heller is addicted to sounds. The search for sounds – lost, buried, undiscovered, or previously unnoticed – shapes her life. She has no choice: “Composing for me means finding my own filter for the permanent flood of sounds, both within and without. Listening, imagining, and discovering music is like building a bridge between the material and the immaterial worlds.” This album presents a small portrait of the sounds Barbara Heller has found for string instruments. It opens with her third string quartet, “Patchwork”, from 2008. Playfully flowing figures, often in pizzicato, alternate with static layers of sound. Conceived by Heller as a study in tritons, the pitch material consists throughout of whole-tone relationships. Heller’s second string quartet, “La Caleta”, was written in November of 2008. “A coming and going …” is how Heller describes the essence of this work. She was inspired by the calm, gentle, and steady movement of waves on the beach of a small bay on the island of La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands. The comparatively more substantial String Quartet No. 1 was written in 1958 at the end of Barbara Heller’s time as a student at the Music Hochschule in Mannheim, where she studied with Hans Vogt (1911-1992). In terms of sound, this is an entirely different universe from the works written in 2008. At the end of this recording, there comes “Lalai – Schlaflied zum Wachwerden?” [Lalai – lullaby for an awakening?], one of Barbara Heller’s best known and most performed works. The expressive power of its simple folksong melody makes “Lalai” a sensitive and many-sided portrait of human feeling.

Edition ZKM is dedicated to productions from the ZKM-Institute for Music and Acoustics. The institute is part of the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Germany, (ZKM) which also includes the Museum for Contemporary Art, the Media Museum, a Media Library and the Institute for Visual Media. Guest artists from all over the world are invited to work in the music studios to realize specific projects. The projects, ranging from digital synthesis and algorithmic composition to the integration of live electronics, from radio art to sound installation, encompass a broad spectrum of that locus where digital technology stimulates musical fantasy.

Milica Djordjevic’s compositions are musical explorations, meticulous observations and dissections. Seven such investigations of sound are presented by the Serbian composer on her portrait album in the series EDITION ZEITGENÖSSISCHE MUSIK. Primarily, Djordjevic focuses on an extreme and exhaustive exploration of the musical material. In the booklet Barbara Eckle points out Djordjevic’s specific approach: "She develops a material component further and further in an increasingly large, loud and dense wave, distorting it, perverting it, multiplying it, squeezing out of it everything it has to give – until it implodes. The rupture is sudden and abrupt, as if the plug of an electronic appliance were ripped from a wall socket." Also essential for Djordjevic’s work is an interdisciplinary perspective, which is based on a diversified aesthetic socialisation, influencing her music in different ways. Each compositional process finally creates musical figures, which, at the same time, affect psyche and ratio. All pieces have been especially recorded at Deutschlandfunk in Cologne by internationally well-known interpreters such as Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Musikfabrik and Teodoro Anzellotti.

In his latest portrait album, Munich composer Enjott Schneider once again reveals new and fascinating interrelationships between classical and contemporary music, and between the Western and Far Eastern traditions. Two of the works deal directly with two of the central figures in the history of Western music: Raptus. Die Freiheit des Beethoven investigates the meaning of freedom and the contrasts between the heroic style of Beethoven's youth and the cryptic works of his later years. Mozart Ascending for Oboe and Orchestra reflects on Mozart's unfinished Oboe Concerto KV 293 and the otherworldly nature of the Salzburg master's genius. Far Eastern influences dominate in Yin & Yang. Concerto for Sheng and Orchestra. The soloist in this concerto for the traditional Chinese instrument is Wu Wei, a virtuoso artist who has introduced the Sheng to European audiences and to whom the work is dedicated. Innenwelten - Innerworlds presents eight symphonic interludes from Bahnw�rter Thiel, Schneider's opera based on the tragic novella by Gerhart Hauptmann. The opera's central figure is hypersensitive and filled with inner visions, taciturn and not given to overt expression.

The music of Serenidad captures the voices of nature and uses them to create an atmosphere of relaxation. On this CD, too, the music therapist and anthropologist Awankana manages to fuse the music of wide-ranging cultures into a harmonic unity by using many instruments and electronic technologies. The result is well suited to meditation.

This CD, which is a co-production with the Berlin Ethnological Museum, is a sample of the larger Mantle Hood collection of 164 reel-to-reel tapes representing more than 80 hours of music and improvisations of principal Javanese gamelan musicians in Yogya, Solo and Bandung in the 1950s. The recordings capture improvisation rooted in a truly Javanese traditional rote system of learning during a pivotal era before the widespread influence of western-modelled conservatory pedagogy. All pieces of this CD - recorded in 1957 and 1958 - are first releases.

This WERGO CD with the Ensemble Phoenix Basel presents a multifaceted view into Detlev Muller-Siemens’s oeuvre for ensemble, composed in the 1990s. The Ensemble Phoenix Basel, founded in 1998 by the conductor Jurg Henneberger, consists of up to 25 musicians with many years of experience in the area of contemporary music. For his opera "Die Menschen" [Humanity], which is also available on CD (WER 62532 / 2 CDs), Detlev Muller-Siemens was awarded the Liebermann Support Prize for Opera Composition from the Korber Foundation. Since 1991 Muller-Siemens has been professor of composition and music theory at the Musikhochschule of the Music Academy in Basel.