Classical Music 314 Items

Jenny Conlee, the multi-instrumentalist best known for her 23-year tenure as a member of indie icons The Decemberists, is stepping once more to center stage this year with the release of Tides: Pieces for Accordion and Piano. The humble yet deeply emotional album of instrumentals finds Conlee pulling from her vast well of influences and knowledge to work in a more neo-classical mode.

The original album "12" released on January 17, 2023, is now available in analog form! Encore Limited pressing of the standard version is now available!

On January 17, 2023, we released our first original album "12" in 6 years since the release of "async" in 2017. This is a collection of 12 songs selected from the musical sketches he created as if he were writing a diary while he was still fighting an ongoing illness, and compiled them into a single album. The jacket was drawn by Lee Ufan, an international artist representing the "Mono-ha" school. The first limited edition analog version sold out immediately and became a mirage! This is an encore pressing in the standard specification. (The "Self Sketch | Music Score Print" from the limited first pressing will not be included, and the vinyl will be black instead of color vinyl.)

Tracks are same as Rzjm-77655-6

Since the 1970s Mario De Leo works as a musician and visual artist. His mechanical paintings are hybrid works that reveal the cosmic spiritualism hidden in the meanders of electronics. With Riccardo Sinigaglia (Futuro Antico, Correnti Magnetiche, Doubling Riders) De Leo consolidates an artistic and human partnership with Lettera Cosmica, a work unpublished to date, produced and recorded in 1981. In a wacky electronic vision of the succession of time, the tracks trace the four seasons in a fine process of analog loops, prepared tapes of strings and piano, time and pitch shifts, filtering with Synthi Ems and Teac 3340 4-track recorder. On this seemingly cold palette, De Leo deploys his own personal Mediterranean fingerpicking, with vocal timbres peculiar to the music of the South of Italy, but no longer circumscribed to the origins of his Pugliese regionalism, as much as to an expressive range seasoned also with irony and avant-garde.The sound writing harmonizes with the evocative cover, in which emerges a warmest human note of "technological peasant”.

Since selling out the Concert Hall at the Sydney Opera House in 2010, Neil Gaiman and FourPlay String Quartet have been firm friends and collaborators. They have toured the world together, released a New York Times best-selling book & record together, sold out Carnegie Hall together and most importantly, recorded a new album together, Signs of Life. Reflecting the fact that Gaiman and FourPlay have each, always refused to be pigeon-holed in their creativity - together, they have created something remarkable and unique. Signs of Life is a gorgeous, ground-breaking and genre-bending collaboration between an iconic author and a unique musical ensemble. Part songwriting, part poetry, part story-telling; allencompassing, all-engaging, all beautiful.

Factory Benelux presents a box set collection of the first five albums released by the celebrated Factory Classical imprint in 1989, featuring modern classical works composed by Benjamin Britten, Elliott Carter, Paul Hindemith, Theodore Lalliet, Gyorgy Ligeti, Steve Martland, Olivier Messiaen, Francis Poulenc, Dmitri Shostakovich and Michael Tippett.

The new Factory Benelux clamshell box set includes a 24 page booklet featuring the original Factory commissioned liner notes from 1989, as well as a contemporary essay by writer Stuart Huggett and an interview with Tony Wilson. Each individual CD is housed in a card wallet which reproduces the original artwork by designers Peter Saville, Trevor Key, Ben Kelly, Mark Farrow, Neville Brody and Trevor Johnson.

The 5 CDs have been newly re-mastered in 2022 by Peter Beckmann at Technology Works.

Curated by Durutti Column viola player John Metcalfe, the performers include the Kreisler String Orchestra, German pianist Rolf Hind, The Duke Quartet and oboist Robin Williams, with Steve Martland’s material performed by Residentie Orkest Den Haag and pianists Gerard Bouwhuis and Cees Van Zeeland.

Explained Factory founder Tony Wilson: ‘The idea I had in mind was people like Peter Saville, the Factory designer, and his girlfriend - art school kids brought up with Bowie and Roxy Music, into punk, maybe they find acid house interesting, but they’re looking for something else. For people like them or younger, there is no easy way into classical music, because it’s all quite exclusive. They’re scarcely likely to read Gramophone magazine, or make head or tail of it if they did.’

‘I was a relatively angry young man at that time,’ adds Metcalfe, ‘and chose to channel some of that into a rather naïve disapproval of standard classical industry practices. The white tie and tails and very, very boring, reproductions of Constable paintings on album covers, all that stuff. So I had a chat with Tony and he said, “Off you go, fill your boots”.’

Largely drowned out by relentless Acid House beats and faddish Madchester guitar rock in 1989, the bold, contrarian Factory Classical catalogue is now ripe for re-appraisal by much the same audience identified by Wilson. Indeed since 1989 Metcalfe has worked as an arranger for artists such as Peter Gabriel, U2, Blur, Coldplay and Bat for Lashes, as well as performing and recording with the Max Richter Ensemble. Sadly contemporary composer Steve Martland passed away in 2013.

Tryghed is the debut album from Franciska, the alias of the now Copenhagen-based artist Jonas Torstensson. As one of the key figures in the young, vivid scene around the Forlaget Kornmod imprint, Jonas has released a good deal of music under different names during the last few years, often in very limited cassette editions with barely no distribution. In many ways, Franciska pretty much captures the very essence of the sound world their label now is associated with: melancholic and rather loose tape compositions made with a hands-on approach, usually performed on organ, piano, synthesizers and acoustic instruments and often room recorded with environmental sounds leaking in. Truly DIY ambient music, closely connected in spirit with some of the more melodic Förlag För Fri Musik moments, Astrid Øster Mortensen etc. With crude stop/rec editing, sizzling magnetism and tape scuffs left intact, the A-side consists mainly of piano recordings made while on break from classical music rehearsals in school, while the B-side incorporates more electronics and field recordings though still having the piano as the focal point. Wintery minimalism at its very best. Mastered by Joakim Karlsson. Edition of 750 copies. Discreet Music 12.

Some dreams take longer to come true. For many years we trusted in Orka's musical talent and were hoping that one day we will spin the turntable and listen with our eyes closed. That moment is now at your fingertips.
Strictly limited 100 copies made for absolute musical joy. Seven tracks including three awesome remixes which warp classical music to electronic universe. Superb cover by Silvie and Marika. Shines in your collection like a pearl.

Des Spheres is inspired by the movement of the planets closest to the earth. the Sun,which begins the piece, is positioned in the central axis. Each planet is represented bytwo sounds: one from a natural recording (Water-Air-Earth-Fire), the other from atiny analog synthesizer. This involves a cross synthesis, in which natural soundsremain inaudible, but modulate synthetic sounds by varying their amplitudes andfrequencies over time in order to obtain an evolving, and partly random timbre.The relative orbits of each planet around the solar axis have been reproduced instereo space. To make them audible, I have had to greatly accelerate thesemovements. The 51 minutes of the piece represent over 100,000 years. Likewise, theambits of the stereo pans for each planet/track correspond to the relative distances ofthe planets in the solar system from the Sun. Saturn therefore undergoes a left/rightmovement over several minutes, while it takes Mercury only a fraction of a second forthe same movement.Each planet corresponds to a pair of different sounds (natural/synthetic), composedfrom distinct pitches, textures, and timbral colors. It is these differences which, bycoming together in the same listening space, express an auditory vision of the solarsystem.Most of the time, I worked in a daze, feeling that the mixer was becoming anextension of myself. I composed daily according to the star which corresponded tothe day of the week (Monday: the Moon - Tuesday: Mars - Wednesday: Mercury etc.).Des Spheres is therefore a piece recorded over 8 days, but involving more than a yearof preliminary research.Far from being music for relaxation, Spheres has a quasi-hypnotic effect, due to thefact that the piece consists of a single large chord of 8 notes, but whose timbres varyin tone and duration. It is not uncommon for listeners to fall asleep on this trip,which is fine with me...Refusing to reproduce an existing astronomical model in which models of reality aretaken for reality itself, the piece refers instead to an organic vision, which in oldentimes was called “the spheres”, the idea that the forces expressed in humans arelinked to the movements of celestial objects.