Classical Music 380 Items

“Shotns - Shadows: Songs from Testimonies, Volume 3” - is the latest addition (2024) to the Fortunoff Video Archive’s Songs from Testimonies project., brought by the Zisl Slepovitch Ensemble featuring Sasha Lurje. The project brings to life painful memories of surviving the genocide, and memory of those who did not make it, but first and foremost these are the stories of these people’s lives. Volume 3 stays as linguistically and musically diverse as the previous two albums. Songs in Greek, Ladino, Yiddish, Hebrew, and Czech; music from concentration camps and ghettos of Vilna, Warsaw, and Lodz; music of cabaret and theatre from across the globe— adapted to tell the stories of suffering and betrayal, hope and loss.

Highly original material on a very limited EP... be quick!

Polyphonic Waves OF Soulful Madrigals

The power of duality is an inscrutable thing: we’re endlessly fascinated by the interplay between light and darkness, East and West, voice and silence, our senses tingling from the compelling synergies that thrive in perceived opposites. Drawing from an urbane Antwerpian upbringing and a Moroccan family lineage, the Brussels-based multidisciplinary artist Younes Zarhoni, embraces these very dualities in all of his projects, exploring those murky areas of contrast and bringing all their ambiguous energy to crystal clear focus.

A longtime staple of the local electronic music scene with his hypnotic techno outings as YZ, Zarhoni’s latest focus is on the compositional power of pure harmony and silence: namely, his polyphonic renditions of medieval mystical poetry, sung in multiple voices and left to solemnly radiate beyond their given spatial grounds. Stripped of all instrumental accompaniments, what you get is Gregorian chant meets Boyz 2 Men, articulated by the lyrical ineffability of Arabic tongues and finding their rhythm in the silences that act as the juncture between observation and anticipation.

These sparse stanzas tread under an elusive referential threshold, conjuring visions of architecture and archaism, madrigals and MTV, the sacred and the profane ~ ostensibly disparate elements that seamlessly fold themselves into the radicality of the compositions. In these 20 minutes of verse, Zarhoni oversteps the margins of categorization to deliver an immersive story of song, flowing freely and sustaining the arc of the narrative long after it has ebbed into silence.

Both prolific composers in their own right working within the field of modern composition/ new electronic music, Berlin-based Yair Elazar Glotman and Stockholm-based Mats Erlandsson have been collaborating since 2015. ‘Negative Chambers’, their first joint album together was released on Miasmah Recordings in 2017, and saw them exploring new approaches to the use of traditional acoustic instruments. Having recently signed to FatCat’s 130701 imprint, and following closely on from Deutsche Gramophon’s release of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s ‘Last and First Men’ project which Yair co-composed, the pair’s sophomore album ‘Emanate’ is a powerful and stunningly executed extended duration work that utilises a fantastic ensemble cast and continues to explore their ideas of a ‘displaced sound’ – combining electronic and acoustic sound sources through both analogue and digital means to create an ambiguous composite work, a music that sounds neither clearly electronic or acoustic, existing instead in some in-between space.

A gas generator, a hi-fi system, a semi-abandoned house, and 20 hastily printed flyers. That's how, almost without realizing it, Lapsus was born in 2004.

Over the course of two decades, we've ridden a rollercoaster of emotions: from soaring epiphanies, convinced that nothing could stop us, to moments of near defeat when we almost threw in the towel. Let's be honest:

Making a career out of music is not exactly choosing the easy path. But epic tales aside, today we look back with pride at having created something that, in our humble view, is genuine. To celebrate Lapsus' journey and what lies ahead—and also keeping an eye on what is yet to come—we've gathered some of the artists who have joined us along the way, musicians we consider friends and for whom we have the deepest admiration. In a way, Vint (Catalan for “twenty”) is like a sonic photo album, a tracklist that tells our story better than we could ourselves, a collection of unreleased music that celebrates the fact that we've made it this far. Leading this outstanding compilation are forward-thinking producers, with contributions from some of the most respected names in cutting-edge electronic music (a-z): Claraguilar, Gazzi, Kettel, Kode9, Le Motel, Lord Of The Isles, Marina Herlop, naemi, Nueen, Pépe, Plaid, Seph, Simo Cell, Suzanne Ciani, Wordcolour, and μ-Ziq.

Vint is our way of thanking you for your unwavering support over these 20 years. We hope you enjoy it!