XI Records has recently released a new dual CD set by Dave Seidel titled Involution. The album consists of two extended works, Involution and Hexany Permutations, that together comprise well over two hours of electronic music. Strongly influenced by La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier, Involution is an extensive exploration of the sonorities that are possible outside of the conventional well-tempered Western scale. Each track features a series of sustained tones presented in layered and changing combinations so as to systematically reveal the implicit harmonies possible in the selected scale. In this album, Seidel incorporates the Wilson-Grady Meta Slendro scale,
Read moreFive Experimental Recordings Anna Heflin The Redundancy of the Angelic: An Interluding Play Shannon Reilly, Emily Holden, violins; Anna Heflin: viola, voice, composer, writer Infrequent Seams cassette and download “I’m sitting on a galaxy. Stars and moons blanket the deep red spa chairs. I rest on constellations. Space itself supports me. Luna lifts me.” Thus begins Anna Heflin’s debut recording, which encompasses a spoken word play, sound art, and string duets filled with secundal dissonances and sustained drones. Heflin acknowledges a debt to Mozart in the violin/viola duo textures of the music, as well as to Bartôk’s own dissonant writing,
Read moreThe March 2021 offering from Music for Your Inbox is Hodad, a new video byDaniel Corral performed by violinist Myra Hinrichs. This work audaciously combines the Southern California surf with a solo violin played on the beach to create a unique collaboration between artist and nature. The program notes state: “At the beach, a violinist watches the waves roll in and out. The ocean becomes a score. Spot a wave in the distance. The wave crests; the wave washes up on the shore; the wave retracts and disappears into the sea. Play according to the wave’s movements.” The result is
Read moreGrand Piano Records, a Naxos recording label, has released Music for Piano XL, a CD premiere of experimental music by Alvin Lucier performed by award-winning French pianist Nicolas Horvath. Music for Piano XL extends Horvath’s exploration of contemporary composition that has featured works by Philip Glass, Dennis Johnson and Karlheinz Stockhausen as well as the piano music of Erik Satie and Claude Debussy. Lucier’s Music for Piano with Slow Sweep Pure Wave Oscillator XL is the formal title of the single track on this CD, and it is exactly that, with a duration slightly over an hour. Horvath writes that
Read moreDouglas Boyce Hunt By Night: Chamber Works by Douglas Boyce counter)induction; Trio Cavatina; Beth Guterman Chu, viola; Schuyler Slack, cello, Ieva Jokubaviciute, piano New Focus CD In selecting the fifteenth century “L’Homme Arme” tune as the centerpiece for his quintet by the same name, composer Douglas Boyce demonstrates an affinity for connecting music of the past with an individual contemporary voice. The piece leads off his portrait CD Hunt by Night, and it matches a structural integrity akin to Renaissance talea with an energetic, propulsive demeanor. Chamber ensemble counter)induction impressively navigates the intricacies of the score, particularly impressive in
Read moreThis podcast examines Voices of the Pearl, a particularly interesting project that combines the rediscovery of ancient religious texts, the setting of these texts by women into chamber music by contemporary composers and the historical role of women in sacred music. Our guests are Dr. Anne Harley, Artistic Director of the Voices of the Pearl project and Dr. Stacey Fraser, soprano. The podcast will explore the music of their third and latest CD album. With Jim Goodin.
Read moreWilfrido Terrazas Cero Records Cero Records has released Ítaca, a new CD of solo flute music by Wilfrido Terrazas. The album contains ten mostly short pieces that explore a wide variety of musical sounds and extended techniques, inspired by epic Greek poetry. Terrazas is a native of Mexico and has performed widely throughout the world. He is currently a member of the music faculty at UCSD and a presence in the Southern California new music scene. His website states that “His work focuses on finding points of convergence between notated and improvised music, and in exploring innovative approaches to collaboration
Read moreOn January 29, 2021 the wasteLAnd ensemble streamed the premiere of Voice Fragments, by Davíð Brynjar Franzson, featuring soprano Stephanie Aston. WasteLAnd is one of the anchors of new music here in Los Angeles and it is encouraging that they are finding ways to stay active during the pandemic. Voice Fragments was commissioned and developed for streaming and represents an adoption of the technology into the art rather than just an online presentation of a typical musical concert. The streamed premiere was of high quality in both sound and video, with Ms. Aston capably carrying the production with her visual
Read moreBeyond 12: Reinventing the Piano Volume 2 is a new CD release of piano music from MicroFest Records featuring Grammy-nominated pianist Aron Kallay. Beyond 12 refers to the conventional scale in Western music that has 12 equal divisions to the octave. Kallay, however, goes beyond that limitation by the use of a digital grand piano that configures the keyboard for alternate tuning systems. New pieces were solicited from eight different contemporary composers with only two ground rules: 1) Re-tune the keyboard, from extended just intonation to 88 equal-divisions of the octave and everything in between. 2) Re-map the keyboard, left
Read moreMicroFest Records has released Rider of Darkness, Path of Light, a new CD by composer Jeffrey Holmes that offers a potent brew of the Old Norse filled with “…primitive myths, transcendent legends, and dramatic elemental landscapes in their primal and violent natural states.” All of this is expressed in “post-spectral, teleological music incorporating elements of mysticism and lyrical expression.” The four pieces on this album are performed by a number of leading Los Angeles area and East Coast musicians along with solo vocalists Nicholas Isherwood and Kirsten Ashley Wiest. The first track is Urðarmána [Moon of Fate] (2012), as performed
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