Best of 2021 – Happy 80th Birthday Wadada Leo Smith! Wadada Leo Smith turns eighty today, and Sequenza 21 wishes him many more years of health, creative improvisation, and composing. Smith has been a driving force as a member of AACM for over five decades, a keen collaborator with jazz and concert musicians, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a faculty member at CalArts and elsewhere. 2021 has been a prolific one in terms of record releases by the trumpeter and composer. He is joined by wind player Douglas Ewart and drummer Mike Reed on the Astral Spirits CD Sun
Read moreThree is a new CD release from Cold Blue Music by musician and master-machinist Chas Smith. Now residing in rural Grass Valley, California, Smith lived for many years in the San Fernando Valley, and this put him squarely in the center of the Los Angeles aerospace and movie industries. Smith was a student of James Tenney and Harold Budd, which led to later friendships with both men. Smith’s long experience as a machinist has resulted in the ability to fabricate specialized musical instruments and intriguing sound sculptures. His industrial metalworking is no doubt still in use, and his sound sculptures
Read moreBernhard Lang Piano Music Wolfram Oettl, piano Kairos Music CD Bernhard Lang (b. 1957) writes in a number of different media, from chamber music to theatre works. His solo piano music is reflective of the composer’s omnivorous interest in various musical styles and his adroit sense of scoring, which allows the piano to have an orchestral impact in the two multi-movement works on his latest Kairos CD. In liner notes for the CD, Lang remarks that he is interested in free improvisation and DJ electronica as well as contemporary concert music. One can hear this in the angular
Read moreSivan Silver-Swartz Untitled 6 Wandelweiser CD EWR 1920 Nigel Dean, violin; Patrick Behnke, Tanner Pfeiffer, viola; Tal Katz, Julian Tedaldi, cello Antoine Beuger Jankélévich Sextets Another Timbre CD at168 Apartment House – James Opstad, double bass; Mark Knoop, accordion; Heather Roche, bass clarinet; Mira Benjamin, violin; Joe Qiu, bassoon; Bridget Carey, viola At twenty-eight years of age, Sivan Silver-Swartz is the youngest member of the Wandelweiser collective. A native of Ohio, he received his undergraduate degree at Oberlin College and then relocated to California to get his Master’s at CalArts. He has remained in Los Angeles since getting
Read moreSergio Merce En lugar de pensar (Instead of thinking) Wandelweiser CD “The name of the album is about this feeling that I have. I believe that playing music is a non-cerebral thought form; thought in the sense of being a channel to see, to reveal, a channel that opens through intuition, observation and attention but not through thinking.” Argentinian composer Sergio Merce frequently records at home, but the results aren’t rough hewn as a result. Employing a microtonal saxophone of his own design, synthesizer, and an electronic wind instrument, Merce creates music that encompasses drones, layered sine waves,
Read moreXI 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 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 moreThe search for ways to deliver new music to audiences during the pandemic continues, and on December 15, 2020, Music For Your Inbox inaugurated a promising subscription system for distributing video links via email. For Percussion Perhaps, Or… (night) (1971), by James Tenney was their initial offering and viewers were invited to subscribe or purchase tickets by December 10th, and receive the video link on the 15th. The performance by Stephanie Cheng Smith and Liam Mooney was previously recorded, available for viewing later at multiple times. In addition, subscribers were appropriately sent an original print postcard by dance pioneer Simone
Read moreInterview: Philip Thomas Launches Cageconcert By Christian Carey Pianist Philip Thomas is a prolific artist. A member of Apartment House, he recently participated in their recording of Ryoko Akama’s compositions for Another Timbre. Also on Another Timbre is Thomas’s gargantuan CD set of piano music by Morton Feldman, which includes several previously unreleased pieces. Two of the pianist’s other recent projects focus on other members of the New York School. His deep dive into Cage’s Concert for Piano (again with Apartment House) has resulted in a book, recording, and an interactive online project, Cageconcert (cageconcert.org) that also includes apps to
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