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| Journal Archive |
| New Releases |
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| Mark Barden: Monoliths |
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| Mark Barden’s work represents a staging of the failures that occur just before and just beyond the limits of what the body can hear and what it can enact, but where the failure itself is always palpable. The sounds of this music are, by turns, dense, visceral, and febrile; the tangibility of the performer’s loss of precise physical control is mirrored in the listening experience. The listener senses, just barely, a loss of themselves in this moment of shared vulnerability. Click here to find out more about the album Monoliths.
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| Birke J. Bertelsmeier: folklich |
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| A simple melody, well-formed and self-contained, is to be played „with utter calm and exquisite tone“ – and yet something seems to be amiss. An ensemble for new music – but it plays standing up, like an early music group. A simple, incessantly repeated rhythmic model – but its regularity always threatens to lose its balance. Confounding moments such as these are ubiquitous in music of Birke J. Bertelsmeier; indeed, she positively seeks them out: they reveal the composer’s fascination with controlled imperfection and calculated approximation. Click here to find out more about the album folklich.
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| Christian Mason: Unseen Light |
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| Light, of course. Radiance. It comes from – it comes in – Christian Mason’s music in the same way it comes from and in that of other composers, going back through Gérard Grisey to Guillaume Dufay and the anonymous authors of plainchant (to cite some plausible kinships), by virtue of how the sound is at one with resonance. This is so even when Mason – like his nearest musical connections, who include Scelsi, Radulescu and Stockhausen as well as Grisey – is dealing with complex, clangorous resonances: the sounds of bells, as it might be, or of wind blowing through a frost-covered tree. Click here to find out more about the album Unseen Light.
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In the echo chambers of tradition. Ernst von Siemens composer’s award winner David Pilip Hefti.  |
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| Beating Bounds, the Limits of Failure: the Music of Mark Barden. |
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| Strive for the greatest integration, exclude all vagaries and obfuscations. |
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Steven Daverson’s compositions allude to the
intangible: fluid forms that might be experienceable, but never enduring concrete... |
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| To stump a listener: the Music of Birke J. Bertelsmeier. |
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| Ceremonies, too, guard their silences: the music of Christian Mason. |
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| “…as if the music had shed each of its shells and skins one after the other, to finally stand revealed in all its naked essence.” |
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| For me, composition is a game’, says Kampe, ‘using objects which – from a distance – don’t seem to belong together. |
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| Focussing and magnification, concentration and expansion – these [...] diametrically opposed dynamics [...] characteristically pervade Luke Bedford’s music. |
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