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CD/DVD Releases: More Titles Available Through Wayside Music

Posted on Saturday, April 30 @ 15:00:00 UTC by nightowl

In addition to the 6 new Cuneiform titles we reported on last week (found here), Wayside also has these titles available:

Phideaux - Snowtorch (Bloodfish, mini-lp sleeve, $12.00): "Another weird conceptual album from Phideaux Xavier and cohorts. This time the album is basically one long song with many twists and turns. A long form composition extolling the virtues of DNA and life and culture. Gorgeous melodies, heavy instrumental passages and thoughtful surreal lyrics."

Phideaux Xavier has been releasing interesting, modern symphonic rock/progressive albums for a while now. This is his eighth album, released in a lovely, gatefold mini-lp sleeve, and like the well received Number Seven, he has a huge band band (10 musicians, including himself) plus two guests. I [Wayside] saw them about 3 months ago and it was a fine show. His stage presence was excellent and the music was an impressive show of proggy music that didn't sound old and had its own strong vision and showed a lot of class. Good singing and fine playing from everyone, with great, well thought out touches throughout. If you had to compare it to anyone of the 'old school', I guess you could compare it JUST a bit to Genesis, but like I said, it has its own vision. Engaging and enjoyable and smart. [You can catch Phideaux live at RoSFest the weekend of May 20 -ed.]

Find it here at Wayside

Inzinzac - Inzinzac (High Two, $12.00):

"Not lazy for a second. A wonderful and unique record that you must check out." – Mary Halvorson

Inzinzac are a fairly amazing Philadelphia trio of guitar, sax, drums. Their music is very raw and rough, but also tight as hell and very composed. It reminds me of a rough-hewn Etron Fou but brought up to date with modern day skronk and noise. They are one of the surprising number of interesting, entertaining, challenging brutal-prog bands cropping up all over and are one of the best. Highly recommended.

"Founded by a Philadelphia-based French musician Alban Bailly (guitar), Inzinzac includes Dan Scofield (soprano & tenor sax) and Eli Litwin (drums). Inzinzac is influenced by rock, new music, free jazz and the rhythms and energy of eastern European music. The trio combines strong improvisations with densely composed music. Meticulously balancing a thin line between melody and chaos, Inzinzac has a penchant for jagged angles and gradually expanding mazes of sound that obfuscate the boundaries of composition and improvisation. A brutal and muscular document, Inzinzac's first album captures the raw energy the power trio has nurtured through intense live shows and demanding group development. Across the album’s eight songs, Inzinzac moves through a plethora of styles, structures, and time signatures. Although all of the pieces were composed by Bailly, the trio finds plenty of room for individual and collective improvisation. Without overtly showing off their individual skills or blatantly shifting styles, Inzinzac has created an masterful debut record that is not easily compared to any other band." [Uncredited, but maybe also Halvorson, or the label -ed.]

You can hear their music here: www.myspace.com/inzinzac

Find it here at Wayside

Henry Kaiser/Charles K. Noyes/Weasel Walter - Ninja Star Danger Rock (UgExplode, $11.00): Even Henry calls this one noisy and extreme! "Total skonk for ugly times," is what Weasel says.

"This rawly recorded studio album features 12 tracks of musical destruction. Henry Kaiser is at his most extreme here, deploying bizarre electronic effects to conjure alien landscapes. Charles K. Noyes (of Toy Killers fame) staggeringly arrythmic drumming displays Japanese Noh and Korean percussion influences as well as conjuring bad dreams of The Shaggs. Weasel Walter ties the whole thing together with his penchant for extremity, wielding the bass guitar with an air of spastic fury. Plunderphonics expert John Oswald and Toy Killer Mark E. Miller both make surprise appearances on alto saxophone and drums."

Find it here at Wayside

Lukas Ligeti - Pattern Time (Innova, $15.00): With Pattern Time, Lukas Ligeti and his group introduce a style of music that is hard to categorize for the best of reasons: it is something the likes of which have not been heard before. Is it a new direction in jazz, perhaps more specifically in African jazz? Is it a new idiom in the otherwise unidiomatic realm of creative improvised music? Ultimately, such questions may be impossible to answer. This, however, is for sure: it is a fresh approach to both sound and rhythm, a musical conversation that uses a new syntax that comes across as immediately striking; an abstract language the listener can instantly understand — with enough motion to keep a restless octopus happy.

Invited by the Vienna Musik-Galerie festival in Austria to put together a group consisting of some of his favorite musicians, New York-based Ligeti assembled a quintet of kindred spirits united by their interest in new rhythmic possibilities in improvised music. Their communication was immediate, their interaction both playful and profound. Like in African music, patterns form the foundation of this music; like in jazz, the patterns are often implied rather than obvious. But here, both the musicians’ usual roles and the ways in which the patterns interrelate are blurred, resulting in a form of interplay that indicates directions heretofore unexplored. Time is treated topologically; it is expanded, contracted, twisted and turned to provide fresh and new ways of experiencing the beat. And often, there is no clear beat, though a sense of groove is never lost. This music takes the African approach to polymeters, which renders the rhythm both firmly grounded and ambiguous, to the world of experimental improvisation; it swings while eschewing all clichés. Lukas Ligeti’s compositional input - mainly in the form of ideas, shapes, and patterns - provides the conceptual foundation upon which the ensemble builds its conversation, combining their individual, highly evolved musical vocabularies. The African influence is a cornerstone throughout.

Ligeti has developed a choreographic, polyrhythmic drumming style based on the music of East Africa’s Kingdom of Buganda; his connection to the continent was deepened through numerous trips and collaborations with African musicians. In C&ocaret;te d'Ivoire, he met Aly Keïta, one of today’s leading virtuosos of the balafon, the West African marimba, who has boldly introduced his instrument and traditions into a jazz environment. Parisian pianist Benoît Delbecq, in turn, has developed a completely original approach to jazz piano, preparing his instrument with wood and basing his rhythmic vocabulary on the chants of Ba’aka pygmies. His playing leaves an indelible mark on any music to which he contributes. Hailing from Sicily, saxophonist Gianni Gebbia has similarly crossed the bridge between traditional and experimental music, conjuring up the launedda, the ancient Sardinian bagpipe, and propelling it into the new millennium. And Michael Manring, one of the world’s most recognized electric bass players, built a new world of expression upon the foundations passed on to him by his teacher, Jaco Pastorius. It is a rare and welcome treat to hear him in a context where he is so unbound and free to experiment. Together, these singular musicians create an architecture that is greater than the sum of its parts, and points to new paths, spaces, and structures to be explored. Like his father György before him, in his own way Lukas is revealing a new musical universe strikingly his own."

Find it here at Wayside

Alvin Lucier - Almost New York (Pogus, 2 x CDs $20.00):

CD 1

Twonings: Charles Curtis, cello; Joseph Kubera, piano
Almost New York: Robert Dick, flutes
Broken Line: Robert Dick, flute; Danny Tunick, vibraphone; Joseph Kubera, piano

CD 2

Coda Variations: Robin Hayward, tuba

"Pogus is extremely delighted to release this 2 CD set of recordings of works by Alvin Lucier. He is one of the key experimental artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, and is one of my favorite composers. A unique and individual artist: No one sounds quite like Alvin Lucier.

"Lucier writes about the genesis of the works on this release: 'Since the early 1980's I have made a series of works for conventional musical instruments. Before that time I had been mainly occupied with the exploration of such phenomena as echoloca-tion, brain waves, room acoustics and the visual representation of sound. Often these works required special equipment-hand held pulse wave oscillators (Vespers), differential amplifiers (Music for Solo Performer), horseshoe magnets (Music on a Long Thin Wire). Then players began asking me for pieces. Now I needed to find a way of achieving the same poetry with acoustic instruments as I did with electronic means.

"'One of the things I discovered was that players could create rhythmic patterns by closely tuning with electronically generated pure waves or with each other, producing audible beats. Often, to get continuous motion, I have one or more voices sweep up or down at various speeds against fixed sustained pitches. As a wave approaches a sustained pitch the audible beating slows down to zero when it reaches unison, then speeds up again as the wave leaves the pitch. "Almost New York" employs slow sweep pure wave oscillators, "Broken Line," flute glissandi. In "Twonings" two different tuning systems collide and in "Coda Variations" slight variations in pitch are heard chronologically.'

"Recorded by Charles Curtis, Joseph Kubera, Robert Dick, Danny Tunick, and Robin Hayward - some of the leading new music performers of our era, these works are essential additions to the Alvin Lucier oeuvre, as well as satisfying anyone interested in great experimental music."

Find it here at Wayside

Endel Rivers - The Jaz Symphony (12:14 Productions/ER, CD + PAL (all region) DVD $21.00): It's amazing what you can find when you browse the 'net. Endel Rivers is a Estonian composer and guitarist who have lived in Australia for several decades. His music is really great, top-drawer, instrumental, progressive jazz/rock. This is a stupendous work of sweeping symphonic jazz rock performed by a ensemble of top-drawer musicians. featuring two versions of his 'symphony; a studio recording and a live recording, which is presented on the DVD. Watch the video clip and be amazed! Highly recommended.

Find it here at Wayside

Dimitri Voudouris - AΛΟ=Φ/UVIVI/1:Φφ4/Onta (Pogus, $13.00): "Pogus is very pleased to release its second recording by composer Dimitri Voudouris, a South African composer of Greek birth. As Massimo Ricci wrote in his Touching Extremes review of the first Pogus release:

"'Voudouris is interested in the "research of cognitive psycho-acoustic behavioral patterns in humans and the behavior of sound in relationship to continued environmental changes." Don't let the composer's difficult description fool you into thinking about some kind of cerebral pretentiousness, though, as this album contains instead four magnificent examples of his approach, music that's always challenging and, in many of its expressions, of extraordinary beauty.' This description applies just as well as to this new recording. AΛΟ= Φ (for text to speech synthesis with computer assisted processing for 24 speaker interactive robotic ensemble) is a comparative study of pathways in communication between Man and Machine and is composed using fragments of processed speech synthesis; UVIVI is a computer music piece that is Voudouris's fourth work that was composed for contemporary dance theatre. UVIVI originates from Zulu -- meaning 'daybreak'. This computer music composition focuses on linearity and infinite memory in the kinetic flow of vehicular traffic. Four languages were chosen to represent the composition of 1:Φφ4 (singing synthesis for four artificial female voices) namely Greek, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Onta (for voice and electronics) is a project that discusses the daily tensions encountered and focuses on the energy building up, exploding, or imploding from these tensions in the city, be it organically or inorganically created; this promotes musical creativity integrated into everyday life, of familiar places and natural behaviours."

Find it here at Wayside

[Source: Wayside, label websites]

Posted in Album Release News