Yannis Kyriakides. ANTICHAMBER.   Dutch-Cypriot composer Yannis Kyriakides is better known for his extended multimedia and music-theatre works, but the ten pieces collected on this double-CD demonstrate that writing for smaller ensembles affords him equally fertile ground for creative exploration. The album offers[...] Read more

Recordings Jason van Eyk Issue 107

Grutronic. Essex Foam Party. Essex Foam Party sees Grutronic, a free improvising collective, join forces with guests vibraphonist Orphy Robinson and sampler Paul Obermayer. Mixed among the moist pulses and triggered cross textures that characterize much of the music are interludes of keyboard comping and runs from[...] Read more

Recordings Ken Waxman Issue 107

FURT. Sense.   Two methods of creation play out on this disc by FURT, the British electronic composition-performance duo of Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer. The track Uranus is a forty-six-minute studio composition developed over a two-year period. In contrast, Curtains, the second track on the CD,[...] Read more

Recordings Ken Waxman Issue 107

Lori Freedman. Bridge. Bridge largely emulates the pattern of one of Freedman’s solo clarinet concerts, exploring the relationships between composition, interpretation, and improvisation. If composition and improvisation were once separated by a gulf, here they’re constructed as a continuously[...] Read more

Recordings Stuart Broomer Issue 107

The Element Choir. At Rosedale United.   Christine Duncan leads the most unlikely ensemble devoted to collective improvisation, Toronto’s fifty-one-voice Element Choir. The choir’s improvisation is strongly shaped by Duncan’s ongoing “conduction.” In performance, members respond to a series of[...] Read more

Recordings Stuart Broomer Issue 107

Kyle Brenders. WAYS.   Saxophonist-composer Kyle Brenders has assembled a sextet from among Toronto’s community of improvising musicians to perform an extended composition called Ways. Five segments of the work are heard here (Sections 2, 4, 5, 6, and 8) so the recording explicitly resists the notion of[...] Read more

Recordings Stuart Broomer Issue 107

Burkhard Beins. Structural Drift.   Conceived, created, recorded, and mixed during a three-month residency in Worpswede, Germany, composer-improviser Burkhard Beins’ CD Structural Drift uses found sounds along with custom-made electronics, an e-bow zither, various percussion, and synthesizer to reflect Worpswede[...] Read more

Recordings Ken Waxman Issue 107

Iannis Xenakis. Translated by Sharon Kanach. Music and Architecture.   It is commonly known that Iannis Xenakis was more than a composer; that he studied engineering rather than composition; that he worked for Le Corbusier as an architectural assistant; that he taught himself computer programming in order to create composition algorithms, new methods for[...] Read more

Books James Harley Issue 106

Seth Kim-Cohen. In the Blink of An Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art.   It’s happened more often than I’d like to admit that I will read the artist statement of a sonic work and be disappointed in its dated ideas. The odd time I’ve ever engaged in debate with a sonic artist I have usually been astonished by the gulf between current visual[...] Read more

Books Laura Paolini Issue 106

Heidi Grundmann, Elisabeth Zimmerman, Reinhard Braun, Dieter Daniels, An-dreas Hirsch, & Anne Thurman-Jajes eds. Re-Inventing Radio; Aspects of Radio as Art.   “While the death of radio as a mass medium is once again being predicted as imminent, recent developments in transmission technology underline what has long been evident: radio is not about the transmission of sound but of signal.” So states this self proclaimed “[...] Read more

Books Allison Cameron

Louise Gray. The No-Nonsense Guide To World Music.   At a mere 167 pages, this little guide might justifiably raise suspicions about exactly what nonsense was jettisoned to make this book so compact. While it is scanter on information than the books put out by Rough Guides, Gray’s guide offers a compelling issue-and-topic-driven[...] Read more

Books Nick Storring Issue 106