Harold Budd - By the Dawn's Early Light (1991)

This is a splendid album, perhaps the most personal album of Harold Budd. Mixing together the reading of some of his beautiful poems and ambient musical soundscapes, Budd creates unique atmospheres, between day and night, between light and darkness, between sleep and awakening. Playing piano, Hammond B3 and synthesizer, Harold Budd is surrounded by B.J. Cole (pedal steel guitar), Bill Nelson (acoustic and electric guitars), Mabel Wong (viola) and Susan Allen (harp).

The result is magical and moving, deep and ambient, and a subtle and aerial chamber music surrounds Harold Budd's texts: his voice, the rythm and pauses of his reading are parts of the music.

Imagination meets memory, silence found its voice, words and sounds are just colours painting a beautiful, quiet, serene and ambient atmosphere...

link: mp3 / 320

HB.BtDEL.zip

password: olduvai

Stuart Dempster - Underground Overlays from the Cistern Chapel (1985)

Art would be so boring if there was not a part of crazyness in it. The recording industry would be just a routine if there were only studio sessions, without risks and imagination... Life becomes more interesting when one is going to the very end of his (her ?) dreams, concepts, abilities..

Most of New Albion records, this innovative company based in San Francisco, shared such features. They are extreme, exciting, experimental, innovative, and never, never they take into account commercial, economic, market data, to frame creativity within borders and limits.

Stuart Dempster is a veteran composer and performer in the American new music scene.

This Cistern Chapel project  is crazy, incredible, bold, on the edge... 

Stuart Dempster and his trombone class went inside a giant water tank close to Seattle. In this place, there is a natural reverberation of 45 seconds...  Conches,  Dijderidu, Tibetan cymbals and nine trombones create these unique soundscapes, atmospheric drones, ambient climates, multi-dimensional acoustic spaces...

Meditation ? Exploring the borders of consciousness ? Mapping new audio territories ?

These Underground Overlays do not allow simple definitions. They are an invitation to share a unique acoustic and ambient experience.

If you think that true musical creation should open new spaces and break all the existing borders, then you should definitely explore the superb ambient world of Stuart Dempster and his students...

Enjoy ! 

link: mp3 / 320

StD.UndOv.zip

password: olduvai

Wim Mertens - After Virtue (1987)

Wim Mertens belongs to the bunch of my all time favorite musicians ... This Belgian composer (b. 1953), after studying social sciences at the University of Leuven, discovered American repetitive composers, such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich. From 1978, he worked as a producer for the Belgian TV and from 1982 he started an amazing career of musician, composing musics for theatrical plays and for movies (for example Peter Greenaway's The Belly of an Architect and Louis Delluc's La femme de nulle part).

His first album was released in 1982 (For Amusement Only - The Sound of Pinball Machines).

His whole discography, until 2007, includes 71 CDs !!! 

Wim Mertens wrote many pieces of chamber music for small ensembles or solo instruments, he also recorded many albums as a solo artist, playing piano, sometimes with vocals.

Defining Wim Mertens' music is not easy. I would say it blends minimalism and classicism in a very intimate and poetical way, with a personal lyrical touch... This music is serene and dynamic at the same time, melodies are at the forefront, there is a unique feeling... Wim Mertens' music is intemporal, at the crossroads of classical traditions and of the exploration of new patterns and atmospheres...

As an introduction to his musical universe, please listen to After Virtue, and try to buy some of Wim Mertens' 70 other recordings ;-)

 link: mp3 / 320

WMAV.zip

password: olduvai

Jon Gibson - In Good Company (1992)

Jon Gibson is a composer and a musician (saxophone, flute), born in Los Angeles in 1949, who played a key-part in the American minimalist scene. He played works by the most important composers in this trend, such as Steve Reich (1963-1972), Terry Riley (1964-1966) and Philip Glass (from 1968). He collaborated with composers such as La Monte Young, Frederick Rzewski, Alvin Curran, Anna Lockwood, to name but a few.

"In good company" is his first solo album, released on Point Music, the record company created by Philip Glass. Indeed, Jon Gibson is here in good company: this record is produced by Michael Riesman, who also plays keyboards, La Monte Young plays digital piano, Martin Goldray plays piano, and John Snyder and Bill Ruyle are credited for various percussions.

Jon Gibson plays compositions by Steve Reich, John Adam, Terry Jennings, Philip Glass and Terry Riley. He also plays his own compositions, and my favorite one is the very ambient and moody "Extensions II".

This is a beautiful and intimate record, built around Gibson's various saxophones and his unique way to play with them.  From the hypnotic repetitive structures of Steve Reich to the lyrical minimalism of Philip Glass, from the raga structrues of Terry Riley to John Adams, Jon Gibson is travelling freely through the history of American new musics.

link: mp3 / 320

JGIGC.zip

password: olduvai

Alexander Knaifel - Svete Tikhiy (2002)

This is a splendid album released on ECM New Series: where else could one find such an ethereal music, slow and minimalist, ambient and lightly experimental at the same time ? "Svete Tikhiy" means in Russian "O Gladsome Light": it is one of the three oldest Christian hymns included in the Russian Orthodox Vespers. It provides the album with its title but defines also its general mood, spiritual, introspective, contemplative.

A first piece, "In Air Clear and Unseen" is played he Keller Quartett and Oleg Malov (piano).

Then, the Russian soprano Tatiana Melentieva sings "the Song of the Most Holy Theotokos" (Svete Tikhiy) and her voice is treated by a digital  sampler (Andrei Siegle) in order to create beautiful choral patterns.

This beautiful album is a masterpiece, and it is very difficult to compare it with anything else.

One could say, as a rough definition, that it might be located at the crossroad of Brian Eno and Arvo Pärt...

link: mp3 / 320

AK-ST.zip

password: olduvai

Penguin Cafe Orchestra - When in Rome, Recorded live at the Royal Festival Hall (1988)

How could I describe the music of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra ? Lets imagine a wedding party, where musicians invite everyone to dance and to have fun... Let's imagine a nomad band, travelling from city to city, and creating incredible parties, each time it stops in a particular place... Let's imagine yodel's art blending with American country music, let's imagine blues, jazz, classical music, rock blended in order to create a unique instrumental music, challenging any attempt to classify it... Let's imagine a pub, where an inspired music invite you to dance all the night...

Penguin Cafe Orchestra followed a very unique musical path, crossing many musical genres and creating unexpected dialogues between instruments and genres... I love the simplicity and the sophistication of the arrangements, the subtle blending of acoustic instruments, the inventive play on harmonies and rythms...

Guitars, percussions, piano and harmonium, cello, mandolin and ukelele.. Well, there so many instruments that it is impossible to list them...

If I was to locate the Penguin Cafe Orchestra on a map, I would pinpoint its place at the crossroad of minimal and chamber music, but I would like to add a third coordinate: pleasure and fun..

"When in Rome'" is a live recording...  You will feel the incredible feeling, the unique instrumental skill, the fun, the inspiration of this so creative band.

Simon Jeffes died in 1997. He was the main composer of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, he was its soul and he contributed to create its unique sound and mood...

I love this live recording... So much energy, feeling and creaticity.. Such a creative dialogue between musicians and instruments...

This is a great album !

link : mp3

PCOWiR1.zip

PCOWiR2.zip

password: olduvai

Hans Otte - The book of Sounds (1984)

Hans Otte (1926-2007) was a very creative German composer and artist, as creative in poems and drawings as in sound installations or music for theatrical plays. He helped a lot in promoting in Germany artists such as John Cage, David Tudor, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, in his Bremen radio Festival. As a musician, Hans Otte was a student of Paul Hindemith and of piano maestro Walter Gieseking. 

The Book of the Sounds or Das Buch der Klänge is among Hans Otte most significant compositions. He played live this composition in many places. This 1984 recording by the Kuckuck German record company is the best introduction to his musical world, where Western minimalism meets Eastern spiritual traditions. John Cage, Terry Riley, Morton Feldman are obvious references, if one tries to compare Hans Otte's piano music to someone else...

What fascinates me in this CD is the quest for new sounds through a traditional musical instruments...

Hans Otte conceived and played piano as anyone else...

For lovers of experimental music, this original CD calls another one: "Das Buch Der Klange" played by Herbert Hencke on ECM New Music...

The interest of Manfred Eicher and ECM for the compositions of Hans Otte is enough to tell its importance in the landscape of contemporary music...

Link: mp3 / 320

BofS1.zip

BofS2.zip

password: olduvai

Chris Hughes - Shift From the music of Steve Reich (1994)

Point Music was a record label that was started in 1992 as a joint-venture between Philips Classics and Michael Riesman and Philip Glass. It specialized in cutting-edge contemporary Western music. It was shut down in 2002.

Chris Hughes was fascinated by Steve Reich's music since his childhood, when his father took him to see the European premiere of Steve Reich's Drumming at the Hayward Gallery in London. 

The Shift project started as Chris Hughes pushed forwards his exploration of Steve Reich's musical universe. He met Steve Reich in the mid-80's and decided to work on a series of variations on Reich's early works.

Shift is strongly inspired by Drumming, Violin Phase, Piano Phase and adds something special to the original Steve Reich's works. 

The Synclavier provide Steve Reich's music with a new geometry, a new temporality, new patterns of repetition and variation. 

Shift is a deep exploration of the world of rythms and patterns, of loops and phrases, of electronic gamelan and sequences. Mathematics and time-codes create a unique hypnotic and ambient climate, where space and time are manipulated through computer programming.

By the way, Chris Hughes became one of the most famous British producers and drummers and he worked with Peter Gabriel, Robert Plant, Enya, Tears for Fears, Paul Mc Cartney and Wang Chung, to name but a few....

Here is the user's guide to this Shift album: "Melt in the sofa, close your eyes, relax and listen". Do it !

link / mp3 320

Shift.zip

password: olduvai

Harold Budd, Ruben Garcia, Daniel Lentz - Music for 3 Pianos (1992)

Music for three Pianos is the result of a long-standing friendship between Harold Budd, Daniel Lentz and Ruben Garcia. Inspired by Morton Feldman's multi-piano pieces, this album explores the border between silence and music and invites the listener to navigate along dreams and memories. Minimalist and ambient, this music is stripped to the essential, and could remind Erik Satie's atmospheres. Simplicity, depth, sensitivity, this is a beautiful dialogue between three outstanding musicians who are more interested in the essence than in the surface, this Music for 3 Pianos is a true melodic and ambient gem. This album should be listened late at night, when the surrounding silence will create its own harmonics with the music and your own feelings...

Link / mp3 320

M43p.zip

password: olduvai

John Adams conducts - American Elegies: Charles Ives, Ingram Marshall, Morton Feldman, John Adams, David Diamond (1991)

All the compositions of this album share a common feature: a quiet and reflective mood, an elegiac feeling, blending together lament and memory. As the title of the opening track by Charles Ives suggests, this CD could be considered as a meditation about "The Unanswered Question", as an elegy for the inharmonious folly of the world itself. 

The Orchestra of St. Luke's, conducted by John Adams, plays compositions by Charles Ives (among them, Five Songs, for the splendid soprano voice of Dawn Upshaw), Ingram Marshall (Fog Tropes), Morton Feldman (Madame Press Dies Last Week at Ninety), John Adams himself (Eros piano, played by Paul Crossley) and David Diamond (Elegy in Memory of Maurice Ravel).

This is a beautiful journey through the territory of American new musics, beyond all the usual borders of genres and sub-genres. One could say that a particular form of minimalism is displayed into these delicate orchestral atmospheres, as intimate as chamber music, as evocative as memories fading away...

link / mp3 320

JAAmEl.zip

password: olduvai

Harold Budd - The Pavilion of Dreams (1978)

Harold Budd is an American composer (b. 1936) who played (and still plays)  a very important part in the minimalist and ambient scene, either as a solo artist or through his collaborations with musicians such as Brian Eno, Zeitgeist, Hector Zazou, Andy Patridge, John Foxx, Daniel Lentz, Ruben Gardia, Cocteau Twins, Robin Guthrie.

The Pavilion of Dreams was released in the famous series Obscure Records, where Brian Eno produced still unknown composers such as Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman. It was Harold Budd's second album, and it revealed him to a wider international audience.

Ambient and impressionist music, intimate chamber music, quiet melodies in the vein of Satie and Debussy, The Pavilion of Dreams offers "an extended cycle of works begun in 1972". Harold Budd (electric piano) is accompanied by a small ensemble of musicians (harp, celeste, marimbas, percussion, vibes and vibraphone, chorus). Among them, Lynda Richardson (mezzo soprano), Marion Brown (Alto sapophone), Michael Nyman (marimba) and Gavin Bryars (glockenspiel, voice, celeste). 

Quiet music for an hectic age, The Pavilion of Dreams explores the poetics of slowness. Mysteriously ambient, lightly melancholic, deep as an horizon, these compositions opened new perspectives in the trend of ambient musics, and they could be considered as a foreword to Ambient 2 / The Plateaux of Mirror, composed in 1980 with Brian Eno.

link / mp3 320

HB.TPofD.zip

password: olduvai

Brian Eno - I Dormienti (1999)

"This music was made for an installation of sculptures by Mimmo Paladino at the Undercroft of the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, London. Collectively the sculptures - about 30 reclining terracotta figures with about 20 attendant terracotta crocodiles - form a work called "I DORMIENTI" - "The Sleepers".

The elements of the music were distributed over 10 CDs (such that each CD carried just one layer of the music), and then played on 10 CD players positioned around the space. The CDs are of different lengths, and carry different numbers of tracks (some of which are silent tracks). Each player was set to "random shuffle" so that the exact overlay of elements at any given moment would not be predictable. The total playing time of such a piece (i.e. the time before it precisely repeats) is effectively infinite".

Random, infinite, overlay, non predictable, installation, space, repeats: perfect key words for describing this deep and mysterious ambient music, surrounding sleeping bodies who remind me the petrified corpses of Pompei inhabitants, when the Vesuvius volcano destroyed the city.

Beautiful atmospheric music, to be played and listened to in infinite mode...

Link: mp3 / 320

BEMfD.zip

password: olduvai

Ingram Marshall - Three Penitential Visions & Hidden Voices (1990)

Ingram Marshall is another great composer of the New Albion record company, based in San Francisco. As an introduction to his musical universe, I chose this Elektra / Nonesuch recording..

Three Penitential Visions (1986) surfaced as a radio work, part of a series called "The Territory of Art", sponsored by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Hidden Voices (1989) draws must of its substance from recordings of ethnic vocal music from Eastern Europe, particularly the strange wailing laments heard typically at funerals. Ingram Marshall wrote: "It has been my intention not only to exploit, but to pay homage to these found voices. The sources used are from Central Russia (...), Northern Russia (...), Romania and Hungary"

Into the mix, processed electronically through digital delays and often combined with their own echoes, Marshall has stirred a live soprano, singing the old Anglican hymn "Once, in David's City".

These ambient soundscapes rely on the mixing of natural sounds, voices, synthesizers. The result is totally original and has a kind of haunting beauty...

It is impossible to compare Ingram Marshall's music with anyone else. Brian Eno could be, however, a possible challenger. 

The mood, the soundscapes, the sonic depth are unique...

link: mp3 / 320

IngMars.zip

password: olduvai

IngMars.zip

Somei Satoh - Mantra & Stabat Mater(1988)

Somei Satoh is a Japanese composer (b. 1947), strongly influenced by Japanese music and dance as well as by an almost 19th century sense of Romanticism, updated through extensive use of electronic instruments and processing. Shintoism and Buddhism are the underlying philosophies of Satoh's musical work.

This album offers two compositions recorded live in 1987, at the Masonic Temple in New York City.

Mantra relies on Satoh's own voice, which was layered repeatedly during the recording and processed though delays and reverbs. It is is a very meditative piece, that reminds sometimes the overtones of buddhist prayers.

Stabat Mater is a composition for soprano (Jane Thorngren) and for a capella chorus (The Pro Arte Chorale). The mood is also meditative and is dedicated to women everywhere who have suffered such loss as Maria at the foot of the cross.

These two long ambient compositions create a world of infinite spaces and suspended times...

This is a New Albion recording: New Albion is a unique label for contemporary, minimalist and experimental music and you should definitely support them, browse their online catalogue and buy the recordings at emusic.

links: mp3 /320

SS.MStM_1.zip

SS.MStM2.zip

password: olduvai

Peter Michael Hamel - Transition (1983)

Peter Michael Hamel is a German composer (b. 1947) who played (and still plays) an important part in contemporary music. He could be labelled as a minimalist composer, close to Terry Riley, mixing together improvisation, repetitive patterns, Indian influences. His music is both ambient and avant-garde, developping rich harmonic atmospheres and mysterious soundscapes where his piano sounds sometimes like a Balinese gamelan. 

Peter Michael Hamel studied music with Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Morton Feldman and Terry Riley, among others. 

Since 1997, he is the successor of György Ligeti as professor of composition at the Music Academy of Hamburg.

His recent work includes four operas, many pieces for orchestra, chamber music as well as solo compositions.

In 1970, he founded the band Between and released several albums where West met East, mixing musical traditions and instruments though fascinating improvised ambient pieces.

As a solo artist, he released many albums in the 70's and 80s, such as:

Aura (1972, Wergo)

The Voice of Silence (1973, Wergo)

Buddhist Meditation East-West (1975, Harmonia Mundi)

Colours Of Time (1980, Kuckuck) 

Nada (1980, Kuckuck)  

Bardo (1981, Kuckuck) 

Transition (1983, Kuckuck)  

Organum (1986, Kuckuck) 

Let It Play 1979-83 (1987, Kuckuck) 

Arrow Of Time/ Cycle Of Time (1991, Kuckuck)

As an introduction to his musical universe, I chose Transition, a 1983 double CD with five compositions for piano, prepared piano, pipe organ and PPG wave computer synthesizer: perfect music for walking on the paths of memory and dream....

PMHT1.zip

PMHT_2.zip

password: olduvai