RADIANCE is a new work by Stephan Mathieu comprising twelve album-length pieces, each of them following the concept of stasis, the unfolding of time and sustained frequencies, deep listening, and immersive soundscapes.
Two conceptual compositions from Christoph Korn: the first, "Ich Spreche Diesen" (I appeal to this) where spoken word is placed in a loop and then slowly erased by custom software using aleatory procedures; then "Stille" (Silent), a Cage inspired work. The file sizes are not a mistake, as ridiculous as they may seem. Track 1 has many stretches of silence and track 2 is basically pure digital silence the whole way through. FLAC is not constant bit rate encoding so these files sizes are possible with very quiet / silent tracks that are still quite long.
“Many of the ideas in this collection have now been so completely assimilated into popular listening that it may sometimes be hard to remember how surprising it all was on first outing. Some of it still sounds pretty exotic. These CDs are important as part of the story of how we got to where we are now—the cultural conversation so far—and as a still fruitful repertoire of future possibilities.”from the Foreword by Brian Eno
A round or a canon is a musical form in which several voices or instruments perform the same material, but with staggered entries. For example, in a three-voice version of "Row, row, row your boat," some people don't get to sing the first line until others are singing "Gently down the stream," and others don't get to sing it until "Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily." The last group to sing the opening line is the last to sing "Life is but a dream," and they sing it all by themselves. In a so-called mensuration canon, all of the voices end at the same time, which means that the later you enter the canon, the faster you have to sing – or the more you have to compress - to reach the end at the same time as everybody else. One might predict that as the canon approaches its end, its density increases arithmetically. And it does – with vertigo-producing results.
A short-lived but prodigiously gifted Genovese musician of the 17th century rediscovered. Better known now as the teacher of his nephew Simone Molinaro, one of the more important Italian composers of the post-Renaissance era, Giovanni Battista Dalla Gostena is worth knowing in his own right. Born early in the 1540s in Genova, he studied with the renowned Flemish polyphonist Philippe de Monte, composer to the Viennese court of Maximilian II, and he followed de Monte’s example by composing several volumes of sacred and secular vocal music during the 1570s and 80s before he was apparently murdered in 1593 (there are also records of a funeral Mass held for him five years later).