Music of The Gothic Era

This 55-CD set chronicles the remarkable Archiv label, begun in 1947. Devoted mainly to early and Baroque music, the recordings presented here, in facsimiles of their original sleeves (a nice touch), cover the period from Gregorian chant to Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies, played on period instruments. There are stops in between for a great deal of Bach, music of the Gothic era, the French Baroque (Mouret, Delalande, Rameau, etc), Gibbons, Handel (Alcina, La Resurrezione, Messiah, Italian cantatas), Telemann, Zelenka, Gabrieli, Desprez, Haydn, LeJeune, and plenty of the usual, as well as unusual, suspects. There’s also a final CD with selections of new releases (more Handel, Cavalli, Gesualdo, Vivaldi).

This 50 CD Box Set includes Archiv Produktions finest analogue recordings made between 1959 and 1981, representing a Golden Age of a pioneering label that defined the way early music should be performed and recorded. Featured artists include Karl Richter, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Pierre Fournier, John Eliot Gardiner, Trevor Pinnock and other icons of the Archiv label.

The reign of Philippe IV the Fair of France, from the late thirteenth through the early fourteenth centuries, was marked by prosperity and a flourishing of the arts. During Philippe's reign, several important collections of music were copied, including the Montpellier Codex, the Chansonnier Cangé, and the Robertsbridge Codex, which remain the most significant sources of music of the era. The selections from those manuscripts recorded here are delightfully diverse: estampies – perky folk-like dances, polyphonic secular motets, and soulful Trouvère love songs. The music has a rough-hewn quality to it – it was written well before the conventions of western classical music had fallen into place, and it follows a logic that's foreign to modern sensibilities accustomed to music from the Renaissance to the Contemporary periods.

‘And Also The Trees’ compelling new album, ‘Mother-of-Pearl Moon’, was born from a series of extraordinary electric guitar improvisations created by guitarist Justin Jones in the pre- and postdawn hours during a month of solitude in 2020. Each piece then developed in its own way - the guitar, often left in its raw, unaltered form, is accompanied by the voice of his brother Simon, bringing imagery and narrative, Colin Ozanne’s clarinet and piano adding poise, colour and harmony, Paul Hill’s percussion creating depth… on occasion an autoharp, a Moog… all leading the listener from the depths of the English countryside far out in all directions of the compass. The music is often filmic, reminiscent of various film genres from the ‘50s to the ‘70s.

Following its Linn debut which saw the ‘revitalisation of an iconic group’ (Choir & Organ), Gothic Voices presents The Dufay Spectacle, featuring special guest Andrew Lawrence-King.

With The Miraculous, Swedish singer, songwriter, and keyboardist Anna von Hausswolff has delivered an album as different from 2013's celebrated Ceremony as that was from 2010's Singing From The Grave. On Ceremony, Hausswolff discovered the sonic possibilities of the cathedral organ. Her four-octave vocal range rose above compositions that wove classically tinged Gothic art pop and skeletal post-rock that touched on Sweden's gloomy operatic and folk traditions. Sometimes gentle and dreamy, and just as often moody and droning (sometimes inside the same tune), she has created an iconoclastic brand of indie music. On The Miraculous, Hausswolff doubles down on the organ. The instrument she's using here is an enormous 9,000-pipe Acusticum Organ designed by Gerard Woehl. Its vast tonal and instrumental possibilities include sounds for glockenspiel, vibraphone, celeste, percussion, and indefinable high-pitched shrieking sounds that extend the upper reaches of the Western harmonic system (these pipes are partially submerged in water).