Cut Circle

Intimacy, intensity, passion this album explores the unfamiliar idea that fifteenth-century songs might cause us to sigh, weep, or laugh out loud. In bringing to life a world in which crying in public was not just acceptable but required, we have to take seriously the crushing despair of a line like My only sorrow is that I am not dead, or the undisguised sarcasm of This is how she chopped and cooked me up. In Johannes Ockeghem's (d. 1497) roughly two-dozen songs we find not only unparalleled compositional prowess, but feelings that range from happiness to loss, anger to despair, and bitterness to merriment. The album's all-vocal, fully texted, close-mic'd performances are rooted in a flexible, full-blooded vocal technique that aims to capture the music's technical brilliance and emotional depth.

What makes a piece of music difficult? This album introduces a pair of riveting, technically ambitious, historically important, and never-before-recorded polyphonic masses of the fifteenth century, performed by an ensemble that has developed a new approach designed to honor the music’s variety and unflagging intensity. Both works stand out for their notational complexity. They are also exceptional for the skill they demand of the performers: we find hair-raising rhythms, intricate counterpoint, and long melodic phrases. Rather than mitigate these challenges with a large ensemble and a generous acoustic, this recording enhances them: the performances are one-on-a-part, featuring energetic tempi, close miking, and minimal reverberation. This approach is unforgiving—but together with bright vowels and a flexible vocal technique, it has the benefit of allowing the music to come across with uncommon directness and clarity.

What did it mean for Guillaume Du Fay (ca. 1397-1474), chameleon-like expert in every musical genre of his day, to compose four settings of the Mass Ordinary toward the end of his life? Looking back from the vantage point of the next generation, when the polyphonic mass reigned supreme, it might be tempting to interpret these works as a self-conscious summa of Du Fay’s career – an achievement akin to Haydn’s London Symphonies or Beethoven’s late string quartets. On a purely musical level these comparisons are apt. Each mass stakes out unique musical terrain; they are often strikingly experimental; and the entire set is shimmeringly beautiful from beginning to end, revealing a composer at the height of his powers.

Josquin des Prez: the name evokes beautiful, brilliant, even magical music–but more than five centuries since he composed his last note, we are still discovering how to hear him. In this album, originally conceived to mark the composer's quincentenary in 2021, Cut Circle strives to treat Josquin not as a sleepy relic of the distant past but as a stylish, sensitive, playful, ecstatic composer. We foreground his revolutionary precision and drive while embracing reactions to the music that are visceral and emotional.

Josquin des Prez - Music in the Sistine Chapel around 1490 - Cut Circle (2012) {2CD Set, Musique en Wallonie MEW 1265-1266}
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© 2012 Musique En Wallonie ‎| MEW 1265-1266
Classical / Reneissance / Sacred / Mass

Аeatures sacred music by Renaissance composers living and working in Rome. Offers new interpretations of music by Josquin des Prez, including his famous Missa L’homme armé super voces musicales. Presents premiere recordings of works by Marbrianus de Orto, Gaspar van Weerbeke, and other scandalously understudied late fifteenth-century singer-composers employed in the newly built chapel of Pope Sixtus IV. In a space that overlooked frescoes by Botticelli and Perugino, they gathered around enormous choirbooks to sing one another’s masses, motets, and hymns. Cut Circle’s recording aims to capture the soundscape of the Sistine Chapel as Josquin knew it.

Sister Sledge - Circle of Love (1975) {2016 Special 40th Anniversary Edition Big Break Records WCDBBRX0344}
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© 1975, 2016 ATCO / Cotillion Records / Big Break Records / Cherry Red Records | WCDBBRX0344
R'n'B / Disco / Soul / Smooth Soul / Quiet Storm

BBR are thrilled to present the 40th Anniversary Edition of Circle of Love in a deluxe super jewel case, expanded and remastered, featuring a new interview with Kathy Sledge and ten bonus tracks. The disco era’s most famous “family”, Sister Sledge went from promising success in Europe to phenomenal mainstream success in 1979 with the platinum-selling Nile Rodgers/Bernard Edwards-helmed (Chic) album WE ARE FAMILY. ‘He’s the Greatest Dancer’, ‘Lost in Music’ and ‘We Are Family’ remain classic anthems in disco’s final years before sustaining respectable hits through to the mid-80s.