Philip Glass Recording Archive

From the Philip Glass Archive is a series of releases from Orange Mountain Music which seeks to document archival and unreleased material or reissue classic albums by Philip Glass. The current volume, the sixth, features a collaboration between Glass and African musician Foday Musa Suso from a score they both worked on in the 1990s. The work was incidental music to the play The Screens by Jean Genet and was directed by JoAnne Akalaitis. Glass described the collaboration as the closest thing he had come to at that point of a true collaboration with both artists contributing original pieces and both working on many in the score together. The Screens was originally released on Point Music in the late 1990s. Orange Mountain Music is also pleased to present this remastered version with the inclusion of two bonus tracks of Philip Glass and Foday Musa Suso LIVE, recorded in New York in 2009.

In 1986 Mr. Glass was commissioned to create and bring a piece to the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Adelaide, Australia. He chose to write a piece based on the Edgar Allan Poe short story "A Descent into the Maelström" and invited collaborators dancer/choreographer Molissa Fenley, set designer Eamon D’Arcy and theatre director Mathew McGuire to participate. They transformed Edgar Allan Poe's vertiginous short story of being swept into a huge and terrible whirlpool by a raging hurricane that "the oldest seaman in Norway never experienced" into a Musical/Dance/Theatre extravganza. This compelling, propulsive piece of music premiered in March, 1986 at the Adelaide Festival of Arts and was only performed by the Philip Glass Ensemble during the week of the festival in Australia. Consequently, it has had very little exposure to Philip Glass' audience. This little known recording of this powerful piece of classic Glass music was made when the Philip Glass Ensemble was at one of its peaks. It was also done in possibly one of the best settings for Philip Glass and his musicians– musical theatre.

This autumn, Erased Tapes are set to release ‘Give It to the Sky: Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning Expanded’ by composer and producer Peter Broderick and French 12-piece group Ensemble 0; a complete re-recording of Russell’s epic minimalist orchestral composition originally released in 1983. ‘Give It to the Sky’ also includes unreleased tracks by Russell which have been restored and re-recorded, resulting in an 80-minute reanimation that threads several lost songs into a meticulous and gorgeous rendering. The album was recorded live as a group in a small theatre in the Southwest of France with minimal overdubs.