Ins Innerste! Bei Stefan Hussong beeindruckt die vehement einfühlsame Interpretation. Der Klang des Instruments ist in allen Facetten präsent, entfaltet sich voll im Raum, wird auch mit Wahrung der "natürlichen" Distanz (be)greifbar.
Musica

Tracklisting:
01 Volker Heyn: QUETSCH (1987)
02 Sofia Gubaidulina: De profundis (1978)
03 Klaus Huber: Ein Hauch von Unzeit VI (1972,1982)
04 Joachim Krebs: Musik für Akkordeon (1986)
Stefan Hussong: Accordion

After several stays in Lebanon, and having experienced the country’s permanent tension, we wanted to address the complexity of representation that communities develop towards their own language when facing domination from an outside culture.
This work is a “sound being” and the result of my meeting with Isabelle Bassil. “We have forgotten something, but to learn what has been forgotten, we need to access the suffering from those who haven’t yet accessed to oblivion,” says Philippe Vaernewyck in the last interlude of the work, and a fragment taken from one of our numerous discussions on the luxury of reflection. Through Isabelle’s life, a Lebanese girl using Arabic speaking with all the distance of a foreigner’s experience, we can recall the idea of a poetic phonography of intimacy with texts and culture. Behind each of Isabelle’s choices (Khalil Gibran, Najib Mahafouz, or a popular tale like “the heart of a mother” for instance), lies a portrait, a souvenir, an emotion, a claiming, an Arabic memory in any case. For each piece, we carefully positioned the microphones to create the situation that would allow the necessary gap to the reception of this expression. From a musical standpoint, we tried and built a sound dramaturgy to bring the listening on the course where the voice creates the movement. We hope to trigger off imagination, opening to a poetic interpretation of sense by overtly playing on the recognition of the sound sources that evoke both journeys and (y)our native language. Our music includes electro-acoustics and concrete aesthetics. We let sounds exist by themselves. The sounds and sequences were often played using our memory of our first stays there, adding an idealized perfume to it. Le luxe de la réflexion! (The luxury of reflection!) is an attempt in valuing the Arabic language, presented as an oral and written language, and beyond this, represent when languages are experienced as stigmata. We tell of people whom ghettoized native language involves insecurity.
This piece was first conceived as a work for a tape and one actor, and was first shown on January 6 1996 at L’Embarcadère in Lyon, as part of the collective event “comme un murmure” (”as a whisper”). It was then decided to use it as a training material (Inter Service Migrant) around this concept so “Le luxe…” has been shown around 20 times in France. The acousmatic version has been created using high-end sound techniques to ease focus on the qualities of listening, and played in Le Festival d’Albi, Les 38èmes Rugissants, Futura, Le Festival. Inter. Musi. Impro. Libre in Beirut, Le 102, Les Instants Chavirés, Le Vandémiaire, Le nomade’s land, Le Cirque clandestin des frères Kasamarof.

Cellule 75 subtitled Force du rythme et cadence forcée for piano, percussion and magnetic tape composed May - November 1975. Originally recorded by Pablo Cueco (percussion) & Paul Dubuisson (piano). Released by Association départementale pour le développement des arts (ADDA 581010, 1987).
Place des abbesses for magnetic tape composed June 1977 for the film directed by Erika Magdalinski.
Tzadik composer series.

Composers: Morton Feldman & Milton Babbitt
Performers: Phoenix Ensemble, Mark Lieb, Clarinet

"When you think of two American composers exhibiting extremes in method and aesthetics, 20th century giants Morton Feldman and Milton Babbitt are certainly a good example. There are no two men with more opposite views on music and expression. You might think therefore that listening to their music side by side would automatically turn off 50% of the audience. You’d be wrong.

The New York based Phoenix Ensemble has paired Feldman's Clarinet and String Quartet and the world premiere recording of Babbitt's Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, and the result shows their deep musical connections. Each benefits from the other’s perspective on texture, color, and time-flow.

Feldman's suspended transparency next to Babbitt's equally striking gnarliness complement one another, and provide a compelling case for the importance and influence of these composers to the American music
scene in recent decades.

The Phoenix Ensemble, with the approval and guidance of Mr. Babbitt, provides a first look into his largely unknown masterwork, and an equally enlightening performance of Feldman's poignantly expressive music." (label info)

Composer: Stefan Wolpe
Performer: Harry Van der Kamp, Hans Aschenbach, Franziska Hirzel, Michael Kraus, Romain Bischoff, Daniel Reuss
Conductor: Werner Herbers
Orchestra/Ensemble: Ebony Band, Cappella Amsterdam

For listeners who can't imagine a halfway point between Schoenberg and Satie-or perhaps a tenfold multiplication of Kurt Weill's biting irony and sardonic use of jazz-these short operas by Stefan Wolpe will come as a revelation. Influenced in equal parts by socialism, serialism and Dada, Wolpe's 1928 stage works have been long forgotten, or in the case of 'Zeus und Elida,' never performed at all until 1997.
In 'Zeus,' the Greek god descends upon Berlin's bustling Potsdamer Platz-a location of modern urban life brilliantly and chaotically evoked by Wolpe. Zeus is understandably confused; after singing a Tango, he searches for his beloved Europa but finds a prostitute instead, only to wind up arrested for, among other things, impersonating a god.
'Schöne Geschichten' is even more unconventional: seven "pretty stories" (actually scathing jokes), accompanied by the highly complex and atonal music of an eight-piece jazz ensemble. Taking on science, religion, justice, culture, love, philosophy and patriotism, Wolpe dramatizes gaps in communication and points out the ways in which society fails to live up to its high ideals. The satirical diction used by the singers in this work should be apparent even to non-German speakers, and the Ebony Band brings impressive accuracy to the music, equal parts swing and sting. Once again, Decca/London's 'Entartete Musik' series has done a marvelous job recovering a slice of 20th-century musical history.

Since its initial release, controversy has swirled around this album. In the early '60s, John Cale, Tony Conrad, La Monte Young, Angus Maclise, and Marian Zazeela were all a part of New York's underground music and emergent minimalist scenes. In a variety of formations, usually involving Cale, Conrad, and Young, they played together billed alternately as the Theater of Eternal Music or as the Dream Syndicate. Together they were articulating what were to become the central tenets of American minimalism. They disbanded around 1965, and since then all involved have staked, depending on the day and weather, various claims to the group's musical and philosophical ideas and – more importantly in this case – unreleased recordings. This album, a remastered copy of a tape from one of the Dream Syndicate's sessions recorded in Young's Church Street apartment, was released without anyone's expressed written consent and occasioned a ten-page statement from Young and his lawyer contesting the label's legal authority to put out this "unauthorized bootleg." The record makes these issues of intellectual property all the more critical, as the few obscure albums from the Dream Syndicate are long out of print and notoriously difficult to find. For anyone who cares about the history of American music, however, the album is an exceptional piece of musical history. All of the early precepts of minimalism are present – incremental variation, drone, sustained pitch – as well as the emphasis on group creation through improvisation. Unfortunately, the mix is not overwhelming in quality, and the effects of the interplay among instruments is lessened. Nonetheless, the album is sonically beatific, formally profound, and an incomparable look inside the Syndicate. Table of the Elements should be praised for letting the chips fall where they may in the interest of a more complete understanding of music history, especially since history is still too near to clearly substantiate anyone's claims. ~ Brian Whitener, All Music Guide

Why Patterns? (1978) for flute/alto flute/bass flute, piano and glockenspiel
Crippled Symmetry (1983) for flute/bass flute, piano/celesta, and glockenspiel/vibraphone
Co-production with Westdeutscher Rundfunk, Köln.
Digital recording 14th & 15th September 1990 at Studio Stolberger Strasse, Cologne.

Performed by David Tudor; produced and recorded by David Tudor and John D.S. Adams. Binaural and stereo mixes on 2 CDs.

This recording combines the art of music, the engineering of electronics, and the inspiration of biology. In it, David Tudor orchestrates electronic sound in ways analogous to our biological bodies' orchestration of consciousness. The performance originates from a neural-network synthesizer conceived and built especially for Tudor. He surrounds this synthesizer with his own unique collection of electronic devices, and in the recording on this CD made for headphone playback, he uses a new binaural technique for translating sound into out-of-head localizations in which sound seems to originate from specific, changing points within a space around the listener.

One of John Cage's more infamous recordings, this disc contains 90 one-minute stories read by the composer himself with musical accompaniment in the form of randomly selected excerpts from recordings of his Concert for Piano and Orchestra and 'Fontana Mix' provided by Tudor.