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New Sounds / March 28, 2006

New Sounds

Tuesday, March 28, 2006
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  • descansos jim fox cold blue

    Acoustic Ambient Music

    On this edition of New Sounds, there’s brand new music from the composer and founder of the recently revived Cold Blue Music label, Jim Fox. Brooding and beautifully ominous, the piece is called “Descansos, past,” and was written in memory of composer/performer John Kuhlman, who died a few years ago. Also, listen to music from Anton Batagov, who explores musical mathematics and harmonic ratios as hidden in the ten-dot pyramid, the Tetractys. Plus Harold Budd’s swan song - Avalon Sutra, a carefully chosen path between ambient music and the “m” word. Budd is the composer and pianist who has declared that he is quitting the composing life, explaining he has said all he wants to and does not mind disappearing.

PROGRAM #2389, Ambient Classics (First aired on March 18, 2005)

ARTIST(S) RECORDING CUT(S) SOURCE
Jim Fox Descansos, past Descansos, past [15:00] Cold Blue #0021 www.coldbluemusic.com*
Anton Batagov Tetractys Tetractys, excerpt [20:00] Long Arms #04064 www.longarms.net www.batagov.com*
Harold Budd Avalon Sutra As Long As I Can Hold My Breath, excerpt [15:00] Samadhisound #004 www.samadhisound.com*

*, ** - Find the recordings you've heard - go to the New Sounds Recordings Information page

Comments

  • [1] tim mcmahon April 06, 2008 - 03:34PM

    As collective media devolves into a banal,overly loud,copycat format, I am truly grateful for J.Schaefer and new sounds these past 25 years. Both are national treasures.

This thread is closed.


Nico Muhly (www.myspace.com/muhly)

Twitchy Renaissance-Infused Minimalism

New Sounds

From the New Sounds Live concerts at Merkin Hall, Nico Muhly presents a series of new electroacoustic ensemble works, combining “twitchy Minimalism” and Renaissance polyphony. Hear brand-new works from "Mothertongue," along with other works, recorded live.

Robert Moran

In Robert Moran's Kitchen

New Sounds

From October 30, 1989, the infamous "cooking show" with composer/raconteur Robert Moran. Recorded while cooking an Indian dinner in John Schaefer's kitchen, for reasons still not entirely clear. Along the way, we hear an "acoustic" version of Cage's 0:00 - for amplification of chopping vegetables and blender. And don't miss the teary conversation as onions are chopped. View the the recipes.

Michael Hedges and Michael Manring

New Sounds

The incredibly gifted and astonishingly original guitarist Michael Hedges left the planet much too soon in 1997. Avant-folk and ever-entertaining, Hedges made brilliant music with alternate tunings, harmonics and was known for striking the guitar’s body and strings with his fingers, palms and knuckles. His close friend and sometime collaborator, electric bass virtuoso Michael Manring, was a genre-bender, before music writers ever discovered that hyphenated term. He started out in the New Age bins, but moved all over with various projects, including the very first New Age-death-metal-jazz-funk-fusion record, among other things, with his “hyperbass”, (a fretless instrument which makes re-tuning mid-piece a little easier). On this October 10, 1987 edition of New Sounds, the two artists visited and played at the WNYC performance studios.

Duke Ellington - www.dukeellington.com

Caravan Variations

New Sounds

Like camels slogging through the sand, the exotic strains of “Caravan,” by Duke Ellington and his sometime trombonist Juan Tizol (with rarely heard lyrics by Irving Mills), have been played loose, fast, swinging, and/or slow by just about everyone. For this New Sounds program, it’s another of the occasional series of programs of Theme and Variations, where the premise is simple: take a single piece of music and explore what a number of musicians have done with it, through arrangements, deconstructions, and revisions of the original theme. This time around, it’s Duke Ellington’s “Caravan.” Listen to arrangements by Romania’s Fanfare Ciocarlia, Hungary’s Kalman Balogh & The Gipsy Cimbalom Band, the California Guitar Trio, the ska group Hepcat, banjoman Bela Fleck, Lebanese composer Rabih Abou-Khalil, and trumpeter/composer Jon Hassell, among others.

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