Catalog

GENETIC DRIFT, a 17-piece collection from electronic music composer Joel Gressel, is among the latest releases from Ravello Records. The various tracks featured on the album were composed over the course of 20 years, each using the same set of sophisticated compositional rules to produce their unique sounds.

Ravello Records is proud to announce the release of FIRST LIGHT, featuring performances of two innovative works by composer Jackson Greenberg. In FIRST LIGHT, human inspiration and the machine mind come together to produce music of startling richness and beauty.

Welcoming the new day in the world of composer Maija Hynninen is not soft like early morning rays. In DAWN BREAKS, Hynninen does away with the cliches of warmth and comfort in the morning. Performing all of the electronics on this album, Hynninen characterizes everything in her world, presenting soundscapes that are truly unique.

Composer Bill Whitley is no stranger to storytelling through the art of composition. Central themes in his works include that of embarking on a journey, the thrill and spontaneity of discovery, and the comfort and reflectiveness of the eventual returning home. These form a story arc as old as time, beautifully transcribed and made new through Whitley’s compositions.

Rebecka Sofia Ahvenniemi's debut TACIT-CITAT-ION is a reflection of contemporary Scandinavian composition – gestural, yet empowered by painstaking attention to detail. Where other composers' work ends, Ahvenniemi only begins. Breath sounds, glottal stops, microphone static, white noise, electronic interferences, the percussive friction of instrument bows – these byproducts of music are the backbone of TACIT-CITAT-ION, yielding a truly unique auditory experience.

The 15 tracks on Thad Anderson’s LINES & SPACES are from his Lines series, based on his compositional technique called “duration lines” that create both structure and polyrhythmic interest. Anderson integrates traditional instruments with fixed media, live processing, and tuned metals to create pieces that are infinitely malleable.

DEVIANT RESONANCES carries the concept of “creative listening" into new dimensions. In addition to the unconventional ways in which the everyday listener is called on to interpret the music, composer David Rosenboom literally uses the action of “listening” as an instrument.

Jeff Morris's second album, WITH STRINGS, explores the possibilities of 21st-century counterpoint. He builds up rich musical textures by sampling violin and cello live and folding them back into the mix, influencing the performers in turn.

Using the sounds of handmade paper, electronics, and surf guitar among others, Ted Coffey composes a sometimes fragile, sometimes brutal order that swings from texturalism to song. Written for dance, both fixed media and live computer-mediated performance, Coffey’s music feels spontaneous without sacrificing finely calculated craft.

INTERFACES explores the different ways a computer can fit in a modern jazz ensemble and still be true to itself. Technology performer Jeff Morris is joined by free jazz icon Karl Berger on vibes and piano as well as innovative New York percussionist Joe Hertenstein. Morris takes sounds from his partners live in the moment and transforms them into his own musical voice with the DNA of acoustic sounds and the fingerprints of digital processing. This live sampling improvisation results in expressively shifting quasi-loops and glitchy melodic gestures, drawn from music that just happened and influencing what the performers will do next.

MIND & MACHINE VOL. 2 is the second electro-acoustic compilation to be released on Ravello Records. Each of the seven composers featured on MIND & MACHINE VOL. 2 offers his or her own striking exploration into the means by which technology can be used to alter time and form to create entirely new musical experiences. This diverse assortment of composers have all taken different paths to reach that goal. The sounds of nature are manipulated or integrated into pieces such as Tom Prescott’s The Singing Forest and Jennifer Bernard Merkowitz’s Les Crapauds de la Fontaine, while Joshua Tomlinson’s Convergences utilizes the natural elements of metal and wood.

MIND & MACHINE is the first of two electro-acoustic compilations to be released on RAVELLO RECORDS. Featuring the work of seven composers on six tracks, MIND & MACHINE explores the incredible range of works that can be categorized as electro-acoustic, a music in which styles are dictated by the technology that is at the heart of its performance. As far-ranging as are the works themselves are the composers of these pieces.

Ravello Records welcomes Michael Wittgraf to its family of artists. Wittgraf is releasing his debut album MANIFOLD, an expansive effort with numerous layers hidden in the composition. Choosing texture over melody, the visceral compositions of MANIFOLD draw the listener in to the arresting music, and sound as if it would take lifetimes to unpack the complex layers building to Wittgraf’s stellar debut.

Ravello Records is proud to present RIPPLING, a new album by composer Robert Morris. Morris recorded the album live at a “Summer at Eastman Concert” in Hatch Recital Hall, in Rochester, NY. Consisting of only two tracks, “Mountain Streams” and “Mysterious Landscape,” these dramatic compositions turn ordinary sounds of nature in extraordinary pursuits of sonic ambience. Like a drop in a pond, both tracks start small and simple only to evolve into an all-encompassing, full sound that excites curiosity while evoking relaxation.

New from Ravello Records is DECADE ZERO, a compilation of works for instruments and electronics by Christopher Biggs. The works integrate traditional instruments with live electronic processing and sound files. Biggs’ compositions focus on environmental, political, and scientific extra-musical concepts relevant to today’s world. Featuring the Western Brass Quintet, the title track, Decade Zero explores the last period in time when humanity can take decisive action to combat climate change without facing irrevocable changes to our world.

Ken Walicki is an American composer and director of the Composition Program at California State University, Fullerton. He is widely recognized and acknowledged for his dramatic and engaging music, often using innovative instrumentation. Walicki was one of the first composers to use turntables in his music. Walicki conveys the effects of globalization and increasing dependency on technology with CYBERISTAN, a Ravello Records release. Each piece contains its own environment and its own space. The natural acoustic sounds juxtaposed against man-made sounds of electronic instrumentation supports a dichotomy of two worlds vying for supremacy but inevitably merging into one homogenous identity.

Composer Douglas Bielmeier’s BETTY AND THE SENSORY WORLD is an enveloping musical work that soothingly twists time into a languid river of sound. Along these lines, BETTY AND THE SENSORY WORLD unfolds as one massive work that, though it may be marked in seven constituent sections, flows with very little delineation from one movement to another. This is not to say, however, that BETTY AND THE SENSORY WORLD is static or overly repetitive. Rather, Bielmeier’s creation simply exists on an atypically large scale, which demands the kind of gradual, almost furtive, evolution of musical ideas that characterizes this work.

With SUFFICIENT TROUBLE, his debut release on Ravello Records, composer and performer Brian Belet offers a selection of computer music composed over the last twenty years. Featuring acoustic instruments and responsive electronic materials the disc offers a degree of variety in timbre and musical content that is sometimes lacking in electronic music. In Lyra, the album’s opening track, Belet establishes an aural world in which the organic material and electronic content merge seamlessly, clearly defining the musical language to come as the album progresses.

Ravello Records presents ANIMATED SOUNDS, a multimedia release from composer Gheorghe Costinescu. The album showcases works by Costinescu from a varied and illustrious career spanning more than half a century. The first half of the release is purely musical, with pieces such as the virtuosic Sonata for the Piano and Essay in Sound, performed by pianist Stephen Gosling, and the expressive Voices Within, performed by violinist Vesselin Gellev.

On his debut Ravello Records release ROSE, composer Michael Laurello offers a personal and refined style marked by rhythmic invention, visceral directness, and earnest emotional depth. His music reflects his diverse stylistic influences, which include Western classical music, jazz-fusion, progressive rock/metal, and EDM/IDM. Intricate polyrhythms, high-energy grooves, and a sophisticated harmonic palette are distinctive features of his music. Laurello composes for both traditional and non-traditional musical forces, including symphony orchestra, acoustic chamber ensembles, and works conceived specifically for the recording studio. He has recently collaborated with groups such as So Percussion, the Yale Philharmonia, Sandbox Percussion, and HOCKET.