Unseen Worlds 黑胶唱片和CD

Review: How far can a single artist take a time-honoured musical trope: the piano solo? Josiah Steinbrick attempts to answer the question not in words, but in ivories, with his newest album For Anyone That Knows You, a bewitching hybrid compositional project that puts the chordophonal instrument centre-stage. Allegedly, the album was recorded not for smoothness or posterity but to emphasise the piano as an object, as well as the person playing it and the moment in which it resounds. On top of that, its ten original compositions - cathartic and ecstatic - are backed up by covers of songs from Peruvian, Creole, and Malian traditions, as well as the much-sought saxophone backings of one Sam Gendel.

Review: Plenty of electronic artists can claim to focus on repetitive layers, loops and timbre. Few can say they've explored these ideas to the extent Carl Stone has. Released to mark his 70th birthday, this collection looks not to offer a complete retrospective on the seminal producer, but instead a supporting document to the archival re-releases that have been doing the rounds in recent times. Trying to put a label on what's here is less relevant than the how or even why. Working at CalArts, Stone, a then-aspiring music maker, was tasked with preserving vinyl recordings by dubbing them to tape. This repetitive process was used to store 10,000 albums, from Renaissance to electronica, and involved re-recording multiple discs at the same time. After that experience, it's understandable that he'd find himself using cut and paste style fractions of sound, samples, vocals, and melodies to make old parts new again, removing the source material from time and place so it exists only in the now.

Review: Southern California-based composer and improviser David Rosenboom is a figure who can't quite be aligned to one particular school, his work slipping intriguingly through the cracks. A collaboration with vocalist Jacqueline Humbert, Daytime Viewing is an extraordinary narrative poem set over a song cycle consisting of six pieces. Quietly released privately in 1983, Unseen Worlds has brought this seminal work back into view along with a full remastering. Exploring ideas of absurdist theatricality, TV soap operas, commercialism, and family, Humbert's voice and Rosenboom's production merge to create a landscape that is at once lush yet also dystopian. An entirely unique release that invites endless study.