In stock
2 LP
Julius EASTMAN
“Femenine”
In 2016, frozen reeds published the première release of Julius Eastman’s Femenine, for chamber ensemble. Laying unheard for decades prior, the release documented a 1974 performance by the S.E.M. Ensemble with the composer himself on piano.
It is now available on vinyl for the first time, in a revelatory new remaster by Jim O’Rourke.
The first release of Femenine served as the catalyst that propelled Eastman’s music into the mainstream. Articles on Eastman’s music and its immediate disruptive impact on the classical canon began to appear in every major news organ in the English-speaking world and beyond. His music began to be programmed in major concerts and festivals, several of these entirely themed around his life and work. New recordings sprang up from a fresh generation of musicians engaging with his ideas and interpreting them for a modern audience hungry to hear more.
But the raw, emotionally cascading spirit of the original performance continues to inspire listeners. Joyous, insistent, and immersive, Femenine bathes the listener in surges of tonal colour from intertwining winds, piano, violin, pitched percussion, synthesizer and – uniquely – the composer’s own invention of mechanised sleigh bells, which provide the 72-minute piece with its characteristic pulse.
Femenine was recorded live by Steve Cellum – co-producer of Arthur Russell’s World of Echo – and the new vinyl reissue has been remastered from the original high-definition tape transfer by Jim O’Rourke at his Steamroom studio in the Japanese mountains.
Illuminating sleeve notes are provided by composer and author Mary Jane Leach, key figure of the Eastman revival and co-editor of the Gay Guerrilla collection of essays on his life and music.
35,00€
Out of stock
2 LP
Julius EASTMAN
“Two Extended Pieces For Four Pianos”
2023 repress, black vinyl.
Four Pianos (1979-80): It is recognized today that these tutelary pieces for four pianos are among the most powerful in contemporary music, their impact is almost unparalleled. After the historical version recorded forty years ago, this one, featuring four of the greatest European performers, is now regaining its full power. High level recordings too.
Julius Eastman: There was some for John Cage, then came Christian Wolff, and finally Morton Feldman, from this school in New York. Only Julius Eastman remained outside the game, the last figure, the most solitary and enigmatic -- undoubtedly also one of the most powerful, and it is this power that is revealed through these recordings. In the 1970s and 1980s, Eastman was one of the very few African-Americans to gain recognition in the New York avant-garde music scene. He was politically committed, a figure of queer culture and a solar and solitary poet whose melancholy influenced his genius as well as his tragic destiny: suffering from various addictions, declared missing, actually homeless. During Winter of 1981-82, he got deported from his apartment by the police, who destroyed most of what he owned - including scores and recordings. He was found dead in 1990, on the streets of Buffalo, after years of vagrancy.
The Performers: Nicolas Horvath, pianist and electroacoustic composer; Melaine Dalibert, a French composer and pianist; Stephane Ginsburgh, a tireless surveyor of the repertoire but also explorer of new music; Wilhem Latchoumia, embraces both new music and the classical repertoire with success and charisma.
20,00€
Out of stock
2 LP
Julius EASTMAN
“Two Extended Pieces For Four Pianos”
Four Pianos (1979-80): It is recognized today that these tutelary pieces for four pianos are among the most powerful in contemporary music, their impact is almost unparalleled. After the historical version recorded forty years ago, this one, featuring four of the greatest European performers, is now regaining its full power. High level recordings too. Red vinyl; includes color insert.
Julius Eastman: There was some for John Cage, then came Christian Wolff, and finally Morton Feldman, from this school in New York. Only Julius Eastman remained outside the game, the last figure, the most solitary and enigmatic -- undoubtedly also one of the most powerful, and it is this power that is revealed through these recordings. In the 1970s and 1980s, Eastman was one of the very few African-Americans to gain recognition in the New York avant-garde music scene. He was politically committed, a figure of queer culture and a solar and solitary poet whose melancholy influenced his genius as well as his tragic destiny: suffering from various addictions, declared missing, actually homeless. During Winter of 1981-82, he got deported from his apartment by the police, who destroyed most of what he owned - including scores and recordings. He was found dead in 1990, on the streets of Buffalo, after years of vagrancy.
The Performers: Nicolas Horvath, pianist and electroacoustic composer; Melaine Dalibert, a French composer and pianist; Stephane Ginsburgh, a tireless surveyor of the repertoire but also explorer of new music; Wilhem Latchoumia, embraces both new music and the classical repertoire with success and charisma.
20,00€
Out of stock
2 CD
Julius EASTMAN
“Three extended pieces for four pianos”
Four Pianos (1979-80)
It is recognized today that these tutelary pieces for four pianos are among the most powerful in contemporary music, their impact is almost unparalleled. After the historical version recorded forty years ago, this one, featuring four of the greatest European performers, is now regaining its full power. High level recordings too.
Julius Eastman
There was some for John Cage, then came Christian Wolff, and finally Morton Feldman, from this school in New York. Only Julius Eastman remained outside the game, the last figure, the most solitary and enigmatic - undoubtedly also one of the most powerful, and it is this power that is revealed through these recordings. In the 1970s and 1980s, Eastman was one of the very few African-Americans to gain recognition in the New York avant-garde music scene. He was politically committed, a figure of queer culture and a solar and solitary poet whose melancholy influenced his genius as well as his tragic destiny : suffering from various addictions, declared missing, actually homeless. During Winter of 1981-82, he got deported from his apartment by the police, who destroyed most of what he owned - including scores and recordings. He was found dead in 1990, on the streets of Buffalo, after years of vagrancy.
The Performers
Nicolas Horvath, pianist and electroacoustic composer. He is known for his boundariesless musical explorations - he has collaborated with leading contemporary composers from around the world, including Alvin Lucier, Alvin Curran and Valentyn Silvestrov - the recordings of his complete works for piano by Phil Glass made a lasting impression. He has collaborated recently with Lustmord on the Deconstruction of November by Dennis Johnson (Sub Rosa SR502: The Fall).
Melaine Dalibert, a French composer and pianist, fascinated by natural phenomena which are both expected and unpredictable, Dalibert has developed his own algorithmic procedures of composition which contain the notion of stretched time evoking Morton Feldman, minimal and introspective, adopting a unique concept of fractal series.
Stephane Ginsburgh, a tireless surveyor of the repertoire but also explorer of new music, collaborated with composers such as Philippe Boesmans, Jean-Luc Fafchamps, Stefan Prins, Frederic Rzewski and Matthew Shlomowitz of whom he premiered works, as well as with choreographers such as Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (Rosas) and recorded Feldman, Duchamp and Satie for Sub Rosa and the complete set of Prokofiev piano sonatas for Cypres.
Wilhem Latchoumia, he embraces both new music and the classical repertoire with success and charisma. His two last recordings for La Dolce Volta (Prokofiev and de Falla) have been highly acclaimed by critics with a FFFF in Télérama. Winner of the Hewlett-Packard Foundation and the Montsalvatge International Piano Competition, he brilliantly won the First Prize in the 2006 Orléans International Piano Competition.
16,00€
Out of stock
CD
Julius EASTMAN
“Femenine”
Label notes :
"Apartment House give new life to Julius Eastman's irrepressible ensemble piece from 1974. Unbounded energy and clarity of sound. Unmissable."
12,00€
Out of stock
2 LP
Julius EASTMAN
“Crazy Nigger / Evil Nigger / Gay Guerrilla”
Only a handful of years ago, the name Julius Eastman would have been met by a unanimous blank look. The legacy of this once darling of the New York post-minimal avant-garde had, since his untimely death at the age of 49, in 1990, been almost entirely lost. Eastman's story is as fascinating as they come – black, angry, and queer in an all too polite, straight white musical world. A prodigy and genius whose music took him to astounding heights, and whose unwillingness to conform and play by the rules took him to overwhelming lows, leading down the path of drug abuse, homelessness, and with it the loss of his scores and body of work. Even before his death, he was already a forgotten name.
Eastman belongs to a generation of composers who inherited the mantel left by 1970's Minimalism, making it their own – sometimes more simple and direct, others with tonal and structural complexity which bent the ear. Despite composing rigorously and being highly respected by his peers, was only given a slim number of chances to record his work, relegating most of voice as singer and pianist to the realization of others's work. It was Eastman who conducted the iconic recording of Arthur Russell's Tower of Meaning, an whose piano cuts its way across the 1976 recording of Morton Feldman's For Frank O'hara, not to mention a slew of recordings by Peter Maxwell Davies and Meredith Monk. Other than a single work, found on an obscure cassette complication, Tellus
4, his singular voice was no where to be found. It's likely that Eastman's would have been entirely lost, had it not been for rigorous efforts of a few close friends, the most persistent of whom was the composers, Mary Jane Leach, who spent years tracking down his lost scores. These efforts eventually led to the comprehensive cd collection, Unjust Malaise, issued by New World Records in 2005. It was the beginning of the turning tide, over the 13 years since, Eastman's singular voice has slowly returned to the audience he always deserved. It also represented the recorded debut of some his most thrilling and controversial work, three compositions for piano from what he called the Nigger Series - Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, and Crazy Nigger, all proofs of his creative brilliance and contentious politics in a single force. Now issued across two LPs in their first ever vinyl release by Blume Editions, offering extensive liner notes by Mary Jane Leach and Bradford Bailey, these three seminal works by one of the most important, but neglected, American composers of the 1970s and 80s, return to the light once more. Not only are Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, and Crazy Nigger an entire rethinking of Musical Minimalism, but they ferociously blow the doors of what classical music can be seen to be.
4, his singular voice was no where to be found. It's likely that Eastman's would have been entirely lost, had it not been for rigorous efforts of a few close friends, the most persistent of whom was the composers, Mary Jane Leach, who spent years tracking down his lost scores. These efforts eventually led to the comprehensive cd collection, Unjust Malaise, issued by New World Records in 2005. It was the beginning of the turning tide, over the 13 years since, Eastman's singular voice has slowly returned to the audience he always deserved. It also represented the recorded debut of some his most thrilling and controversial work, three compositions for piano from what he called the Nigger Series - Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, and Crazy Nigger, all proofs of his creative brilliance and contentious politics in a single force. Now issued across two LPs in their first ever vinyl release by Blume Editions, offering extensive liner notes by Mary Jane Leach and Bradford Bailey, these three seminal works by one of the most important, but neglected, American composers of the 1970s and 80s, return to the light once more. Not only are Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, and Crazy Nigger an entire rethinking of Musical Minimalism, but they ferociously blow the doors of what classical music can be seen to be.
42,00€
Out of stock
LP
Julius EASTMAN
“Evil Nigger / Gay Guerrilla”
« Gay Guerrilla » and « Evil Nigger », both composed in 1979, with a third work, « Crazy Nigger », make up what Eastman called The Nigger Series. Some of themost challenging and beautiful works composed for piano during their era, they double as a window into the intricate thought process and contentiousness of their creator. When the composer was asked to perform the series at Northwestern University in 1980, due to protests by African American students, their titles were censored in the event's program. His response was a flamboyant foreshadowing of the sentiments toward bigoted language which later arose within hip-hop culture – to publicly take back these words, assert ownership of them, and deploy their power for positive change.
What Eastman was early to recognize, was that there is a fundamental difference in what happens when these words are spoken by white people toward people of color, and when people of color deploy them toward a white audience. The balance of power shifts. Eastman's audience was largely heterosexual and white. He knew exactly what he was doing, and to whom he spoke.
The object in your hands contains some of the most striking and important music composed during the later decades of the 20th century - music which remained lost and unheard for years, not because of what it is, but because of who its composer was. It is music, doubling as the voice of a man, which, because it refused to be oppressed, was suppressed or ignored. Eastman's work is a conscious act of intervention, plowing into a context defined by heterosexual whiteness, attacking its unjust demands from within. It is Christ like – metaphor and beauty which is impossible to separate from the evils of the world.
It is a music which carries the body of a man. As it speaks to our hearts, as it offers an glimpse of the freedoms implied by the sublime, a shackle is bound – a consciousness of our complicity with unforgivable sin.
Edition of 300 copies.
21,00€
Out of stock
LP
Julius EASTMAN
“Crazy Nigger”
It's little wonder that Julius Eastman (who died in 1990 under unexplained circumstances), remained the supreme underground composer. He was Afro-American and gay, a composer who rocked the cerebral world of process music with his explosions of free improvisation. This is
first time any of Eastman's music has been available on LP, with the three extended pieces for four pianos, « Gay Guerrilla », « Evil Nigger » and « Crazy Nigger », all written and preformed around 1980. All three works generate their epic soundscapes through adamantly restated patterns and interlocking canons, not fragmenting now, but preaching urgent truths. To quote brilliant Mary Jane Leach liner notes: "He wrote what can be categorized as minimal music, but also wrote
"post-minimal" music before minimal music was fully established. His pieces straddle the two main styles of minimal music—rhythmic/pulse driven music (Steve Reich and Philip Glass) and spectral drone music (La Monte Young and Phill Niblock). While using process and rhythmic patterns, there is a flexibility that lends a breathing, organic feel to his music, a muscularity missing in a lot of other music from that time ith the re-emergence of his powerful music, a missing gap in the history
of contemporary music has been filled. Created in the late 1970s, these three pieces should have been released on vinyl at the time they were written. However, that was not to be, and they, and other pieces of Eastman's, were unavailable commercially. Instead, they were shared on cassettes, copied and passed from one admirer to another, a kind of underground musical distribution by aficionados. Unlike today's instant access to music, at that time each new copy represented a time
commitment, since it took as long to copy a piece as it was long, while also removing itself further from the original recording with a resultant deterioration in sound quality.
« Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla » form a trio of pieces that occupies a high point in
Eastman's compositions. They were the culmination of his mature style.
Crazy Nigger is a sprawling sonic study, the last section exploring canonic form both harmonically and rhythmically, using the same process as James Tenney's Spectral Canon for Conlan Nancarrow, but notated in a more intuitive way.
In the most transcendent sense, it's music that occupies its very own place, a magical soundworld all of its own. Now issued across two LPs in their first ever vinyl release by Blume Editions, offering extensive liner notes by Mary Jane Leach and Bradford Bailey, these three seminal works by one of the most important, but neglected, American composers of the 1970s and 80s, return to the light once more. Not only are Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, and Crazy Nigger an entire rethinking of Musical Minimalism, but they ferociously blow the doors of what classical music can be seen to be.
Edition of 300 copies. Color Vinyl. 180gr Audiophile pressing. Including printed inner sleeve housing a Nagaoka anti-static record sleeve, plus an original insert that functions as Obi. Housed in a fold-out outer sleeve. Vinyl Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi.
21,00€
Out of stock
CD
Julius EASTMAN
“The Zürich concert”
“The composer is therefore enjoined to accomplish the following: she must establish himself as a major instrumentalist, he must not wait upon a descending being, and she must become an interpreter, not only of her own music and career, but also the music of her contemporaries, and give a fresh new view of the known and unknown classics”. Julius Eastman
Just when you think you are grasping the breadth and quality of the music of Julius Eastman (1940–1990), a recording such as Julius Eastman: The Zürich Concert shows up, and you have to go back and reassess his work and wonder what will show up next. This recording is from a 1980 solo seventy-minute improvisatory concert in Zürich, a cherished cassette made by a friend of Eastman’s, who recently realized its uniqueness and decided that he should share it. The Zürich Concert was performed on October 25, 1980 in the Aula R.mibühl gallery. Eastman was in Europe participating in The Kitchen tour, and a Swiss friend, Dieter Hall, a painter who had been living in the East Village, arranged the concert. Hall recorded it on a cassette machine, so there is the inevitable gap when the tape had to be turned over, as Eastman played non-stop for seventy minutes. Simply put, The Zürich Concert is a revelation. Listening to this recording, one is overwhelmed by the cascades of sound, the power of the playing. It almost seems as if the piano will start bouncing across the floor like an out-of-control washing machine. But there is also space and delicacy in the playing. As a whole, the music never flags, and your attention doesn’t wane, as you are drawn in by the intensity of the playing and the coherence and wonder of the music being made.
Just when you think you are grasping the breadth and quality of the music of Julius Eastman (1940–1990), a recording such as Julius Eastman: The Zürich Concert shows up, and you have to go back and reassess his work and wonder what will show up next. This recording is from a 1980 solo seventy-minute improvisatory concert in Zürich, a cherished cassette made by a friend of Eastman’s, who recently realized its uniqueness and decided that he should share it. The Zürich Concert was performed on October 25, 1980 in the Aula R.mibühl gallery. Eastman was in Europe participating in The Kitchen tour, and a Swiss friend, Dieter Hall, a painter who had been living in the East Village, arranged the concert. Hall recorded it on a cassette machine, so there is the inevitable gap when the tape had to be turned over, as Eastman played non-stop for seventy minutes. Simply put, The Zürich Concert is a revelation. Listening to this recording, one is overwhelmed by the cascades of sound, the power of the playing. It almost seems as if the piano will start bouncing across the floor like an out-of-control washing machine. But there is also space and delicacy in the playing. As a whole, the music never flags, and your attention doesn’t wane, as you are drawn in by the intensity of the playing and the coherence and wonder of the music being made.
14,00€
Out of stock
3 CD
Julius EASTMAN
“Unjust malaise”
Members of Creative Associates; Jodi Beder, Sarah Carter, Barry Gold, Julie Green, Christine Gummere, Maureen Hynes, Chase Morrison, Abby Newton, Larry Rawdon, David Sabee, cellos; Frank Ferko, Janet Kattas, Patricia Martin, pianos; Julius Eastman, piano, voice, conductor. This three-disc set marks the first appearance on disc of the music of the African-American composer Julius Eastman (1940-1990), who died sixteen years ago under unexplained circumstances and whose musical legacy was thought lost. This comprehensive and definitive document, which comprises almost all of Eastman’s signature works, will undoubtedly be a revelation for those who have thus far been unable to hear his work.
In his book American Music in the Twentieth Century, composer/author Kyle Gann briefly sums up Eastman’s work and its importance: “Born in New York, he graduated from the Curtis Institute in composition and was discovered by Lukas Foss, who conducted his music, including Stay On It (1973), one of the first works to introduce pop tonal progressions and free improvisation in an art context… Applying minimalism’s additive process to the building of sections, he developed a composing technique he called “organic music,” a cumulatively overlapping process in which each section of a work contains, simultaneously, all the sections which preceded it. The pieces he wrote in this style often had intentionally provocative titles intended to reinterpret the minorities Eastman belonged to in a positive light: for example, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla (all circa 1980). These three pieces, all scored for multiple pianos, build up immense emotive power through the incessant repetition of rhythmic figures.”
Eastman was an energizing underground figure, one whose forms are clear, whose methods were powerful and persuasive, and whose thinking was supremely musical. His works show different routes minimalism might have taken, and perhaps some of those will now be followed up. This set of discs is a bold beginning to restoring to history the works of one of the most important members of the first post-minimalist generation.
Stay on It (1973). If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? (1977). Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc (1981). The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc (1981). Gay Guerrilla (1980). Evil Nigger (1979). Crazy Nigger (1980).
In his book American Music in the Twentieth Century, composer/author Kyle Gann briefly sums up Eastman’s work and its importance: “Born in New York, he graduated from the Curtis Institute in composition and was discovered by Lukas Foss, who conducted his music, including Stay On It (1973), one of the first works to introduce pop tonal progressions and free improvisation in an art context… Applying minimalism’s additive process to the building of sections, he developed a composing technique he called “organic music,” a cumulatively overlapping process in which each section of a work contains, simultaneously, all the sections which preceded it. The pieces he wrote in this style often had intentionally provocative titles intended to reinterpret the minorities Eastman belonged to in a positive light: for example, Evil Nigger, Crazy Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla (all circa 1980). These three pieces, all scored for multiple pianos, build up immense emotive power through the incessant repetition of rhythmic figures.”
Eastman was an energizing underground figure, one whose forms are clear, whose methods were powerful and persuasive, and whose thinking was supremely musical. His works show different routes minimalism might have taken, and perhaps some of those will now be followed up. This set of discs is a bold beginning to restoring to history the works of one of the most important members of the first post-minimalist generation.
Stay on It (1973). If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich? (1977). Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc (1981). The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc (1981). Gay Guerrilla (1980). Evil Nigger (1979). Crazy Nigger (1980).
40,00€