Greetings earsay fans. Happy New Year!

For the month of January, we are offering 40% discounts on selected back-catalogue CD albums, plus you get the digital files too. Do you (still) own a CD player? If you do, here's your chance to get some actual physical product! In addition to the CD being mailed to you, the album is added to your Bandcamp Collection, and you will get a link to download the audio files in CD and/or MP3 resolution.

Enter the discount codes below for each release when you “add to cart.”

Touch n Go tng40

Flight 182 Meditations f18240

Krishna's Flute kf40

Structural Damage: Live at the Lux sd40

Time is Dust - the original DVD-audio release dvd40

http://earsaymusic.bandcamp.co...

Rainer Bürck premiere of new piece „Zwielicht (entflammt)“ on 12 January at the FRAKZIONEN Festival in Bielefeld. It is a major piece of about 45 minutes for organ and live electronics.

https://www.frakzionen-festiva...

It rustles and roars, it shimmers and sparkles. Bürck's music is many things: energetic, direct, elemental, but also complex, rich in references, exuberant, a sonic sci-fi project, a spectacular mind cinema. - Neue Zeitschrift für Musik

Here is the English translation of a recent review of Rainer Bürck's album FeuerZungenGlockenSaiten. You can read the original and the translation at this link: https://earsay.com/yakity-yak/...

An adventure, a journey into worlds of sound beyond the imagination: The album Feuer Zungen Glocken Saiten, released by the Canadian experimental label earsay, offers around sixty minutes of electroacoustic music. The composer Rainer Bürck, an experienced individual in the scene and present at international festivals for many years, presents works from 2000 to 2021. Of a total of five compositions, two were written for performers and live electronics, and another three are acousmatic pieces, i.e. without live performers. The title refers, among other things, to the acoustic sources used, including accordion, church bells, guitar and violin. If you want, you can also interpret the pair of terms "Fire Tongues" as an allusion to the myth of the Pentecostal miracle of languages, the ability to speak in foreign "tongues".

It rustles and roars, it shimmers and sparkles. Bürck's music is many things: energetic, direct, elemental, but also complex, rich in references, exuberant, a sonic sci-fi project, a spectacular mind cinema. First of all, the pieces with live performers: Locust wind, rattle and hum (2002-13) consists of improvisations in which Stefan Ostersjo (10-string guitar) explores percussive and furiously fast-paced border areas. Bürck's electronic transformations develop surreal sounds from this: ghostly whirring, crackling storms. In In Zungen (2019), Marko Kassl (accordion) generates breathtaking contrasts in interaction with Bürck's live electronics. trembling tones to massive cluster cascades swirling through all registers.

Of the three acousmatic pieces, the eight-channel Capriccio con fuoco eriflessi (2006-19) uses edited recordings by the violinist Günter Marx, such as fast, spiccato-like figurations. The moment when a flaming, seething band of sound suddenly breaks off and a delicate spherical music of shadowy afterimages begins is impressive. In Lamento industriale (2017), Bürck, drawing on the practices of musique concrète, processes collected sound material from metal factories, breweries, quarries and scrap yards. Using specially developed programs, he creates a sound drama of subterranean hammering and hissing explosions - a distorted lament of digitally stretched scratching noises can also be heard: dark, oppressive. Alleluja (2000), which processes the Gregorian hymn and the sound of the bells of the Bad Urach Amandus Church, unfolds an equally immense, if rather joyful, wealth of associations. Roaring floods of noise intersperse with blurred choral fragments and blown-away bell sounds. Sounds deform and wander through an infinite reverberation space.

In short: no sterile laboratory electronics, instead exciting sound events, unexpected textures, combinations, metamorphoses, eruptions. Rainer Bürck has developed an idiosyncratic, expressive and highly imaginative language in electroacoustic music. A listening experience of a different kind.

Otto Paul Burkhardt

New Adventures in Sound Art is presenting the complete Audio Birth Project at their concert on May 11 online and in-person at the NAISA headquarters in South River, Ontario.

Reflections on Birth - Multi-channel A/V Performance with work by Soft Alchemy and Susan Frykberg
May 11, 2024, 7:00 pm
Online access via registration. In-person at NAISA North Media Arts Centre, 313 Highway 124, South River, Ontario.

Tickets are only $12 and can be purchased here: https://naisa.ca/purchase-tick...

Here is the web site: https://naisa.ca/performances/...

We reprint the essential of their notice below.

On the eve of Mother’s Day, NAISA presents a hybrid A/V performance with works by Soft Alchemy and the late Susan Frykberg that reflect on giving birth. Susan Frykberg’s "Audio Birth Project" from 1996-97 consists of works that center around interviews with Frykberg’s sisters and mother on the process of giving birth. "Simula" by Soft Alchemy is a five movement work that is a reflection on the emotional journey experienced by three Mothers. The Mothers do not know each other, and have never met, yet their experiences are brought together in an inward journey of birth.

Earsay is proud to announce a new release by Hildegard Westerkamp, Klavierklang, the third release on the earsay label.
The release includes two tracks: Klavierklang, and Fantasie for Horns I.

Klavierklang was commissioned by Canadian pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa and is dedicated to her.

Klavierklang is a sonic-musical journey for narrating pianist and soundscapes into the complexities of piano playing, a dramatic narrative, grappling with conventions in classical music training and opening ears towards an authentic re-engagement with this musical, soundmaking instrument.

Fantasie for Horns I is the first of Westerkamp's works to gain international recognition, winning Honorable Mention at the Bourges Competition in 1979.

Get your copy here: https://earsaymusic.bandcamp.c...