Tracts

Track Listings

1. Lemma-Icon-Epigram - Brian Ferneyhough, Ian Pace

2. You Done Torn Your Playhouse Down

3. Llik. Rellik

4. Llik. Rellik

5. Topologies

6. Tract I

7. Tract II

8. Tract: Hypothesis

9. Tract: The Light Gleams an Instant

10. Tract: Lacunae

11. Tract: As Heard So Murmured

Tracts, Music, Richard Barrett, Chris Dench, James Erber, Brian Ferneyhough, Christopher Fox, Ian Pace, Chamber Music & Recitals, Character/Single-Movement/Miscellaneous Work for Keyboard, Classical, Classical Artists, Classical Music, Keyboard, Music for Keyboard

Deep Tracts of Hell
Average customer rating:

Glorious, chaotic, black metal at its finest !

Deep Tracts of Hell
Aura Noir
Manufacturer: Hammerheart
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Rock | Styles | Music
General | Hard Rock & Metal | Styles | Music
Metal | Hard Rock & Metal | Rock | Indie Music | Stores | Music
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The Merciless

ASIN: B00000J7DG
Release Date: 1999-06-29

Tracks:

Deep Tracts Of Hell
Released Damnation
Swarm Of Vultures
Blood Unity
Slasher
Purification Of Hell
The Spiral Sear
The Beautiful, Darkest Path
Broth Of Oblivion
To Wear The Mark

Customer Reviews:

Glorious, chaotic, black metal at its finest !.......2005-10-29

I first heard Aura Noir on a compilation album - Fenriz presents the best of Old School Black Metal. Blood Unity, Aura Noir's contribution to the album, was the track whose brilliance stood out above all others, its fast pace, powerful riffs, wild drumming and dark, tortured vocal style blew me away.
I purchased Deep Tracts of Hell as soon as I possibly could, expecting further brilliance, and was far from disappointed. I admittedly had assumed that Blood Unity would stand out as the most accomplished track on the album - how wrong I was ! Beginning with the brutal title track, I encounted wave after wave of unparalleled black thrash excellence, evoking powerful themes of suffering, brutality, pain and outright chaos. There are no "Stand-out songs" on this album, every one is an instant black thrash classic and is as enjoyable as the last. Believe me, this is the rebirth of Norwegian black metal, rekindling the flame of their predecessors who first pioneered the black metal sound, and creating a blazing inferno of their own.
Another source of interest regarding this album is that Apollyon and Aggressor switch roles from track to track, both playing drums, guitars and delivering vocals. This results in a very unique album, with each track having something special to add.
If you are a fan of old school black metal, WHY ARE YOU STILL READING THIS? BUY THIS ALBUM NOW !
I would love to recommend this album further but in all honesty, I believe the sound may be rather too intense for those not acquainted with black metal, but if you have an eclectic taste and wish to experience the black metal sound, this is as good a place to start as any other.

Average customer rating:

Distinguish three aspects: hard-to-play, hard-looking, and hard-sounding. So what are you *really* searching for?
some very fine music
A good survey of contemporary British piano music
perceptive,sensitive,astonishing piano playing

Tracts

Manufacturer: Nmc Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Classical | Styles | Music

General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music
Similar Items:

Barrett: Vanity
The Music of Elliott Carter Vol. 7; Boston Concerto, Cello Concerto, ASKO Concerto, Dialogues
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Scelsi: Natura Renovatur
Kaikhosru Sorabji: 100 Transcendental Studies, Nos. 1-25

ASIN: B00005KAUX
Release Date: 2001-05-29

Tracks:

Lemma-Icon-Epigram - Brian Ferneyhough, Ian Pace
You Done Torn Your Playhouse Down
Llik. Rellik
Llik. Rellik
Topologies
Tract I
Tract II
Tract: Hypothesis
Tract: The Light Gleams an Instant
Tract: Lacunae
Tract: As Heard So Murmured

Customer Reviews:

Distinguish three aspects: hard-to-play, hard-looking, and hard-sounding. So what are you *really* searching for?.......2007-05-23

What you get is a burned (and not a commonly pressed!) disc, burnt on a printable CD-R with its CD label losing its ink face if a droplet of water gets lost on it, a generous 80:14 total time, and a satisfactorily detailed 11p-booklet incl portrait fotos of each of the six involved persons. There isnt much to say on the performance --Ian Pace's debut album-- itself since most of the tracks are first, world-premiere recordings for which you cannot find any comparatives. So all I can really comment on is the music itself whether it is good or why i like it. Well, let's take it this way: i bought this album because i was searching for the hardest, *the most difficult* piano solo of traditional pianism and traditional notation ever composed. Doing some research you will quickly find out that pieces written by composers affiliated with the New Complexity movement meet this criterium, writing notably more difficult pieces than, say, Barraqué, Jolivet, Sorabji, or Boulez, Ligeti, Stockhausen, Xenakis, or the 'New Virtuosity' (see KIRBY) American serial composers such as Babbitt, Martino, Sessions, Wuorinen, etc. Actually i was looking for the *most virtuoso* (or at least sounding like this!) piano piece and thought that both terms would lead to the same search result. This album proves that the most difficult is not equal to the most virtuoso nor virtuoso sounding, while it does prove that the most difficult is equal to *the most complex*. Wikipedia refers to an interview where the pianist states about Barrett's Tract, "It's one of the hardest piano pieces ever written, in a way I would describe as 'transcendental' - meaning a difficulty that lies on the very fringes of possibility. [...] All the other [transcendental] pieces [before-mentioned, composed by Barlow, Finnissy, W.Zimmermann; Bussotti, Stockhausen, Xenakis] pose great pianistic challenges, but not in that league of difficulty." and he must know it possessing an overwhelming active solo modern repertoire and being an expert in the most daring and venturesome piano literature of our times. Curious, I examined the sheet music of the almost legendary score Lemma-Icon-Epigram and of Tract before purchasing the disc. At first glance the Tract score does not look very frightening but at a closer look you will agree that the "much darker, intricate and tortuous counterpoint of Barrett [...] sometimes almost as if each finger requires a separate brain attached to it" (quoted from album introduction by Ian Pace) "is one of the most demanding piano works ever composed". However, to my ears, its sound effect is nugatory, i.e. the piece doesnt actually sound as hard as it is to play. In my opinion a pity, both for the listener and the hard-working performer! If you relate 'virtuosity', as I do, to open, bright virtuosity, brilliance, showiness, rapid-fire fingers and leaps, loudness, wildness, even banging, making full use of the entire keyboard and its resources, full textures and gorgeous piano sound masses, say to pieces such as Stravinsky's From Petrouchka or Kapustin's first 2 piano sonatas, then Tract is rather the opposite: slow, quiet, dark, lame, tame, and never sounding virtuoso. On the other hand, the score of Lemma-Icon-Epigramm by the leading figure within the New Complexity school (see wikipedia) Brian Ferneyhough does frighten at first glance, absolutely ferocious-looking in what is probably the craziest, wildest piano writing ever written (talking of traditional notation. Finnissy's extravagant, fearsome scores use some non-traditional notation so dont count in here)! And the sound?..compares well to any standard American serial piano composition with lean textures and uncoordinated, homophonic tinkling on the keyboard, i.e. the piece doesnt actually sound as hard as it looks. Please dont get me wrong, I dont really regret the purchase, but I would have preferred to have got a possibly more virtuoso *sounding* disc, for more listening enjoyment over a long time; this CD is more that type of albums which I treat as 'ah! interesting music, pretty neat, nice to have in my vast collection' but never get excited with and would put it in the remote corner of my shelf after giving it a max of 5-10 repeated hearings and then probably never again due to lack of genuine enjoyment, similar to the Stockhausen's Klavierstücke. A public audience at a recital would for sure never get enthused, thrilled nor even excited by a performance of pieces on 'Tracts', because the music, the sound isnt very exciting nor effective, and as commented earlier, never virtuoso sounding. But interesting.
To sum up, with this truely exotic album we finally have two superlatives represented: the *hardest-to-play* piano solo (Tract, 1996) ever written, and the *hardest-looking* piano score (Lemma-Icon-Epigramm, 1981) ever written. So I leave this review, this album, still in search of the most virtuoso piano solo, or better said, the *hardest-sounding* piano solo ever written..
Even if you dont agree with my opinions just expressed I hope you have found the review helpful for your intention to buy or not to buy.

some very fine music.......2005-02-21

The other reviewers have done fine jobs describing these works, so there isn't a whole lot for me to add, save that I found all of these works interesting, with Ferneyhough and Barrett being especially wonderful. The tremendous tremolos, trills, and repeated notes of Tract create a dark atmosphere, perhaps one of the most ominous pieces of piano music I have ever heard. Amazing stuff. Lemma-Icon-Epigram in contrast is delightful, very bright and virtuosic music. The other, shorter pieces are exciting and bright also. Ian Pace does an excellent job performing these scores, which must be seen (and attempted!) to be believed.

A good survey of contemporary British piano music.......2004-01-30

The British pianist Ian Pace is an increasingly important figure in the world of contemporary music. A strong advocate of the music of Michael Finnissy, he has also recently premiered new works by Walter Zimmermann, Pascal Dusapin, James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough and others. In this disc, he turns his attention to British composers, primarily those of the so-called new complexity school.

Brian Ferneyhough's Lemma-Icon-Epigram is already approaching minor classic status. This tripartite work evokes the poetic form of the Emblema (a superscription; an image; a concluding epigram that explains the preceding elements); Ferneyhough had been studying Walter Benjamin's essay on the topic. The Lemma section is a virtuoso torrent of single notes and, later, chordal writing; the Icon is slow and harmonically based; the Epigram gradually collapses the two preceding movements into the series of harmonies on which the whole work was based. This is the only one of the works on the disc for which a rival recording is available, and Massimiliano Damerini's recording on Piano XX, Volume 2 must be considered superior--there is more glitter in his treble playing and more virtuoso joy (the super-dry acoustic for Pace doesn't help matters).

James Erber's You Done Torn Your Playhouse down was a 50th birthday homage to Michael Finnissy, and accordingly it has a similar focus to some of Finnissy's music in the way that it plays with blues figurations within an atonal context. The left hand and right hand parts are sharply divided, and the music ends with a series of trills in the right hand that might remind some of the close of Finnissy's Sixth Piano Concerto.

Christopher Fox's lliK.relliK continues along from Erber's piece in its interest in popular music. The first movement attempts to evoke the physical energy of early rock'n'roll piano with its ferocious ostinato rhythms, the sheer energy of the writing helping to prevent it falling into banality; the second uses analogous techniques to those of techno music in its attempt to produce a remix of parts of the first. I find the first movement more sucessful than the second, whose Stravinskian rhythmic figures ultimately become rather blandly repetitive (I assume, though, that this was Fox's intention).

The Australian-based Chris Dench's Topologies (inspired by a Robbe-Grillet novel) is an early work, written in the composer's 20s. In it, two styles of music interweave and interpenetrate; long, fine-spun, constantly varying filigree alternates with and is finally subsumed by dense chordal writing before descending scalar passages trigger the disintegration of the material.

By far the longest work on this disc is Richard Barrett's diptych Tract. Pace describes this as one of the most difficult piano pieces ever written, and it certainly sounds that way. Tract 1 is dense, complex and vigorously polyphonic, an almost relentlessly complex toccata centred in the bass and alto regions of the keyboard. After a minute's silence, Tract 2 follows; where Tract 1 was a single monolithic section, Tract 2 contains five diverse, even fragmentary movements. In it, material from Tract 1 and from late Beethoven is jumbled up and reassembled, only for ominous silences to intrude, destroying all musical momentum. The final section acts as a sotto voce recapitulation--albeit highly compressed--of Tract 1, and ends with a gesture of futility as the pianist slams down the piano lid before the final sounds have died away.

This is a strong collection--the Ferneyhough and Barrett pieces are particularly fine--though it is likely to only appeal to fans of hypercomplex modernism (don't expect to find the minimalist tonality of a Howard Skempton here). Recommended, though if you only want the Ferneyhough you may find Damerini's recording a more enticing prospect.

perceptive,sensitive,astonishing piano playing.......2001-06-26

Many times music creativity needs someone with the perceptive performance imagination like Ian Pace to complete a compositional plan that,on paper seems cogent,yet when ushered into the real world it has abandoned itself.Left to the vagaries of expressionistic plurality,without a center,shattering its own vessels of perceived fortitude. Pace who has an incredible repertoire is one such pianist. As all good profound perfoming he plays a few feet past the works premise, to place it in a wonderful exciting context,usually quite objective. For this new music (dare I say The New Complexity, well it's all relative terms now), Pace is a wonderful player who places a needed air of objectivity between him and the work. You always sense here that his performances are monitors and conduits for something a dimension larger than the work itself,albeit profound ones,but ones that allow us to hear these unique piano works in a context. Brian Ferneyhough's Lemma-Icon-Epigram is one such work. Dedicated to Massimiliano Damerini,in June 1981. It was completed that month and astonishingly performed later within June at the Venice Biennale.I'd like to consider this if we can still refer to art objects as masterowrks, this is one. Although by comparison Damierini searches for the works outward,surface expressivity,rendering the work scary,phanthomized, whereas Pace allows the works complexity and beauty simply to exist,not overdetermining the works labryrinth of formations and structures, as the complex shapes of ice formations on a window pane. Ferneyhough,as a subtext for his music, keeps wonderful interface with European intellectual history,a place he often locates the creative agendas he utilizes. Here the title refers to a poetic form "Emblema" from the Italian poet Alciati during the first half of the sixtennth century. The work is a labyrinth one with modest dimensions,where the completed work is simply one realization of many, within Ferneyhough's oeuvre. Yet I'm always excited by the pure beauty of this work's density, the upper register filigree structures, like the very opening. I could listen to this stuff endlessly. But the creative agenda here is for a music constantly changing,the separation of surface and substructure(that is the Lemma section)the filigrees, shifting priorities, and materials that transmogrify into evolutional structures. Icon is chordal formations,quite short in duration. The beauty here is the work knows the limits, the thresholds of temporal tolerance,how many events can be packed into given musical moments. The Erber work has,springs more the immediate dimensions in mind, its marcato hardedge attacks in the opening here, almost digging ones fingers. There is an agenda it seems for oppositional discourse between upper and lower regions. The gesture of this music seems to be argumentative,unarticulated interrogatories,as one shouting continuously without elliptical moments,to give structural relief. There is no call and response. The effect/affect is quite menacing.

Christopher Fox by contrast seems to be more playful within this context,with his repeated figures,bouncing along,also quite immediate with an air of the popular strain here, almost like borrowed objects retransformed,filtered from the Rock World. There is also suggestions of dance,gypsy with simple rhythmic displacements of two/three. Yet Fox seems to be at the center of this discourse,something keeps this nefarious materials from collapsing into nothingness of postmodernity more vacuious ends,in that I found the work compelling. The Dench was more the music we've already seen/heard,something the mind already knows, as Jasper Johns once quipped, spatial utilization of the entire keyboard canvas, very fragmented "moments musical",shifting textures which is what makes fragmentation work,evolutional with cascades in the upper registers at times. This is always an arresting effect. But I found no agenda at work here, no underlying philosophy,an aesthetic center, a worldview.How does one invest the objectivized sense of time with form articulating interreferential levels?I found No declamation within a force field.Perhaps I've missed the music,gone out over my cognitive perceptive discourse.

Barrett I found compelling, here it seems he allowed his own music,his materials to direct him, the somatic quality was at work here,the music came from inside,no predetermined structural formations directing the works agenda. Again high density is what interests these folks,without sequential ordering the music seems quite free,improvised, yet with an air of jocularity, fun, of desire in a Lacanian perspective.Nothing quite obvious, again all relative.At work was surface phenonmenons,unarticulated labyrinths,quite interesting to hear.Barrett seems to be at the center and guides the music through an intense fury of moments. This approximately half an hour work breaks into self-contained movements; the Third more reflective, dare I say impressionistic,in its floating demeanor,And the Fourth we return again to the tinkling forever never World of the Upper register filigreed moments, with high levels of density of encrusted continuously moving notes.

Real Country
Average customer rating:
Real Country
Jody Stevens
Manufacturer: Jody Stevens
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Country | Styles | Music
General | Traditional Country | Country | Styles | Music
ASIN: B000CA83C0
Release Date: 2005-05-10

Silly Sally on the Go
Average customer rating:
Silly Sally on the Go
Silly Sally
Manufacturer: Bi-Fi Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Dance & DJ | Styles | Music
General | Children's Music | Styles | Music
General | Dance & DJ | Indie Music | Stores | Music
ASIN: B0009ZBQ68
Release Date: 2002-02-05

Tracks:

Animals in Action
If Your Happy and You Know It
Do You Know the Muscle Man?
GoGo
Skip with Lou
Balancin' Boogie
Workout Surf Out
Hokey Pokey
The Freeze Rock
Manners Matter March
The Chicken Dance
Drum Fun
Limbo Rock

Product Description

Movement ideas and music for your kids created by an elementary PE teacher, professionally trained musician and clown. Includes an activity guide.

Average customer rating:

Less J.C. makes Great CD (BIGGEST Nawth Cackalacki fan)
A CD good for any mood

Pox on the Tracts
The Marshes
Manufacturer: Dr. Strange Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music

Punk | Hardcore & Punk | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music

Punk Revival | Hardcore & Punk | Alternative Rock | Styles | Music

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Recluse

ASIN: B00000B69Z
Release Date: 1997-09-23

Tracks:

Girl On The Bus
Big Fat I Love You
Pox On The Tracts
Grandpa
Facelift
Polly Logies
Wahmbulance
The Investigator
A Better View
Speed Where

Customer Reviews:

Less J.C. makes Great CD (BIGGEST Nawth Cackalacki fan).......1999-07-28

Great CD. Outstanding vocal performance. Great riffs and raw emotion. Speed Whore rocks. Polly Logies is kick-a. Emil is probably is cool guy, just got mixed up with devil in a skirt, but hopefully is recovered by now.

These guys will make it big and make all the ex-girlfriends mad, particularly one. They'll have their own "entourage".

A CD good for any mood.......1999-06-08

Aright, normally you put in a CD according to whatever mood you're in, and for me, it sometimes gets difficult to match the music and emotion. However, the Marshes have put out an album here which matches any mood. This is a great album, it's a slightly different style than I've heard before, which is always a good thing, and the way all the instruments are meshed together is great. The power behind this album is so vast it makes you wish it was longer than 30 minutes.

Music Track:

Music Track

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The Lonely Things

1. Lemma-Icon-Epigram - Brian Ferneyhough, Ian Pace
2. You Done Torn Your Playhouse Down
3. Llik. Rellik
4. Llik. Rellik
5. Topologies
6. Tract I
7. Tract II
8. Tract: Hypothesis
9. Tract: The Light Gleams an Instant
10. Tract: Lacunae
11. Tract: As Heard So Murmured