Flotation Device celebrates Wendy Carlos for her 85th birthday with a mini-retrospective of her pioneering and popularizing synthesizer music. She's long been out of the public eye, and most of her recordings are out of print and unavailable to stream, so this is an unusual opportunity to revisit her most impactful work, ranging back to Switched-On Bach.
Meanwhile Steve Swell honors Galina Ustvolskaya, while her fellow dissonance-lover Thelonious Monk gets the unconventional attention of the Goldberg/Sickafoose/Amendola trio. We mark the 50th anniversary of Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles…, oboist Heinz Holliger’s Study in Multiphonics and Globe Unity Orchestra’s Hamburg ’74 album, while the Downtown New York scene is represented by new recordings from Steve Coleman, Branson Seabrook and John Zorn (featuring Barbara Hannigan in the premiere recording of a quintet inspired by the surrealist paintings of Leonora Carrington). Creative and improvised music with host Michael Schell.
