Julija Hartig - Dark Velvet - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Black Rainbow is a deeply personal musical journey in which violinist and vocalist Julija Hartig explores questions of belonging, identity, and heritage. The album connects her multicultural roots-Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, and Austrian-to her Yugoslavian upbringing, weaving a narrative about migration and ancestral memory. The title work, co-created with Akim Moiseenkov, fuses violin, voice, and live electronics to tell the story of three generations of female migration through sound, using folk elements, recorded voices of her ancestors, and electronic textures. This composition serves as both a meditation on the flow of culture and a sonic bridge between past and present.Through the music of Leos Janacek, Fazil Say, and George Enescu, Hartig continues this exploration of roots and renewal. Janacek's folkloric sonata evokes her sense of Inchhome,Inch while Say's modern improvisational language resonates with her Balkan background. Enescu's Romanian-inspired sonata becomes a revelation of shared ancestry and emotional kinship. Together with pianist Reineke Broekhans, her long-time musical partner and soulmate, Hartig turns Black Rainbow into more than an album-it is a reflection on the InchAncestral Code,Inch showing that wherever we go, the sound of our heritage remains within us

Black vinyl. It's tempting to intellectualize Font, the Austin-based quintet whose driving music of sampled stabs, dance beats, and euphoric choruses could be labeled with all manner of hyphenated pseudo-genres (Inchart-rock,Inch Inchdance-punk,Inch Inchnoise-popInch). However, their music quickly makes clear the inadequacy of those kinds of labels. As drummers Jack Owens and Logan Wagner lock into a co-constructed groove, Roman Parnell's bass bridges the kinetic back line to multi-instrumentalist and environment-shaper Anthony Laurence. From this density emerge frontman Thom Waddill's associative lyrics and electric-shock dance. Font's debut album Strange Burden shows the band both translating the intensity of their live shows into the studio and polishing the surfaces of their music to juxtapose and dislocate genres with a quick-footed, nearly pop-art sensibility. Patchworked over years of improvising, playing, recording and re-recording both in studios and at home, Strange Burden is the fever-dream document of Font's nascent stage. It careens from precipice to precipice, revelation to revelation; over the course of a lean 28 minutes, the record covers a dizzying amount of ground. It draws from the past - New Wave, No Wave, rock, punk, pop - but rejects nostalgia, relentlessly pushing their influences into the future.

Stradivarius is pleased to present Première by Julija Sadaunykaité, Lithuanian pianist and winner of the Grand Prix at the Malta Valletta International Piano Competition. This album, marking Julija Sadaunykaité's recording debut, takes listeners on an intimate journey into the musical world of this pianist, celebrated for her expressive depth and refined artistry. A listening journey through different creative worlds unfolds through celebrated pages of piano literature, with the performer intent on delving into the depths of the scores and capturing their extraordinary compositional textures.The album opens with Maurice Ravel's Miroirs No. 5 La vallée des cloches, the last movement of the Miroirs cycle, a five-movement suite for piano composed between 1904 and 1905. The opening piece, which Ravel dedicated to the French pianist and composer Maurice Delage, is followed by Olivier Messiaen's Première communion de la Vierge from Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant-Jésus, one of the most famous works for solo piano in the contemporary repertoire, and Robert Schumann's Sonata No. 1 in F-sharp minor, Op. 11, composed between 1833 and 1836 and dedicated to Clara Wieck. This intense journey into the musical world of Julija Sadaunykaité concludes with Sonata No. 1 by Australian composer Carl Vine, born in 1954. According to the first printed edition, the work was composed for the Sydney Dance Company and is characterized by energetic rhythms, unusual harmonic shifts, abrupt tempo changes, dynamic contrasts, and rich textures, all of which allow performers to fully explore their technical and emotional range.