Back by popular demand (and available for the first time in a digital format), this essential collection of West Coast new music—an anthology known simply as Cold Blue—is a classic.

Music by Daniel Lentz, Ingram Marshall, Michael Byron, Rick Cox, Michael Jon Fink, James Tenney, Eugene Bowen & Harold Budd, Jim Fox, Chas Smith, Peter Garland, John Kuhlman, Read Miller, and David Mahler.

Originally issued on vinyl in 1984, shortly before the demise of the old Cold Blue label, the disc quickly became the company’s most popular release. When Cold Blue was started up again in 2000, the company received numerous letters encouraging it to re-release the anthology as a CD.

Although bound together by a common concern with music’s basic sensuality, the pieces collected here are wide-ranging in style—process-driven works, through-composed pieces, ambient soundscapes, and music that glances in the directions of world music and avant-pop influences. In instrumentation, the music is also wide-ranging—from a celesta solo to a marimba quartet to a player piano solo to works for speaking voices to music for piano and bullroarer, plus works for solo piano, synthesizers, cello and piano, and perhaps the only known piece of new music for pedal steel guitar and multi-tracked banjo.

New to the CD version of this album of the anthology is a “bonus” track—a previously unreleased piano piece by composer David Mahler.

REVIEWS:

“The collection that built the label’s reputation in the 1980s.” —Il Manifesto (Italy)

“In all, Cold Blue is as compelling today as it would have been when it was originally released eighteen years ago; an anthology with many voices, distinct yet united under the label’s vision of presenting some of the most innovative and accomplished new music coming out of the American west coast.” —Richard di Santo, Incursion Music Review

“Throughout, the music communicates the excitement of the new, the fresh, the experimental: most of the pieces convey a sense of delight and wonder in the sheer creative freedom of their approach to sound—an approach radically loosened from old rhetorics and rooted instead in a belief in the almost unlimited potential of texture and color…. [A] trove of small-scale pleasures and surprises, in which a sense of fun, curiosity, and the thrill of invention are never far away. If Cold Blue has more ‘old’ pieces such as these in its vault we must hope it’ll issue them too.” —International Record Review

“Each of these thirteen aural environments has its own mystery, its own Minotaur’s maze to escape from…or not, as your preference may be. Cold Blue holds together nicely. Strongly recommended.” —Fanfare magazine

“An anthology of West-Coast music focusing on experimentation while retaining a high degree of listenability…. As avant-garde music at the turn of the century seemed confined to the extremes of noise and stamina on the one hand and the post-Feldman search for disappearance of sound on the other, one feels uncertain about how to approach the loveliness of the music on Cold Blue. Recommended.” —François Couture, All-Music Guide

“What does it all add up to? An art of confidence and uncertainty…beauty and tragedy pointedly exemplified by the CD’s cover art: a distant tornado and hyenas on a storm-clouded Serengeti plain.” —21st Century Music magazine

“A rewarding snapshot of composition in the decade or so leading up to 1984…Cold Blue anticipates the new tonalities that characterize the post-minimal generation.” —The Wire magazine

“Destined to be a classic anthology of American new music.” —Charles Amirkhanian

“In keeping with the Cold Blue esthetic, much of the music is tonal and meditative in nature (without being in any way retro or nostalgic), concerned with simple—and often single—processes…. Some pieces are wistful and disarmingly naïve…. It’s not all Day-Glo harmony though…. [T]his reissue is cause for celebration for the famished record scavengers who’ve been hunting it down since it disappeared…join the pack.” —Signal to Noise magazine

“One after the other are many of the protagonists of California new music…from ambient to contemporary classical, from post-minimalist to electro-acoustic. The unmistakable pedal steel guitar of Chas Smith opens the collection, followed by twelve more small miracles.” —Blow Up (Italy)

“The compilation album Cold Blue demonstrates how rich [the Cold Blue label’s] catalog actually is. Two tutelary figures (Harold Budd and James Tenney) are surrounded by mavericks heading in all directions: tonal miniatures (David Mahler, Michael Jon Fink, Ingram Marshall), sound mobiles (Chas Smith, Michael Byron, Jim Fox), works on voice and speech (Daniel Lentz, Read Miller). The whole thing may be drawing ties between Brian Eno’s impassible ambient music and A Silver Mt. Zion’s wild lyricism, or even between Morton Feldman’s esthetic inventions and Sylvain Chauveau or Clogs’ neo-chamber experiments.” —Richard Robert, Vibrations (France)

“Another blue gem that comes out of the vaults of Jim Fox’s label, it is full of surprises, from Smith’s Beatrix to James Tenney’s Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow. The list of performers and composers reads like a gathering of the best that the new American music has offered us during the last forty years.”—I Heard a Noise webzine (Romania)

“A remarkable document rediscovered. The Cold Blue anthology, originally released by the California record label Cold Blue in 1984, was an unusual commodity: a label sampler that was great to listen to all the way through, as though it were a single work. Given the variety of composer’s voices represented, this was quite an accomplishment…. The compilation still has the power to refresh – to reaffirm the value of exploratory music without bombast, music that quietly opens ears and minds.” —Dusted magazine

“This disc deftly captures the essence of what the Cold Blue label is about.” —Exposé magazine

“Simply called Cold Blue, it presents 13 tracks as what can be seen as a manifesto for the label…. These are considered, careful compositions which, broadly speaking, can be classed as quiet post-minimalist. Harold Budd makes an appearance, as do the regular Cold Blue crowd of composers.” —Rupert Loydell, Tangents (UK)

“The complete rundown: Chas Smith’s Beatrix forms a gentle backdrop full of multi-tracked banjo and one lone, loud, distorted power chord struck on a pedal steel guitar that gradually wafts away into a misty powder of pristine ambience. Ingram Marshall’s Gradual Siciliano (For Gus) finds a gentle mandolin and piano gradually dissolving into a nice electronic haze. A totally different piano—along with a large drum and a bullroarer—fill a dark, primal void with a repetitive, echoing knock; a dissonant note cluster and strange, circular mechanical sound in Peter Garland’s Three Strange Angels. Daniel Lentz’s You Can’t See the Forest…Music offers really tweaked sounding spoken word and tapped wine glasses, featuring ‘the composer’s cascading echo technique with three human speakers who play wine glasses that they tune by drinking from them as the piece unfolds, reconstructing disassembled adages.’ Michael Byron’s Marimbas in the Dorian Mode puts four marimba players in the mellow mode, as the piece meanders around in the dark and eventually fizzles away. Jim Fox’s Appearance of Red joins a simple, dramatic piano line with a couple of warm, floating blankets of electric guitar and cello to gorgeous effect. David Mahler’s La Ciudad de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles is…very delicate and pretty. Read Miller’s Weddings, Funerals and Children Who Cannot Sleep features layers of spoken word whose treble is, at times, rolled off into total, muted abstraction. John Kuhlman’s In This Light is comprised of a deep, chanting vocal smeared all over simple, repetitive, rocking electric guitar (mostly played on one string) and trombone for a totally unknown and really nice slice of minimal rock. Rick Cox’s Necessity fills the biggest, most beautiful aquarium in the world with shimmering ashes of electric guitar and prepared electric guitar that sound fully roomy yet totally massive. Michael Jon Fink’s Celesta Solo rings out a nice, forlorn little ditty with the almost toy-like sonorities of the celesta. Eugene Bowen and Harold Budd’s Wonder’s Edge finds a very warm, inviting and intricately woven rug of guitar synthesizer and keyboard synthesizer ‘slipping in and out of a slightly twisted tango.’ Last, and certainly not least, James Tenney’s Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow employs the player piano to gradually transform a single repetitive note into a dense, shimmering cluster of notes and rhythms. This piece is ‘a wonderfully swirling and intensely building rhythmic canon that accelerates as it introduces ever higher pitches tuned to the harmonic spectrum of its lowest note, bringing the disc to a close with a bang.’ Indeed. A gnarly tornado wreaking havoc on the front cover matches the album and label moniker quite well.—Arcane Candy

“This is one of the best compiled collections of music of various artists in general I’ve heard, for the recording sounds as if it’s one piece of music with enough variation and coherence in mood. It’s also a very good collection of small new music pieces. It has something filmic but also a breath of fresh air for its experimentation…. A more than perfect album. Highly recommended.” —Gerald Van Waes, Psyche Van Het Folk (Belgium)

“Just listen to the Cold Blue compilation album, culling 13 works by as many composers. Daniel Lentz’s You Can’t See the Forest…Music, scored for three drinking narrators and three glasses of wine, delivers a fragmented, deconstructed vocal picture, while Jim Fox’s Apparence of Red features a stretched-out, melancholy-driven melody with Debussy-esque overtones. David Mahler’s strikingly beautiful piano piece La Ciudad de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles is pure classical perfection.” —Gérard Nicollet, Octopus (France)