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Tickets are sold out for the release party of John Luther Adams' Become Ocean, presented by Q2 Music, but that doesn't mean you can't still hear the waves. While your computer might not support the luscious 5.1 surround system that will be saturating the The Greene Space tonight, checking in below is certainly the next best thing.

Original stream host by Q2 Music

Maybe the heat-haze is getting to us, but we've been gathering oceans of new merch and collectibles all summer.  We're finally ready to share it with you - take your pick from these all-new Bang on a Can Store exclusives!

t-shirts

Can you believe that we've never had Cantaloupe t-shirts for sale online? We couldn't stand a world where that was the case, so we've designed a whole new line of post-minimal garments featuring our favorite geometric designs: the pervasive green Cantaloupe melon, the Bang on a Can rings in monochrome, and the simantra starburst of Michael Gordon's Timber. And the price is right, too; new summer shirts are on sale for just $10 for a limited time! explore apparel

composer autographs

Every year at the Bang on a Can Marathon, we collect composer autographs: hand-drawn music/art that reflects the personality and immediacy within the artist. The collection is conceptually diverse, with new entries from the 2014 Marathon that include Bryce Dessner, J.G. Thirlwell, Caroline Shaw, Marc Mellits and Meredith Monk. All are worthy additions to any new music collection! explore composer autographs

mystery bundles

Back by popular demand, mystery bundles contain a selection of choice Cantaloupe titles from our 13-year history. A hit at the BoaC Marathon, the bundles were sold out after the first hour, and the contents were swapped like trading cards throughout the rest of the day.

We brought them out again for a few days on twitter and all were switfly snatched up again. We're busting them out one more time for just a week, and after that they're gone until the holiday season. grab your mystery bundle fast!

Faces of Water: Limited Edition Aluminum Prints

Moses Hacmon, the artist of behind the brilliant blue abstraction on the cover of Michael Gordon's Rushes, has partnered with the Bang on a Can Store to bring you a series of truly unique made-to-order prints on aluminum.

Faces of Water is part art, part science, part spiritual awakening. It's a breathtaking, unique collection of photographic images of water that transforms and advances our understanding of this life-giving element and exposes a layer of reality previously hidden from sight. reserve your piece now

John Luther Adams on Become Ocean:

If you stop and think about the oceanic dimension of music, there’s this implication of immersion. We came from the ocean, and we’re going back to the ocean, right? We’re made up mostly of water, and life on earth first emerged from the seas. And with the melting of the polar ice caps and the rising sea levels, we may become ocean sooner than we imagine.

Eventually we begin to realize that we’re part of something much larger than ourselves. Become Ocean embraces this idea, but gets its title from something much more personal for me. Back in the late ’70s, John Cage wrote a mesostic poem called “Many Happy Returns,” in honor of his dear friend—also my mentor and friend—Lou Harrison. He compares Lou’s music to a river in delta, with all these different influences and currents, coming together in a big beautiful sweep of music. And in the last line of the poem, Cage writes, “Listening to it, we become ocean.” I’ve always been struck by what a beautiful image that is.

So now, a little history: some time ago, I was commissioned to compose a piece for the Seattle Chamber Players. Then a few years later, the Seattle Symphony and their music director Ludovic Morlot approached me, and asked if I would be interested in composing something for the Symphony. Part of Ludo’s vision for the orchestra is to bring it into the 21st century, and to put a special emphasis on new music, so of course I was thrilled at the possibilities.

One idea that I suggested was to build on the sound world of an earlier piece I’d composed called Dark Waves, which is a 12-minute piece for large orchestra and electronic sounds. To my surprise and delight, Ludo was very interested. I was calling it “Dark Waves on steroids,” and I knew early on that I wanted to take that oceanic sound and expand it into a much larger timeframe. So the result was Become Ocean.

Preorder now and ride the wave!

My companion to Adventureland is out today! The dig. EP Fantasyland -on @itunes @cantaloupeny @eighthblackbird @kronosquartet @gamgalaktika

— Glenn Kotche (@glennkotche) June 24, 2014

Wilco drummer and composer Glenn Kotche conceived of Fantasyland as a companion piece to his March 2014 Cantaloupe Music release Adventureland for a number of reasons. First and foremost, he felt that the process of composing and recording Adventureland had generated so much outstanding music that he couldn’t possibly fit it on one full-length album.

“I knew almost as soon as I finished sequencing the pieces for Adventureland that I’d come back to it,” Kotche recalls. “When you get the chance to work with so many great musicians — Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird and Gamelan Galak Tika — you’re bound to have more than you know what to do with. Fantasyland is the next chapter, if you will; I wanted to put it out there for anyone who feels drawn to this music, to dig into it and maybe make some new discoveries of their own — just like I did when I made the original recordings.”

Not merely for completists, Fantasyland stands on its own as a complete experience. Its focal point is the 15-minute Double Fantasy (elements of which provided the grist for the sound collage Triple Fantasy, from Adventureland); featuring Chicago’s eighth blackbird ensemble, the piece is a rousing testament to the versatility of the musicians and the confidence and range of Kotche as a composer of challenging new music.

Fantasyland is available exclusively on iTunes Music.

(read the full article on Pitchfork)

In 2008, David Lang won the Pulitzer Prize for a work called The Little Match Girl Passion, which paired four singers with some small hand bells. That was it: the rest was ringing silence, Lang's careful, mazelike vocal writing, and a quiet mournfulness that troubled and changed anyone who heard it. Love Fail feels like a revisiting, or extension, of that work—it's also scored for four voices, this time the vocal group Anonymous 4, and it also features hand bells. The source water, the English madrigal, is the same. But the temperature is a degree or two warmer, more hospitable to cellular life; the 15 pieces, spread across 50 minutes, touch on emotions closer to mundane existence—the difficulty of communication, the impossibility of remaining in the right. 

As with much of Lang's recent work, Love Fail exists in a purposeful, elegant stasis—things change, but barely. His music is, in a sense, process music; you can hear, or feel, the motor that Lang feeds his ideas into whirring beneath the surface. He talks openly in interviews about being an ideas-first composer, one for whom sounds and notes come afterward. But his music always comes out sounding luminous, gorgeous, a reminder that processes are what people make of them. The material David Lang feeds into his processes contains his doubts, fears, bleak thoughts—his, or someone else's—that he is empathetic enough to channel directly into his music. They come out scrambled, but they quickly reassemble themselves in our perception, in much the same way our minds flip the upside down image our retina captures.  

It is this empathy that lifts his music into an exalted, secular realm -- a place where we're forced to understand each other. On Death Speaks, he turned the figure of Death into someone beautiful, someone worth loving. On The Little Match Girl Passion, he rendered the slow death of the titular figure, alone on the street, into a gentle transfiguration, like a time-lapse video of a flower blooming. On "Forbidden Subjects," Lang examines a couple rendered slowly mute by an unnamed tragedy: "Soon most every subject they might want to talk about/ Is associated with your tongue, now they're unpleasant, see/ And becomes a subject they can't talk about/So that as time goes by there is less and less they can safely talk about." The mood is grave, but quiet, and tender—there are dark forces in his pieces, but they don't necessarily hold anything against you. 

The complex emotions at the center of "He was and she was" circle around regret and loss: "She was so charming/ She was so lovely"; "He was an admirable man/ He was so admirable." Lang's scoring of the text draws the ear to the only word that matter to him in this construction: "was." The "he was" and "she was" are broken up into bits, one simply a repeating interval while another washes whispers of "hewashewashewashewashewas" around the feet of the piece. The specifics of what these people were aren't important; Lang wants us to meditate on the fact that they were, and no longer are.

"Right and Wrong," meanwhile, parses a series of mesmerizing, unnavigable rules about the divide in its title: "She knows she is right/ But to say she is right is wrong/ In this case, to be correct and say so is wrong/ In certain cases she may be correct, and may say so in certain cases/but if she insists too much, she becomes wrong/ So wrong that even her correctness becomes wrong by association." Read those lines on paper, and they drone like stereo instructions. But listen to Lang's setting of this text—two lower voices intoning like intercom beeps, the other two fluttering up like birds scared from a tree—and feel the grace of his animating touch. His mind can turn even the sharpest mental scrutiny into something resembling a loving caress. – Jayson Greene, Pitchfork 

Check out our exclusive video, premiering today on SPIN.com, with drummer and percussionist Glenn Kotche, whose Cantaloupe Music debut Adventureland also drops today.

Compiled, edited and shot by our friend and colleague Gabriel Furtado, this nearly 7-minute mini-doc profiles Kotche as he digs into what motivates him as a composer, the making of Adventureland, his work with Wilco, his myriad sources of inspiration, and much more!