Charles Amirkhanian
The 12th Annual International Sound Poetry Festival
*Last copies, almost sold out at the label. Limited edition of 200 hand-numbered copies.* After years of preparation, Recital is proud to present The 12th Annual International Sound Poetry Festival box set. Held in New York in 1980, this was the last festival of the pioneering sound poetry series started in Stockholm in the 1960s. This ambitious document holds nearly five hours of audio from 30 artists. A 240-page book with biographies, texts, and artwork from each artist supplements the edition…
Hypothetical Moments
Other Minds is excited to present Hypothetical Moments, a DVD of the collaborative works of Carol Law and Charles Amirkhanian, available on video for the first time. Some of the work included within will be familiar to followers of Amirkhanian’s work (Dog of Stravinsky, Mahogany Ballpark), but the vast majority of Hypothetical Moments has been entirely unavailable until now. Both video and audio have been lovingly restored and remastered, opening up a new pathway into the densely layered and ref…
Miatsoom
* 32-page booklet featuring an essay by Peter Garland *Other Minds Records announces a new album from composer Charles Amirkhanian titled Miatsoom (mee-aht-soom) - a collection of pieces that draw on his Armenian heritage - central to the composer’s identity but until now unexplored in his discography. The centerpiece of the album is the 30-minute title track, “Miatsoom” which means “Reunion” in Armenian. A long form radio play of sorts, the work’s source material comes from recordings made dur…
Lexical Music
When Charles Amirkhanian’s Lexical Music was released on pioneering Bay Area record label 1750 Arch Records in 1980, it was heralded as a masterpiece of the then nascent text-sound poetry scene. The New York Times called Amirkhanian “expert at the sort of things his imitators do not do half so well as he.” Lexical Music is a sort of high water mark for American text-sound poetry; it sounds like nothing before or since.
Single words lose their meaning through repetition; nonsense phrases build in…
Loudspeakers
Charles Amirkhanian (b. 1945) can be regarded as a central figure in American music, and on several fronts. As a composer, he's been pervasively innovative in two genres: text-sound pieces, in which he can draw engaging rhythmic processes from wacky word assemblages such as 'rainbow chug bandit' and 'church car rubber baby buggy bumper'; and natural-sound electronic pieces which go far beyond the usual confines of musique concrète to create long, poetic sound narratives poised between collage an…