Paysages Planétaires
In 2000, Henri Pousseur was asked by Philippe Samyn, a Brussels-based architect who liked to work in collaboration with other artforms, to lend his support to the plan for the construction of a business complex by one of the most important building enterprises in the country. There were four low buildings arranged like different parts of a medieval castle-village, grouped around a kind of large open central court. Leaning on the suggested image, Pousseur immediately suggested that the fir…
Ku
The act of conjuring remarkable sound from found objects is at the very heart of this recording from American musicians Greg Davis and Jeph Jerman. Having met in Arizona some years back, Davis and Jerman commenced working together on a series of recording projects. Improvising with a range of implements and devices ranging from sticks, stones and lo-fi electronics to prepared instruments, gongs and broken percussion, the pair sought to develop a personal language that reflected their individual …
Studio Retrospect
A collection of six compositions made in electronic music studios from 1959 to 1984. All were composed for concert hall or theater performance with choreography, as well as for distribution on recordings. Music from the Venezia Space Theatre, The Dresden Interleaf, and Echo-D were composed for quadraphonic theater systems, and were later spatially remodeled for release on stereophonic recordings. A collection of six compositions made in electronic music studios from 1959 to 1984. All were compos…
Defekt
Matchless Recordings presents a live performance by Furt. The album includes four tracks performed by Richard Barrett and Paul Obermayer - electronics.Track 1 - recorded in Berlin, December 2001Track 2 - produced in Watford, October 1997Track 3 - produced in AmsterdamTrack 4 - recorded in Amsterdam, 29 February 2000
Atolón
2004 release ** "Atolón, whose four tracks are further proof that the barriers that once existed between free improvisation and noise are coming down fast. And in the sunshine of Barcelona at that. Alfredo Costa Monteiro and Ferran Fages have released several albums as Cremaster (though not using the same instrumentation), and trumpeter Ruth Barberán previously teamed up with Costa Monteiro and Matt Davis in I Treni Inerti (now sadly disbanded, but not before leaving us the splendid Ura album on…
Jetsun Mila
Beautiful extended ambient work from Eliane Radigue, a composer known for her work with magnetic tape and Arp Synthesizer, and who studied under Pierre Schaeefer and Pierre Henry in the late 50's. Her compositions are often drone-like, impeccably crafted electronic sounds which seem to move in a continual flow around the listener. She has created many meditative works since the late 1970s, mostly based on Tibetan Buddhist subject matter.Jetsun Mila is inspired by the life of Milarepa, a great yo…
Songs of Milarepa
Originally released on Lovely Music in 1998. Double CD of all five of Elaine Radigue's songs in tribute to the Tibetan saint and poet from the 11th century. Two of the tracks dates from Radigue's first release in 1983, two are previously unreleased and the final 62-minute track was previously issued as a sole CD in 1987. The material is performed by Radigue (synthesizer and recording), Robert Ashley (English voice), and Lama Kunga Rinpoche (Tibetan voice). Radigue was born in France and has stud…
Et ses apparitions
2005 release ** "Edgar Olivier Charles doesn’t exist, it’s the alter-ego of Roger Tellier-Craig, who works as Et Sans, Le Fly Pan Am and Set Fire to Flames. So far so good. ‘Rediscovered music recorded in Montreal between september 2002 and january 2005, it says on the cover and rediscovered are three tracks. In each subtitle, to each track, a name is mentioned: Iannis, Karlheinz and John – so, I’d say Xenakis, Stockhausen and Cage (well, more likely than, say Adams? Lennon?). And maybe Edgar Ol…
Dubravko Detoni With Acezantez
Croatian composer and pianist Dubravko Detoni is a name barely familiar to even the most hardened and fanatical followers of avant-garde composition. Although he has managed to consistently escape almost all forms of wider public recognition, Detoni has, since 1970 -- both in the solo context and with his Acezantez ensemble -- doggedly pursued a singular and unique musical path. Drawing on the conventions and traditions of modern composition, avant-garde electronics, musique concrète and group a…
Chrysalide
In Bocalises, Denis Dufour explored with virtuosity the sound possibilities of a sole sound source, glass jars broken, crushed and mixed to themselves to infinity. Fifteen years later, he takes up the material and, with digital tools, presents a retouched and recoloured version to give a new power and poetic richness to the initial energy.
Neural synthesis n. 6-9
1995 release. Neural Synthesis Nos. 6-9 combines the art of music, the engineering of electronics, and the inspiration of biology. In it, David Tudor orchestrates electronic sound in ways analogous to our biological bodies' orchestration of consciousness. The performance originates from a neural-network synthesizer conceived and built especially for Tudor. He surrounds this synthesizer with his own unique collection of electronic devices, and in the recording on this CD made for headphone playba…
Invisible Gold
David Rosenboom (b. 1947) has been widely acclaimed as a pioneer in American experimental music since the 1960's. He is a composer, performer, conductor, interdisciplinary artist, author, and educator having explored ideas in his work about the spontaneous evolution of forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques for ensembles, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art, computer music systems, interactive multi-media, compositional algorithms, and the structure of the brain and nervou…
Autonomous and dynamical systems
A relentless explorer, composer, performer and theorist, David Dunn (b 1953) uses electro-acoustic resources, voice, non-human living systems, as well as traditional instruments. A creator of text-sound compositions, environmental installations, works for radio and video, he has also written and published extensively. Underlying all his work is a common regard for music as a communicative source with a living world. Growing up in San Diego in the sixties and seventies, he encountered people lik…
Leapday Night
A series of three pieces/suites documenting David Behrman's evolved interactive computer music practice from the 1980s, featuring Rhys Chatham and Ben Neill (trumpet/mutantrumpet), Fluxus mainstay Takehisa Kosugi (violin), and Behrman himself on electronics. This essential recording captures Behrman's mature work with listening machines: thickly layered liquid sounds created through a complex computer music system which absorbs, actually hears, the sounds of instrumentalists, then plays off thei…
On the Other Ocean
Originally released on Lovely Music in 1978 and now available on CD, this essential recording documents David Behrman's groundbreaking exploration of interactive computer-human improvisation—among the earliest works to establish real-time dialogue between musicians and microprocessor systems.
On the Other Ocean is an improvisation by Maggi Payne and Arthur Stidfole centered around six pitches which, when played, activate electronic pitch-sensing circuits connected to the "interrupt" line and inp…
Oramics
Comes with 16 page booklet. Daphne Oram is best-known for the design of her Oramics system, and also for co-founding the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1957, but until the release of this material, the only easily-available piece of music by her on CD was the 8-minute long "Four Aspects." There was also a 7" EP from 1962 on HMV, released as part of the Listen, Move and Dance series that was specifically designed to help children dance. Although the short pieces on this record are very basic, it cou…
Hinterland
Carlos Roque Alsina is an Argentinean-born composer who tends to mix acoustic and taped sounds together in a manner that evokes natural sounds to some degree, something of a more programmatically inclined Iannis Xenakis. The title piece combines piano and percussion with taped sounds that often possess an organ-like quality. While the acoustic instruments dance around each other in intricate patterns, the tape heaves and respires ominously, depicting the sort of backcountry that's unsettling in …
Leech
With his works the swedish artist Carl Michael Von Hausswolff takes interest in revealing and using accoustic, visual, social and cultural phenomena. For the cd Leech he acts as a parasite on works by Olafur Eliasson, Carsten Höller, Tommi Grönlund-Petteri Nisunen and Richard James. In the three first pieces he sucked energy-sound out from the electric functions of those works; sounds that normally can not be heard. On James' work he bruises the skin surface as leeches usually do before they pen…
Wakool
Recorded over a series of four Sunday afternoons, Wakool is an interrogation into an expanded range of techniques and gestures applied to instruments including banjo, electroacoustic guitar, bandura, and eukolin. In part an antidote to laborious studio process, this project privileges live stereo recordings without additional overdubs, processing or equalization. The varied and spontaneous nature of David's effortless playing across an eclectic range of instruments was recorded transparently to …
Sitting on Theories on the Frontier on Extension
2003 release ** Cardboard sleeve, each copy with a unique hammer imprint. "Akin to Erik Satie’s advice to the performer of his Vexations to prepare oneself with some “serious immobilities”, Cal Crawford here examines the impossibilities of holding still. For ‘sitting on theories on the frontier on extension’, his first full length solo CD, he generated sounds by sitting on top of a bundle of blankets with a microphone rolled up into its center. This one hour process was his starting point. He di…