Audible Design
In the past, the quality or nature of sounds used in music was set by the technology of instrument design, and conventions about performance and musical 'expression'. In the 19th century, european composers became increasingly concerned with 'sonority', through development of new orchestration techniques, and new instruments. However, a systematic approach to sound itself had to wait for the invention of sound recording and the accurate computer analysis of sounds. Studios, and then computers, a…
Let Me Hang You
“Twenty years ago, William S. Burroughs was asked to record an audio version of his favorite parts of Naked Lunch. Longtime associates and producers Hal Willner and James Grauerholz produced several sessions, and they recruited a team of world class musicians to help. Famed for their Naked City involvement, Bill Frisell and Wayne Horvitz contributed their genius, as well as Eyvind Kang, just to name a few. The recordings were then abandoned and collecting dust on a musty shelf, as forgotten as a…
Raster-Noton Source Book 1
Epic archival document from Raster Noton; the beginning of a comprehensive and authorized review of the past 20 years of the label. Comes with an exclusive CD featuring material from Kangding Ray, Emptyset, Alva Noto, Frank Bretschneider, Senking, Byetone, Atom Heart, Robert Lippok and more. A short introductory preface by Olaf Bender is followed by a keynote interview conducted by berlin publicist Max Dax that provides an insight into the identity and philosophy of the label heads. The main par…
Art Record Covers
Since the dawn of modernism, visual and music production have had a particularly intimate relationship. From Luigi Russolo’s 1913 Futurist manifesto L’Arte dei Rumori (The Art of Noise) to Marcel Duchamp’s 1925 double-sided discs Rotoreliefs, the 20th century saw ever more fertile exchange between sounds and shapes, marks and melodies, and different fields of composition and performance. In Francesco Spampinato’s unique anthology of artists’ record covers, we discover the rhythm of this particul…
A Farewell Performance
Extracts from the Farewell performance at Kings College, London 1978. Jgjgjgjg formed at the London Sound Poetry Festival in June 1976. Reissue of tape on Balsam Flex. 200 copiesIn those days a number of British poets were producing works influenced by radical international currents in sound art, conceptual art, visual poetry and performance art. Bob Cobbing (1920-2002) was a central figure in this continuation of the ‘British Poetry Revival’, a rather loose poetry movement of the 1960s an…
Password / Chamber Music
Password is a short radio-play about the art world. Chamber Music is the trio performing Tibetan throat singing, inspired by a recent internet image: the hipster chart of esoteric music. Edition of 80
Antibarbarus
A reissue of Antibarbarus, issued as a compact disc in 1998, was the first edition Walter Marchetti released on Alga Marghen. The Antibarbarus cycle of five pieces makes use of original tapes coming from the same recording sessions that originated some of Marchetti's major musical works realized in the '80s. This former series of works presented some homogeneous and untouched sound sources in the "concrete" status of their inner - and necessarily chaotic - level of entropy. Nevertheless this ope…
The Book Of J's
Original copies, very few available. José Luis Castillejo's The Book of J's was the first book issued by Alga Marghen. It was also the first art book produced by Castillejo in about 20 years; one line of 'J' letters in the center of the page, a continuous frieze running along 400 pages. No essays, no introduction, no two pages the same. A 400 pages hardbound top quality art book (cover cm.24x16) in an edition of 200 copies. Also included in the edition is a free LP, recorded by the author and co…
Tlalaatala
Art edition, LP edition limited to 80 copies in cardboard box with stamp, also including the original 400-page-creative-book with the same title. A killer reading of José Luis Castillejo's TLALAATALA book by Fernando Millan, recorded in Madrid in 2001. Modern or advanced writing is a direct and independent medium, i.e. it realizes and gives presence to a set of relationships without the need of further dependence (as it happened till now in literature) on other media. Words, syllables, stories, …
Opus 67 Strategygetarts A Symphony, Hommage a Richard Demarco
This record is a lie and a failure - a triumph and truth. Such is the condition that Henning Christiansen build across his entire career. One the 20th Century’s most striking and visionary composers - perhaps the most notable of Fluxus’ Danish arm, Christiansen was a radical collectivist as much as an assertive individualist - contradictory and reactionary - possessed by a singular vision which drove him down uncharted paths. Christiansen’s life, with the sprawling body of work it left in its w…
Untitled
Another crucial excavatio from the elusive The Balsam Flex legendary catalog is now available again thanks to Jan Van Toorn Slowscan imprint. Balsam Flex was a cassette label run by the artist Erik Vonna-Michell in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and evidence of a relatively overlooked moment when a number of London-based British poets were producing work that was influenced by performance art, conceptual art, sound art, text-sound composition, Fluxus, and situationism.
Publisher and poet …
Species pluralis
4GB Recycled Fiber Wood USB. 24 songs: MP3 (160kbps), WAV (88.2kHz/24bit). 2 hours, 2 minutes. PDF liner notes.Species pluralis: Multiple species appear indeterminate, indifferent, and unstable in-the-last-instance? If no more One than Multiple, then no more “Jarrod Fowler” or “Taku Unami” than et al.? Keywords: Alchemy, Biodynamic Agriculture, Hedgecraft, Human Subservience, Integrated Pest Management, [Species inquirenda: Doubtful identity requiring further investigation? If no more X than Y, …
Dé-Coll/Age Musik
** Edition of 100 copies** A seminal figure in the history of 20th century avant-garde, yet sinfully overlooked, Wolf Vostell unleashed ideas - those running wild through his debut LP Dé-coll/age Musik, which remain a slap to the face, more than half a century after they were set into play. A founding member of Fluxus, an early instigator of Happenings, an innovator of video art, Vostell was equally one of the most radical and irreverent practitioners in sound that the world has ever known. Firs…
Mutantra Prophecies and Spells
Mid-eighties recordings by Dutch poet and writer Hans Plomp together with musicians and friends. Hans was involved in the Provo movement of the sixties and later on he squatted a village near Amsterdam with friends called Ruigoord, which still exists today. He is also an expert on psychedelics, hence his book 'Uit Je Bol' is a cult classic in The Netherlands. This tape features him reading his poems in English and Dutch. Also included is a recent scandalous interview. 100 copies.
Cordiox
Outstanding visionary stuff from Mexican artist Ariel Guzik – the kind of record that's a great introduction to his practice – and a sound relic from his mindbending Cordiox, a monumental stringed instrument animated by invisible magnetic forces. Cordiox is a four-meter acoustical tower, a hyper sophisticated musical instrument created by Ariel Guzik. In its depths resides a quartz cylinder, which constitutes its central acoustical axis and took up almost half of the budget of this work. Expl…
Solo Voice I - X
Solo Voice I – X is the first LP by C Spencer Yeh devoted entirely to the voice. Yeh’s practice has its most obvious precedents in the sound poetry scene of the ‘60s and ‘70s—recalling an outlier group like the Four Horsemen, at their most raw and a-verbal, as much as the circles and canons forged around post-Lettrist France—as well as in figures like Joan La Barbara.
Over the past few years, he has moved from virtuosic, intensely physical performances to more focused studies whose specifi…
Born in the state of FLUX/us
Restocked, reduced price Performing and visual artist Ben Patterson (born 1934) was a founding member of Fluxus' participatory, do-it-yourself, anticommercialist avant-garde network. While many Fluxus artists, influenced by John Cage's precedent, employed conceptual techniques borrowed from music (e.g., the event score), Patterson's fusion of art and music was informed by his background as a classically trained double-bassist. His "Variations for Double Bass" (1960), for example, was played with…
OM Entering. And Once Entered
"The latest LP from veteran fluxus composer Philip Corner. OM Entering. and Once Enterd comprises four previously unreleased recordings with the Barton Workshop, taken from performances in the Netherlands, and South Korea, between 2000-2007. 'Om Entrance which one does....because the performance is a real "passage from the material to the spiritual" unless the "real" world is just as spiritual already which i like to think it is. As perhaps an everyday awareness is already to be entranced …
Non finito
200 musicians create over 77 thunderous minutes on 12 tracks of contemporary classical, orchestral, keyboard, noise & experimental music on this retrospective from Jasun Martz, the well known New York artist and composer who has recorded with Michael Jackson (Bad & Dangerous), toured with Frank Zappa and collaborated with art brut master artist Jean Dubuffet.
The essential experimental, keyboard, prog, soundscapes & contemporary classical/orchestral original music from the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s.…
SODOROME
Some of you may have discovered Jean-Marie Massou in the film from Antoine Boutet, “Le Plein Pays”. We can see him gathering big stones, trying to clean the earth, and building an incredible cave. We also can see him working with different tape recorders. He likes recording his voice, some of his texts, mixing with some musics and local noises.
Jean-Marie Massou shall soon be turning seventy. He can’t read or write and lives completely alone, secluded in the middle of the Bouriane forest in …