untitled music for Geography
Specially re-mixed material Francisco Lopez created for the dance work, Geography, by the The Ralph Lemon Dance Co. which premiered at Yale in New Haven. At the time Francisco already had established himself as an important new composer working with huge pools of silence that then build in time stretching waves of sonic purity. This work is certainly in the vein but there’s also subtle percussive elements woven in, drawn from an African percussion ensemble that performed live during the perfor…
My Dear Siegfried
"David Behrman has been active as a composer and artist since the 1960s. Over the years he has made sound and multimedia installations for gallery spaces as well as musical compositions. Sam Behrman and Siegfried Sassoon met in 1920, when Behrman, then a young writer working at The New York Times, was sent to interview Sassoon at the start of the English poet's postwar American lecture tour. In that tour Sassoon was billed as 'England's Soldier-Poet.' He had a reputation both as a war hero and …
Unforeseen Events
Unforeseen Events is the latest of many pieces Behrman has made with computer software designed to interact in real time with a solo performer. The four sections recorded here were made specifically with Ben Neill's performance style in mind. The electronic timbres are intended to complement the sounds of his instrument --the admirable and humorous mutantrumpet, with its three separately-mutable and playable bells. Refractive Light consists of three small pieces based on an interweaving and over…
Vier Stücke
Four pieces from arguably the most cited sound-sculpt of our time, recently fêted via an exposé in The Wire (October 2001). 'Vocrolls II' (1988) consists of recordings of a glass sphere coming to rest in a Tibetan metal bowl, processed in physics-defying fashion through an early desktop port of the now-prevalent phase vocoder algorithm. 'Mouse Ware' (1998) is the soundtrack to an installation (10 different makes and models of computer mouse are preserved in alcohol, accompanied by 10 user-friend…
Sacred Bordello
2004 release. Special edition of Sacred Bordello (originally published by Black Dog Publishing) bundled with a limited edition CD released by Alga Marghen. As one of the most influential figures of experimental music and performance, Charlemagne Palestine has remained an enigma. Unlike his illustrious contemporaries Terry Riley, John Cale, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass, little has been written on Palestine and his continuing influence. In his own right, he was and remains today a pivotal person…
Early Works
2002 release. Alga Marghen proudly presents the first record ever produced by Ben Patterson: "This is not only my first CD, but also the first recordings of these works available to the general public." Starting as a virtuoso double-bass performer of classical music, Ben Patterson was one of the very first founders of the Fluxus Group in Wiesban. This digipak CD will introduce you to some American neo-avant garde music classics, a crossover between John Cage's exploding influences and the experi…
Liverpool soundworks vol.2
"'Surveying Western Philosophy using China Tools' (33'45"): Western philosophy is thought to have begun along the Ionian coast of Asia Minor in the sixth century B.C. Chinese astrology is thought to have begun in China in the thirtieth century B.C. Would a survey using the tools of an ancient Chinese imperial science give us new and fresh reading of Western philosophy? The year in which a person was born is of singular importance in Chinese astrology as each year is governed by an animal sign. I…
Rotomotor
2001 release. The compact disc by Anton Bruhin issued by Alga Marghen is titled r o t o m o t o r and covers two different areas of the artist's research. The first one is represented by a group of works including the short and mysterious environmental recording "ORAX" as well as "Lange Tone," "VERSUCHPILZ 6," and "Paul Is 35," three excerpts from the epic "MC-10 zyklus" created between 1976 and 1977, recording various layers of sound sources on two cassette recorders with loudspeakers.The compl…
Thousand Year Dreaming-Floating World
Thousand Year Dreaming (1990) was commissioned by Essential Music and was written with the musicians on this recording, their particular strengths and inclinations, very much in mind. It grew out of an improvisatory piece, Nautilus, which Art Baron, Scott Robinson and Annea Lockwood realised in 1989. They found that the sound of conch shell trumpets, didjeridu and frame drums really flowered in the resonant spaces they were using for the piece. Lockwood started imagining the sonorities possible …
I Am Sitting In A Room
In this fascinating exploration of acoustical phenomena, Alvin Lucier slips from the domain of language to that of music in the course of 40 minutes and 32 repetitions of a simple paragraph of text.In I am sitting in a room, several sentences of recorded speech are simultaneously played back into a room and re-recorded there many times. As the repetitive process continues, those sounds common to the original spoken statement and those implied by the structural dimensions of the room are reinforc…
Music on a long thin wire
**Legendary sound installation for audio oscillator and electronic monochord** First released on Lovely Music in 1980. A 50-foot length of taut wire passes through the poles of a large magnet and is driven by an oscillator; the vibrations of the wire are miked at either end, amplified and broadcast in stereo. The thin wire is set vibrating four times at four different frequencies; what results is not the low drone one might expect from a long, vibrating wire, but a complexity of evocative, ether…
Bunhill Row
500 copies, numbered edition, few available. 1980 was an incredibe year for London’s experimental music scene with many different strands. Recommended Records were rereleasing the first two Faust LP’s, L. Voag had found ‘the way out’, Swell Maps were ‘in occupied Europe’. Throbbing Gristle and other industrialists were giving plenty of live actions. Nurse With Wound had just released their first LP, as had This Heat. The other great LP on Piano Records by Steve Beresford was also on the shelves.…
Tubridge 99 -00
RESTOCKED, reduced price “I think of Akio Suzuki as a kind of magician, perhaps the most charming, engaging artist I’ve seen, Japanese musician and inventor, instrument builder and shaman Akio Suzuki is probably unknown to most of you. But we think his work is utterly captivating and crucial; it deserves a much bigger audience. Akio has been performing, teaching and building instruments for nearly 40 years. His music is simple and pure, and beautifully unworried by the rules of modern music. He …
On tape from the Judson days
"'On tape from the Judson days. Remember? When you made these things at home, on the best equipment you or your other poor friends could find? Electronic music from the 1960s. And you had that Japanese taperecorder with built-in mike; indeed that was the only piece of furniture on your tatami floor on the Lower East Side that summer of 1961.' This compact disc presents tape music recorded between 1962 and 1963 for the friends meeting once a week in a loft in NYC. The first track, 'Lucinda Pastim…
More from the Judson years Vol. 2
2004 release. Excerpts from the liner notes of More from the Judson Years (Early 60s) Instrumental-Vocal Works Vol. 2, written by Philip Corner: "Everything Max Has" (1964), Max Neuhaus solo, recorded at the ONCE Festival, 1965. "A performance of Max's taking down all of his stuff; tons of equipment filling entire stages." "Big Trombone" (1963), Jim Fulkerson improvisation over tape collage. "Homage to Revere" (1962) for ensemble of copper-bottom kitchen utensils. "Punkt" (1961) for ensemble of …
More from the Judson years Vol. 1
2004 release. "Yet not to forget that extraordinary place where so much of the new and exciting performances at that most interesting time in New York, took place. There was a Theater there; and a place for the first Happenings. An Art Gallery... and later the famous Judson Dance Theater -- the site of Philip Corner's first performance. The concert was in early 1962, January 2nd, to be exact. Excerpts from the liner notes of volume one of More from the Judson Years, Early 60s, written by Philip …
Gong +
2002 release. Gong + presents three previously-unpublished compositions by Philip Corner recorded in New York City, 1974. "Metal Meditations with Listening Center," a 29-minute long piece, is a collaboration between Philip Corner and Bill Fontana. At that time Bill Fontana was very interested in the resonance properties of every object, putting his ear to everything, and sometimes recording what he called "Listening Centers," a microphone placed in a resonating space (for example a jar, or a pip…
Exposé
Based on a series of 33 musical ideas written, printed, framed and 'exposed' in a recent installation in Milan, Exposé is the first of a new cycle of works as well as the result of Alessandro Bosetti's fascination with speech loops. The mesmerizing voice of Audrey Chen, endlessly repeating the same sentence over the entire duration of each piece, is full of musical nuances, and it rewards close attention. The result is a weird and fascinating experience, that takes the listener through a surreal…