condition (record/cover): NM / EX- (minimal sticker removal residue on front)

Two side-long works, recorded in Zagreb in 1973 and 1976. One is called Kitch-Varijacije (Kitsch Variations). The other is called Bajka (Fable). The gap between those titles and what the music contains is part of the point.

Acezantez was a Zagreb-based ensemble organized around the pianist, harpsichordist, and composer Dubravko Detoni, a figure whose importance within Yugoslav experimental music is inversely proportional to his international recognition. The ensemble combined notated scores, graphic notation, free improvisation, and electroacoustic manipulation with an instrumentation that included electric organ, voice, winds, strings, tuba, and glockenspiel - alongside the voice of the actress Veronika Kovacic, who brings to the music an operatic flexibility and an idiosyncratic sense of humor. Detoni had already released music on the Philips Prospective 21e Siècle series, placing him in the company of Xenakis, MEV, and the French electroacoustic avant-garde. This LP is his most extreme document for Jugoton, the Yugoslav state label that nonetheless published a series of remarkable avant-garde recordings through the 1970s.

The music is genuinely hard to describe. Kitch-Varijacije moves through an intricate interplay of percussive squeals, pitchless woodwinds, dislocated keyboard fragments, and vocal onomatopeia that never settles into either improvisation or composition in any received sense, comprised of rich textural pieces constructed from an unnotatable, intricate interplay of percussive squeals, scrapes and rattles, parched and pitchless woodwinds, and dislocated keyboards, with stylistic affinities with early Nurse With Wound. Bajka opens windows: folk fragments, popular music, found sound and musique concrète intrusions, Cage-ian piano chords, stretches of near-total silence. The Dada edge is real and it is not decorative. Nothing else in the Jugoton catalog sounds like it. Almost nothing else anywhere does. Original 1977 pressing.