Edition of 300. Comes with a 8-page booklet. In 1969, while American minimalism was consolidating into its most recognizable forms, Charlemagne Palestine was conducting solitary experiments with oscillators and sine waves that only now reveal their visionary scope. This was the New York of lofts and abandoned industrial spaces, of artists pushing sound toward its physical limits - a city where the boundaries between music, performance art, and bodily endurance were dissolving. Battling the Invisible unearths two electronic studies from that crucial year, paired with rare 1972 Bösendorfer sessions - a document that illuminates the passage from pure electronics to the keyboard as an instrument of prolonged ecstasy.
Low Sounds 3 opens the record with fifteen minutes of low frequencies that seem to emerge from the very foundations of the sonic edifice. There is no development in the traditional sense, but a static presence that gradually colonizes the listening space. Think Eliane Radigue's meditative drone work filtered through a raw, almost brutalist sensibility. Sine Tone Study on Side B extends this practice for nearly nineteen minutes - sine waves overlapping, creating beating patterns, zones of interference explored with the patience of an entomologist. The two 1972 Bösendorfer fragments function as bridges toward the Palestine we know better - the strumming ecstasies, the hypnotic accumulation of overtones, the piano as a vehicle for transcendence. Here the physical approach to the keyboard is already evident - what he would describe as a "battle." The body is always present - Palestine recalls performing in Europe, "pinning your chest against your arms" - a physical ritual that transcends mere musicianship.
This release is part of Alga Marghen's The Golden Research series - a concept devised by Palestine himself around the idea of "perfect sound." The series focuses exclusively on completely unreleased archival materials, bringing to light legendary recordings that have never been heard before.
The LP includes a 8-page interview conducted by Sumner Crane and Rudolph Grey in January 1979 at Palestine's NYC loft, with Arto Lindsay present, later redacted by Alan Licht. Crane was a founding member of Mars, the seminal American No Wave/experimental rock band formed in late 1975 in New York City. It is no coincidence that by 1979 the No Wave generation sought Palestine out as a direct reference point - recognizing in his uncompromising physicality and confrontational approach to sound one of their own, a spiritual ancestor whose late-60s experiments had already mapped the territory they were now inhabiting. The insert is an anastatic reproduction of the original 12-page typescript. Unfiltered, explosive - Palestine on violence, on the body as battleground, on his Brooklyn childhood. Essential reading.
