Limited and numbered edition, featuring original artwork and a newly designed, beautifully crafted collector’s sleeve with new liner notes by Bradford Bailey, and pressed on 180g vinyl. A reissue of one of the most singular documents in Deutsche Grammophon's legendary Avantgarde series - a single LP that sets two radically opposed ways of working with magnetic tape against one another, both realized within months of each other at the same address: the Studio di Fonologia della RAI in Milan.

On one side, Roland Kayn's Cybernetics III, completed in 1969. By this point Kayn had largely set aside conventional notions of authorship, building networks of electronic equipment governed by feedback and letting sound organize itself. Drawing its raw material from recordings of human and animal utterance, the piece transforms that organic foundation into a drifting, self-regulating field of low trills, swelling and thinning densities, and granular textures that migrate across the stereo image. It anticipates, with uncanny clarity, much of what synthesis, sampling, and sequencing would later make commonplace - a music that thinks in systems rather than gestures.

On the other, Luigi Nono's Contrappunto dialettico alla mente, composed the year before. A central figure of postwar serialism alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez, Nono here takes the human voice as primary material, processed through the modulation tools of the Milan studio. The work draws its title and structure from a madrigal comedy by Adriano Banchieri, Contrappunto bestiale alla mente, refracting the older composer's vocal play through the urgencies of 1968: the assassination of Malcolm X, the war in Vietnam, phonetic texts by Nanni Balestrini surfacing the names of presidents and institutions. Commissioned by the Prix Italia and then quietly withdrawn for fear of offending the American delegation, it remains among Nono's most charged and formally daring tape works, voiced by soprano Liliana Poli and the Coro da Camera della RAI under Nino Antonellini, with the studio's Marino Zuccheri at the tape machines.

Heard together, the two works chart the extremes of what the tape medium could hold at the close of the 1960s - one dissolving the composer into a self-governing machine, the other sharpening the voice into an instrument of accusation. For this edition the original analogue two-track master tapes have been newly remastered and cut by Rainer Maillard and Sidney Claire Meyer at the Emil Berliner Studios, presented with the original artwork inside a newly designed, heavyweight collector's sleeve. A limited, numbered pressing of a record long out of reach.