condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Gatefold sleeve with original innersleeve.

The most politically explicit record in Cornelius Cardew's discography, and the most uncomfortable - issued on the Italian Cramps label at a point in the composer's career when he had moved entirely away from the experimental music world of the Scratch Orchestra and AMM and committed himself to a form of Maoist political activism that required, in his view, an art in the service of the working class. Cardew (1936-1981) remains one of the twentieth century's most intractable figures: the student of Stockhausen who became the propagandist for a musical simplicity so radical it amounted to the repudiation of everything his early career had stood for.

Four Principles on Ireland and the accompanying pieces on this LP are songs: direct, accessible, deliberately stripped of the modernist complexity that Cardew had come to regard as a form of class exclusion. They are remarkable not because they succeed as agitprop - the ideological context that produced them has not worn well - but because they document, with unusual clarity, the crisis that afflicted the European avant-garde in the early 1970s: the question of who music was for, and whether the aesthetic radicalism of the post-war period had produced a music disconnected from the social world it claimed to address. Whatever one makes of the answers Cardew found, the question he posed has not gone away. Cramps, CRSLP 6106.