condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Gatefold sleeve.

A genuinely peculiar career: John McGuire was born in California, studied with Karl Kohn, Ingolf Dahl and Seymour Shifrin, then moved to Europe in 1966 and spent the next thirty-two years in Germany, studying with Stockhausen, Penderecki and Koenig and eventually working at the WDR electronic music studio in Cologne. His music fused American minimalism with European serial-structural thinking before either side recognised the synthesis was possible.

Side A: Frieze for Four Pianos (1970-74), commissioned retroactively by WDR in 1976, performed here by Pi-hsien Chen, Deborah Richards, Herbert Henck and Gérard Frémy, conducted by Péter Eötvös. Twenty-two minutes of pure cyclic form, what McGuire calls "wheels and wheels and wheels," modelled on Joyce and Yeats. Side B: Pulse Music III (1978), realised at WDR Cologne in the same studio where Stockhausen made Studie II, twenty-four minutes of voltage-controlled synthesizer counterpoint. Sleeve design by the label's eponymous owner Michael F. Bauer.