International Musique Concrete Assembly

condition (record/cover): NM / NM 

Edition of 77 numbered copies (this is 77/77) with hand-made sleeve and two inserts.

A collective outing on Frans de Waard's Korm Plastics imprint, the International Musique Concrete Assembly gathered together some of the most committed European practitioners of the form around a single LP: de Waard himself, Das Synthetische Mischgewebe (the Berlin-based project of Guido Huebner, active since the early Eighties), and Jos Smolders, the Dutch composer whose studio practice with tape, modular synthesis, and field recording has made him one of the quieter but most rigorous figures of the Low Countries electronic scene.

The collaborative premise fits Korm Plastics's mid-period identity. De Waard had already begun (with Modern Musique Concrete Composers Volume 1: The Netherlands, 1988) to position the label as a clearinghouse for late-Eighties musique concrète activity across the Netherlands and Belgium. IMCA extended the project outward to Germany via Huebner's Das Synthetische Mischgewebe, establishing a direct transnational current that would characterise the Korm Plastics catalogue into the Nineties.

Smolders's working method (objets sonores in the Pierre Schaeffer tradition, read through a late-modernist interest in surface and texture that Smolders himself has traced to his readings of Schaeffer beginning in 1981 and Carl Andre's Yucatan poem-series) gives the record its characteristic compositional density. An important point of contact between three of the key figures of European concrète, and one of the more deliberate programmatic statements on the Korm Plastics shelf.