Michael Ranta

Tip! *Edition of 300 copies, gatefold card sleeve* Mu V / Mu VI was Michael Ranta's own release in 1984, a solo LP recorded and mixed at Conny Plank's studio in Germany, and this is its first appearance on CD. It comes from Metaphon, the Belgian label that has issued much of Ranta's archive, from the Mu box with Conny Plank and Mike Lewis to Yuen Shan, Azabu, Taiwan Years, Die Mauer and the Wired live recording Kyoto 1970. Ranta is an American percussionist who settled in Cologne in the early seventies; he had played with Toshi Ichiyanagi and Takehisa Kosugi, performed live with Hartmut Geerken and led his own improvising group, Wired. Here he works alone, and the subject is percussion itself, pushed well past its usual role in a group.

Each side of the original LP holds one long suite, Mu V at twenty-two minutes and Mu VI at about twenty-three and a half. Ranta plays dozens of instruments, many of them used in rituals across different cultures and others made by himself, and the sleeve of the first edition named a long list of them, from mu-yu and mok-eo to juk-pi and bamboo tubes. Out of these he builds an abstract, closely focused web of sound. The careful mixing by Dave Huchins and Michael Zähl gives the overlapping resonances a drone-like, otherworldly quality, cut through by sharp close-up sounds and sudden accents. Nothing here is electronic, yet the depth of the stereo image recalls early tape music.

The CD adds a previously unreleased piece of almost fifteen minutes, Mwo Shr (der Stein der Singenden), played on a monumental sound sculpture by the German sculptor Günther Oellers. Mastering by EARLabs, cover reconstruction by Jeroen Wille, production by Timo van Luijk. Edition of 300 copies in a gatefold card sleeve.