Dan Constantinescu, Octavian Nemescu, Ștefan Niculescu, Nicolae Brînduș

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (light ring wear)

Romania's experimental music scene developed in a brief but fertile period of relative cultural openness following the death of Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and the early years of Ceaușescu's rule - a window in the mid-1960s that Nemescu himself described as a real Big Bang: "an explosion in all arts." A small group of composers at the Bucharest Conservatory formed an informal resistance called OCL (after their initials: Octavian, Corneliu, Lucian) and began producing music that had almost no public existence outside closed academic circles. Their relationship to Romanian folk archetypes, to spectral and drone-based thinking developed independently of the French school, and to ritual and ecology as artistic frameworks gave this scene its distinctive character. Electrecord - the sole Romanian state label under communism - occasionally published their work.

This LP presents four composers central to that generation. Octavian Nemescu's Concentric is among the key documents of Romanian spectralism before the term existed: harmonic circles that expand outward from a central drone, the circular structures extended in 1980 with an electronic component. Ștefan Niculescu's heterophonic language - based on what he termed the "ison," a drone-related approach drawing on Byzantine church music and Balkan folk intonation - appears here in characteristic form. Dan Constantinescu and Nicolae Brînduș complete the set, the latter with music from his PHTORA cycle (1968-72), which Brînduș described as five degrees of structuring collective improvisation.

A rare and important document. Original Electrecord pressing.