condition (record/cover): EX- (marks not affecting play) / EX- (light sticker removal glue residue on front)

One of the more improbable and significant documents to have emerged from the Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series - the legendary production project that Brown ran for Mainstream Records between 1960 and 1973, issuing eighteen LPs of avant-garde music at a moment of extraordinary institutional generosity toward the experimental. The backstory, recounted by Alcides Lanza, is direct: Brown attended concerts by the composers/performers group [c/pg] in New York and, responding to the work he heard, offered to produce an LP. The result gathers six composers, all of them trained in the ferment of the Latin American avant-garde before relocating or studying in New York, performing their own work: Gerardo Gandini (Argentina), whose Soria Moria for ensemble is a study in timbres and textures, Gandini later becoming musical director of the Teatro Colón and Astor Piazzolla's pianist in the Sexteto Nuevo Tango; César Bolaños (Peru), whose Divertimento III for ensemble and electronics fuses semi-aleatory process with electronic extension; Marlos Nobre (Brazil), whose Tropicale alternates between frantic outbursts and sustained quiet; Oscar Bazán (Argentina), with Sonogramas for two pianos; Manuel Enríquez (Mexico), with Díptico I for flute and piano; and Lanza himself, whose Penetrations II for mixed ensemble with voices and electronic extensions is the most ambitious and extended work on the record.

All six composers had passed through the Centro Latinoamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales at the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, directed by Alberto Ginastera - one of the most consequential hubs for Latin American new music of the 1960s. A document of a moment of genuine cross-cultural avant-garde convergence, recorded at Columbia Studios, New York.