Reissues
1939
This release reissues Robert Rutman's Pogus Lp (P201-1) and includes an additional track. Rutman (b. 1930) has been building and performing on his homemade metallic instruments for many years. This recording features his buzz chime, steel cello, and bow chime, along with tabla, Tibetan horn, and Rutman's vocal chants. Rutman caresses the metal, drawing out eerie drones and overtones that buzz and trumpet. The music in turn can be as fragile as glass or reach the depths of resonance, as if one ha…
String Quartet
"'String Quartet Describing The Motions of Large Real Bodies' was composed as the potential orchestra for a Robert Ashley opera based on the text of 'In Sara, Mencken, Christ and Beethoven There Were Men And Women'. When the work was composed, in 1972, it was clear that a huge change in electronic instrumentation was just beginning, a change that would involve computers and sound producing devices as yet undreamed of. The piece consists of an electronic orchestra of 42 sound producing modules. T…
Atalanta (Acts of God)
Originally released on Lovely Music in 1985. Robert Ashley makes use of the story of Atalanta
- a royal princess, discarded by her family, who was raised by the
animals to become the fastest-running human, and who was later reclaimed
by her father to marry her off for dynastic purposes - to present the
character aspects of the "successful suitor". These three aspects of
character are presented in the opera as anecdotes about three
extraordinary men of our times: Max Ernst (surrealist paint…
Celestial Excursions
2005 release. Following the ground-breaking work, Dust (LCD 1006CD), godfather of experimental opera Robert Ashley returns with Celestial Excursions. Ashley's endeavor explores remarkably uncharted territory -- the kind of language that is common among "old" people who talk all the time or not at all, to anyone passing by or to themselves. The opera premiered at the Hebbel Theater in Berlin, before coming to The Kitchen for its U.S. premiere in April 2003. Celestial Excursions delves into the wi…
Dust
Dust is an opera by Robert Ashley and Yukihiro Yoshihara (video direction) whose imaginary setting is a street corner anywhere in the world, where those who live on the fringes of society gather to talk, to each other and to themselves, about life-changing events, missed opportunities, memory, loss, and regret. Five "street people" recount the memories and experiences of one of their group, a man who has lost his legs in some unnamed war. As part of the experience of losing his legs, he began a …
Your Money My Life Goodbye
An opera commissioned by Bayerisher Rundfunk Munich's Hörspiel und Medienkunst department about an internationally renowned swindler, who almost took down the European and American banking system. Featuring the voices of Robert Ashley, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jackie Humbert, and Joan La Barbara. Recorded and mixed by Tom Hamilton. Robert Ashley on the piece: "Your Money My Life Goodbye is one of forty-nine vocal-ensemble pieces of various lengths (from ten minutes to ninety minutes or more) …
eL/Aficionado
1994 release. The fourth opera in Robert Ashley's Now Eleanor's Idea tetralogy: Junior, Jr.'s story. A group of scenes from the life of an agent. The scenes are a kind of debriefing to a jury of interrogators, in which the Interrogators challenge the agent in various forms of musical dialogue. The mood of the opera owes much to American society's ongoing fascination with espionage and with the character of those people who lead double lives. Featuring Thomas Buckner as the agent and Jacqueline H…
Yellow Man With Heart With Wings
1990 CD issue of Robert Ashley's 1978 piece for voice and electronics. A two-part composition with narration (part one in Spanish and part two in heavily altered English) commissioned by public radio station KUNM in Albuquerque, this music has a plain, serene beauty. Part one is a narration by Guillermo Grenier in dreamy, flatly inflected Spanish, backed by a four-note synthesizer track, and punctuated by mysterious, heavily processed vocalizations. Ashley throws in extensive sound washes and ot…
Music of Richard Lerman 1964 - 1987
Richard Lerman has spent over four decades gathering sounds that most of us never notice, amplifying the mundane until it reveals itself as magic. This deluxe two-CD set, featuring his classic 1982 Folkways LP Travelon Gamelon (Music for Bicycles) plus selected works spanning 1964 to 1987, offers an essential survey of one of American experimental music's most questing spirits. Born in 1944, Lerman belongs to the John Cage and David Tudor continuum of composers for whom all sound is potentially …
Natural Selection
Tip! 2000 release After Paradigm Discs released the 1976 LP by Anal Magic and Rev. Dwight Frizzell, the true scope and diversity of this man's activities became more apparent. First, there were the countless unused remnants from the original LP recording sessions, then the many films and their soundtracks, the regular radio shows, the dreamlanddiaries web page, the large scale Intermedia events, performing weddings and leading the live group Black Crack Review. For 25 years there has been a dyna…
40 years and one
This man and his work represent the real "speculum musicae" of the past 40 years. The example of his music embodies a lifelong commitment to an integral radicalism. . . . this is a venerable tradition that Philip has written so eloquently about, and continued in his music. A tradition that stems from "Charlie" Ives through John Cage and Lou Harrison. All of these composers would ultimately admonish us to do one thing: to open our ears--and LISTEN! —Peter GarlandPerhaps the single most striking …
Experimenting with household chemicals
Experimenting With Household Chemicals' is a 1995 album by the laregly elusive post-minimalist Downtown experimenter Peter Zummo. Whilst possibly best known for his work on classic Arthur Russell recordings, he's been a mainstay of New York's vaunted experimental scene since the the mid-late '70s, but only released three solo albums proper. This is his 2nd, exploring "a trombone-specific method for generating melodic movement, as well as a collection of related, "spinoff" melodic material for en…
Day for night
This CD represents a 25-year collaboration between renowned British avant-garde improviser Peter Cusack and instrument builder and sculptor Max Eastley. Cusack and Eastley have made these short episodes together between busy careers recording experimental music alongside artists such as Nicolas Collins, Steve Beresford, and David Toop). With numerous releases on ReR and Incus, the two musicians are mainstays of the British improvised music world, and Eastley is particularly prominent for his wor…
Electronic Works
One of our favourite "pure drone" album consisting of 3 amazing long tracks by Pauline Oliveros. I of IV was made in July 1966 at the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio and was first released by CBS alongside works by 2 other young composers - 'Come out' by Steve Reich and 'Night music' by Richard Maxfield. It is really only in recent years (born out of the more radical elements of dance music, Electronica and ambient music) that music like this is being rediscovered by a growing numb…
Pure Gaze
“Block is an electro-acoustic and modern instrumental composer whose recorded compositions combine layered, processed wind and string instruments with processed sounds from sections of field recordings she has collected from various natural landscapes. Her performances include minimalistic scored musical sections played live by a quintet accompanied by taped material , often sounds of field recordings, or the same quintet previously recorded and electronically manipulated. block herself “…
Paura
N.A.D.M.A. was officially born between August and the beginning of September 1972 during time spent in a little village in the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines. The identity and musical orientation of the collective centered on the convergence of heterogeneous interests and sensibilities coming from avant-garde jazz experiences liberated by post-free currents, from classical studies, or from musicians also active as visual artists who had cultivated an instrumental practice utilizing spontaneous …
In Streams (Volume 1)
This is the fifth CD release by Morphogenesis, and the first since 1998. Although Morphogenesis do not play live very often, it is certainly their preferred working situation, where the interaction between the space, the people present and the available equipment create a variety of different situations. Substantial extracts from nearly all of their recent concerts appear on this, and a second volume. There is also the inclusion of one studio recording per CD. Perhaps one reason for their infreq…
Gyromancy
Mnemonists eventually evolved into the incredible Biota band. Before they did they released a series of LPs, including the art work that surrounds and informs their approach to improvisation. As Mnemonists their work is darker and more ominous than that of Biota, but the process was still the same: post-processing live improvisation to construct larger works that stood on their own two feet as compositional pieces. Think AMM, Organum, Faust; Mnemonists embraced their strategies but created somet…
Triptych of poisoners
2005 release. Milk From Cheltenham is the first in a series of Alga Marghen editions documenting the activities of the It's War Boys underground label, founded by Amos (of The Homosexuals fame) in the late 1970s. The original LP was issued in an edition limited to 300 copies. The material was recorded from 1979 to 1981 but wasn't released until 1983 due to problems with the silkscreened sleeve. The band only put out this record, a real hidden gem. Lepke said that he wanted it to sound like …
Zyklus - Four Realizations By Max Neuhaus
2004 release. Four previously unreleased realizations of Karlheinz Stockhausen's "Zylus" (different recordings than the one featured on the Columbia LP Electronics and Percussion -- Five Realizations. Recorded 1959-68. The term "New York School" refers to a circle of composers. "Zyklus" was written in 1959 and is one of the first solo pieces to utilize such a large number of percussion instruments (twenty-one). When Max Neuhaus first started to play this piece there were only three percussi…