Reissues
Minimum: Maximum / Orient: Occident
Perhaps best known for his piano work Book of Sounds these two works by German composer Hans Otte were composed in the 1970s. In that decade his aesthetic creed became increasingly clear: "the search for the character and individuality of sound as such, which must be rediscovered and re-experienced independent of superimposed structures. The composer understands the dialogue with sounds as the discovery of their nature." (Ute Schalz-Laurenze)While Hans Otte was an enthusiastic, one might say vis…
One
Comes with 8 page booklet. Originally released in 1973 as a private press LP, 'One' is the first document of GAEB, a mysterious sextet of Californian improvisors. Formed in the late 60's by artist Richard Waters and jazz drummer Lee Charlton, the group made music using Waters's kinetic sculptures. His most important creation was the waterphone, a sort of acoustic synthesizer which used water in its resonators to produce warbling, tone bending vibrations similar to th edeep sea harmonies of humpb…
Les danseurs de la pluie
Either available separately as a 3" CD, or as a bonus disk within the new Tazartes boxset. "Les Danseurs de la Pluie", which gives title to the complete anthology, is a 12-minute mini-CD, presented on creative disc, including four previously unavailable tracks. Two 1977 killer recordings from the 'Eclipse Totale' sessions of a very wild and residential nature; and two colossal new pieces recorded in 2005.
Pondfloorsample
These two discs represent some of Gen Ken Montgomery's sound art and compositional work from 1981-2001. Pondfloorsample is a collection of sonic explorations utilizing common devices meant to hold something other than sound. As with much of his sound work, the sonic material contains many sounds of everyday life. Having composed extensively for multi-channels, Pondfloorsample was specifically designed as a stereo audio piece enabling Montgomery to reach a larger audience."His work always begins …
Freedom Of The City 2001 - Small Groups
Highlights from small group recordings from the 2001 Freedom of the City festival featuring artists such as Steve Beresford (electronics), John Butcher (saxes), Lol Coxhill (sax), Paul Rutherford (trombone), Phil Minton, and more in various arrangements.
Middle of the Moment
Continuing the definitive Fred Frith edition, this is the CD based on Fred’s music for the second film he made with Humbert and Penzel – following nomads – that features, along with Fred’s compositions and re-workings, a restless and gripping unfolding of atmospheric locations, tuareg and other musics, ethongraphic material and times captured. A collage or a soundwork rather than a straightforwardly musical composition, this is a serious and unfairly marginalised piece (because it falls between …
Hortexte
Six radio texts by Ferdinand Kriwet in a beautifully designed 3 LP Picture Discs Luxury Box. Ferdinand Kriwet (born in Duesseldorf in 1942) is a multimedia artist and poet who has produced many seminal films and sound works for radio and television, in particular throughout the 1960's and 1970's. His works 'Apollo Amerika' 1969 and 'Campaign' 1973, rank today as outstanding artistic documents of these spectacular events in the history of mankind. Kriwet created the work 'Apollo Amerika' whilst i…
Air. ratio
*2025 stock* "My listening project (about controlled mechanical ventilation in new buildings) is multiple : it can function as a sound study, a sonic data bank, a CD of environments, and finally as a music. This CD isintended to be an object without distinctive function. This is precisely what interests me: the question of listening, at home. "
"As his installations have repeatedly demonstrated, Eric La Casa has a keen ear for those phenomena of regular (or less) occurrences whose musical chara…
Jetsun Mila
Beautiful extended ambient work from Eliane Radigue, a composer known for her work with magnetic tape and Arp Synthesizer, and who studied under Pierre Schaeefer and Pierre Henry in the late 50's. Her compositions are often drone-like, impeccably crafted electronic sounds which seem to move in a continual flow around the listener. She has created many meditative works since the late 1970s, mostly based on Tibetan Buddhist subject matter.Jetsun Mila is inspired by the life of Milarepa, a great yo…
Songs of Milarepa
Originally released on Lovely Music in 1998. Double CD of all five of Elaine Radigue's songs in tribute to the Tibetan saint and poet from the 11th century. Two of the tracks dates from Radigue's first release in 1983, two are previously unreleased and the final 62-minute track was previously issued as a sole CD in 1987. The material is performed by Radigue (synthesizer and recording), Robert Ashley (English voice), and Lama Kunga Rinpoche (Tibetan voice). Radigue was born in France and has stud…
Chrysalide
In Bocalises, Denis Dufour explored with virtuosity the sound possibilities of a sole sound source, glass jars broken, crushed and mixed to themselves to infinity. Fifteen years later, he takes up the material and, with digital tools, presents a retouched and recoloured version to give a new power and poetic richness to the initial energy.
Rainforest II / Mureau
This historic release of a simultaneous performance by David Tudor and John Cage of Rainforest II and Mureau, recorded live by Radio Bremen on May 5, 1972, preserves the only surviving performance of the second of Tudor’s "Rainforest" series. In addition, it documents one of the precious few recorded collaborations between these two visionaries. In 1970 Cage composed the piece called Mureau, in which phrases from Thoreau’s journals (in particular, passages which touch on the subject of music) ar…
Three Works For Live Electronics
Originally released on Lovely Music as Pulsers / Untitled in 1984. This re-release includes an additional piece from David Tudor, Phonemes. Pulsers explores the world of rhythms created electronically by analog, rather than digital, circuitry. With analog circuitry, the time-base common to the rhythms can be varied in many different ways by a performer, and can eventually become unstable. Untitled is a part of a series of works composed in the 1970s that were developed through experiments in gen…
Invisible Gold
David Rosenboom (b. 1947) has been widely acclaimed as a pioneer in American experimental music since the 1960's. He is a composer, performer, conductor, interdisciplinary artist, author, and educator having explored ideas in his work about the spontaneous evolution of forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques for ensembles, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art, computer music systems, interactive multi-media, compositional algorithms, and the structure of the brain and nervou…
My Dear Siegfried
"David Behrman has been active as a composer and artist since the 1960s. Over the years he has made sound and multimedia installations for gallery spaces as well as musical compositions. Sam Behrman and Siegfried Sassoon met in 1920, when Behrman, then a young writer working at The New York Times, was sent to interview Sassoon at the start of the English poet's postwar American lecture tour. In that tour Sassoon was billed as 'England's Soldier-Poet.' He had a reputation both as a war hero and …
Leapday Night
A series of three pieces/suites documenting David Behrman's evolved interactive computer music practice from the 1980s, featuring Rhys Chatham and Ben Neill (trumpet/mutantrumpet), Fluxus mainstay Takehisa Kosugi (violin), and Behrman himself on electronics. This essential recording captures Behrman's mature work with listening machines: thickly layered liquid sounds created through a complex computer music system which absorbs, actually hears, the sounds of instrumentalists, then plays off thei…
On the Other Ocean
Originally released on Lovely Music in 1978 and now available on CD, this essential recording documents David Behrman's groundbreaking exploration of interactive computer-human improvisation—among the earliest works to establish real-time dialogue between musicians and microprocessor systems.
On the Other Ocean is an improvisation by Maggi Payne and Arthur Stidfole centered around six pitches which, when played, activate electronic pitch-sensing circuits connected to the "interrupt" line and inp…
Oramics
Comes with 16 page booklet. Daphne Oram is best-known for the design of her Oramics system, and also for co-founding the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1957, but until the release of this material, the only easily-available piece of music by her on CD was the 8-minute long "Four Aspects." There was also a 7" EP from 1962 on HMV, released as part of the Listen, Move and Dance series that was specifically designed to help children dance. Although the short pieces on this record are very basic, it cou…
Solo
It took long enough. The electric kit finally gets a chance to speak for itself. I won't try to describe it, but it's been pretty much my main work of the last three years. I can't say it reminds me of anything else but, naturally, I suggest you buy it.
Hinterland
Carlos Roque Alsina is an Argentinean-born composer who tends to mix acoustic and taped sounds together in a manner that evokes natural sounds to some degree, something of a more programmatically inclined Iannis Xenakis. The title piece combines piano and percussion with taped sounds that often possess an organ-like quality. While the acoustic instruments dance around each other in intricate patterns, the tape heaves and respires ominously, depicting the sort of backcountry that's unsettling in …