Reissues
K, Weeds
Issued “privately” (via his own “Discant Records” - the label’s sole release) in 1971, this was the recorded debut of composer & author (his “Techniques of the Contemporary Composer” was a big help in my post-collegiate years) David Cope, consisting of two side-length pieces for live instruments, demonic loud-whisper vocals, and analog electronic processing (according to the liner notes, Cope played back “early tapes of his own works,altered through a Moog synthesizer at the Electronic St…
Aaffluss Raaffluss
Killer 1988 “art-gallery” edition - each copy of the original LP was hand-painted by the composer in a loose, water-colour smear / drip style beautifully reproduced here, albeit utilizing the same image for each replica - covering a pair of beautiful, drifting piano pieces composed & executed by Giuseppe Morrocchi in 1980 & 1984.Seemingly influenced by Charlemagne Palestine’s “Strumming Music” approach - coupled perhaps with Lubomyr Melnyk’s “Continuous Mode” - the slow rise from decisive…
Pandémonium
Herein lies the entire recorded output - save for an appearance on the 1983 Broken Flag “Crusade” compilation tape - of French Musique Concrète composer Jean-Baptiste Barriere, issued as a pair of LPs on Atem magazine’s short-lived record label - where they sat, somewhat uncomfortably, alongside canonic RIO sides by Univers Zero, Art Zoyd, This Heat, Aqsak Maboul, Present, and Fall of Saigon.Composed from 1975-1976, then issued as two separate LPs in 1979, the “Pandemonium” suite encompas…
Luxicon II, Echospace
Gil Trythall’s two late-60s “Country” themed Moogsploitation LPs are of course the gilded arches that keep the genre airborne, but it’s this 1980 collection on the minuscule, West Virginia-based Pandora records imprint that’s always been the real show of Trythall’screative vision. While “Luxicon II's” gorgeous deep-bass filtering, runaway arpeggiations, & spot-on “Electro” -tinged drum-machine gork is the stuff of legend, I maintain that “Echospace” beats a good chunk of time-lag architect Terry…
People The Sky
Nicely timed replication of this 1969 Vanguard “Cardinal” series LP, offering a pair of side-length “Automatic” Buchla pieces by Composer / Producer Michael Czajkowski - then and now known mostly in music circles for his odd, post-production contributions to Buffy Saint-Marie’s “Illuminations” LP.Recorded at NYU’s famed Intermedia Center - see Charlemagne Palestine’s 60s Electronic Music, Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples” - this one falls squarely into the “hands-off” master-patch canon o…
Once
The soundtrack to a seldom-seen 1974 art film by Mort Hellig - featuring a total cast of 3, playing "Creation," "Humanity," and "Destruction," respectively - Israeli Composer Aminadav Aloni's peculiar, minimal Electronic Music cues come from a more compositional bent than much of the era's Synthetic dabblings. Over the course of 8 song-length segments of hand-played melodic refrain, a certain mood is established of laissez-faire, devil-may-care-ish-ness that is, frankly, quite welcome - s…
Paesaggi Intravisti
The sole solo release by Il Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza AND post-MEV ensemble "Elettronica Viva" member Walter Branchi, "composizione elettronica realizzata in occasione della mostra "Il luogo del lavoro" XVII Triennale di Milano." with Mauro Bortolotti - a student & assistant of Pietro Grossi at the latter's Florence studio. Branchi jointly founded the Studio R7 in 1967 w/ Franco Evangelista, Gino Marinuzzi Jr., "Syn-Ket" inventor & John Eaton collaborator Paolo "Paul" Ketoff, Eg…
Homo Faber, Dum Spiro Spero
Creel Pone treatment of this majorly slept-on set of dark, minimal, surrealist electro-acoustic & Musique Concrète pieces from the Polish composer Joanna Bruzdowicz, a member of the GRM under Pierre Schaeffer’s tutelage between 1968 & 1970 & long-term collaborator of Agnes Varda’s, for whom she scored several films from the mid-80’s on, including “Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse.” The LP in question (the only one to feature her electronic work) consists of the three-part “Homo Faber” suite - compose…
Tiens! Les Bourgeons Eclatent...
Souffle Continu Records present the first ever reissue of Workshop De Lyon's Tiens! Les Bourgeons Eclatent..., originally released in 1978. The collective methodology of the Workshop De Lyon led to the creation of the Association Searching for an Imaginary Folklore (ARFI) in 1977, their aims were very much a mission statement "encourage improvisation, spread diverse musical styles and provide means of expression to others with similar ideas, establish a folklore..." Their reference was the As…
La Chasse De Shirah Sharibad
Souffle Continu Records present the first ever reissue of Workshop De Lyon's La Chasse De Shirah Sharibad, originally released in 1975. In France, in the years 1960-1970, musicians pondered over how to transpose the political struggle of free jazz onto a completely different political terrain. One of the first to do so was pianist François Tusques (agitator, theorist and militant) who recorded 1965's Free Jazz (CACK 020LP), and then continued with Le Nouveau Jazz (1967), French equivalents to th…
The Harmony of the World
Fascinating one-off Computer Music curio from 1979, released, incredibly, on Book-of-the Month Records, "a Division of Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc." Much like Laurie Spiegel's Voyager "Golden Record" piece, "Harmonices Mundi," Johannes Kepler's star-math was used as a template for the cyclical periods of a series of Digital Oscillator algorithms, which were then sent spinning in & around each other. The result is not unlike the Pythagoron™ LP, or even Thorkell Sigurbjornsson's somewhat contempor…
The Soundhouse
When you think of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, we’d wager most of the time it’s in context of their seminal ‘60s and ’70-s output. However, The Soundhouse (1983) proves there was much to marvel at in their early ‘80s catalogue, too, summing up the great advances in technology between their Radiophonic Workshop - 21 collection and their acquisition of a Fairlight CMI - the first digital sampling synth - which is thoroughly, imaginatively demonstrated throughout. Horses for courses and all that b…
Epitaph For Venus
Mental Experience present a reissue of Galactic Explorers' Epitaph For Venus. Another album from the Pyramid label shrouded in mystery and produced by Toby Robinson in Cologne, circa 1974. Kosmische and head sounds with plenty of Minimoog, analog synths/keyboards, effects, loops, tape manipulation, treated percussions, etc., courtesy of Galactic Explorers, an electronic, minimal, ambient krautrock trio featuring Reinhard Karwatky (Dzyan). Take a trip to the inner regions of your mind, see ancien…
Tapes
Hamburg’s Growing Bin go back to the roots of Trance, as in hypnotic electronic rhythms for dancing, with this Baldelli-favoured suite produced in Germany 1983-86. “If you’ve kept a keen ear to the underground, you may have noticed a trance revival creeping into the dance floors and darkrooms of late; a post ironic return to the 64 bar breakdowns and peak time key changes of your serotonin drenched youth. So what’s this then? Has Growing Bin gone from groundbreaker to copycat? Dig a little deepe…
Meta
Fascinating collection of Minimal Sound-Art / Musique Concrète works by the obscure Belgian artist Paul A.R. Timmermans, privately issued in 1983 - with the aid & additional insight of his neighbor & friend Badouin Oosterlynck - in a perfectly minimal edition: a lead slug embedded with the artist's name is clamped onto the top left of an otherwise blank LP sleeve, with only a text-insert in four languages either affixed or inside. Containing four pieces composed between 1980 & 1982 of a very pec…
Cordes-Ci, Cordes-Ça, La Discordatura
1972 split release on Pathé Marconi EMI by the GMEB - Groupe de musique expérimentale de Bourges - founders & wife-and-husband team of Françoise Barrière & Christian Clozier. This is the first issue of Barrière's work & only the second of Clozier's after the Perspectives Musicales "Lettre À Une Demoiselle / Dichotomie / Petite Suite / D'Une Multitude En Fête" split w/ Jacques Lejeune (Creel Pone #073). Barrière's three-part "Cordes-Ci, Cordes-Ça" coats the A-side, electronically warping her Harp…
Abattage
Recorded in 1981 & issued “privately” in 1983 (on Jean Marc Foussat’s own Pyjama imprint) this is a screamer of a record, taking in a decidedly unique approach to minimal musique concrète assemblage (there’s an emphasis on presenting banal, interstitial in-situ sound-events [coughs, footsteps] that reminds of Luc Ferrari one minute ... before a sudden barrage of jackhammer-noise, plunderphonic mangling [is that ... Barbra Streisand !?!], and high-end oscillator scree takes over pushing this clos…
7 Trumps from the Tarot Cards
Yet another follow-up; actually in this case a precursor to a prior Creel Pone, Ruth White’s “7 Trumps from the Tarot Cards • Pinions” (LS 86066) - originally released just eight notches before her “Flowers of Evil” (LS 86058) in the discography of the now-legendary Mercury Limelight series - in between, Pierre Henry’s “Mass for Today • The Green Queen” (LS 86065), the Percussion of Strasborg’s “Signals” (LS 86064) , Fifty Foot Hose’s “Cauldron” (LS 86062), “Response: Electronic Music from Norwa…
The Pulses of Time
Creel Pone of a 1981 LP privately released by the University of East Anglia containing three sparse Musique Concrète pieces composed between 1974 and 1979 at the GRM and UEA studios by New Zealand born/bred composer Denis Smalley. Widely considered to be one the classics of early British electro-acoustic music - alongside Trevor Wishart’s “Journey Into Space” & “Red Bird”, Desmond Leslie’s “Music of the Future”, and Basil Kirchin’s “Worlds Within Worlds”), the three pieces on “Pulses” each wor…
Pythagoron Inc.
Reproduction of a rather odd, late 70s upstate New York “Electronic Music for Healing” lineage LP, credited only to the corporation "Pythagoron Inc. 1977;” about whom we know very little - and maybe it’s best it stays that way. Explaining the music enclosed - encased within, really, without resorting to euphemism is rather hard to do here; so I’ll just give you a rundown of what I hear:The A-side starts out with a surge of White Noise, then suddenly out of nowhere an out of time Echoplexed Dru…