Reissues
Palimpsest
Finally, the long awaited collaboration between Yasunao Tone and Florian Hecker is ready for release on Mego. Yasunao Tone (b. 1932, Tokyo) founded the Group Ongaku in 1960, a group devoted to creating event music and improvisational music. He began participating in the Fluxus movement in 1962, and has been in events and shows in numerous places. Tone also composed a great deal of experimental music for use in films, theater and dance pieces. Since coming to the United States in 1972, he has com…
Totentanz and other electronic works 1958-1973
by far the most anticipated early-electronic music reissue around these parts since it was announced a year or so back ; this double-disc collection of just about everything by bay-area outsider / composer warner (ne “warren”) jepson, including his totemic (... and previously creel pwned) lp “totentanz”. what we do get here : a bunch of amazing bedroom-lineage electro-acoustic experiments dating back to 1958 (!!!) - most invoking mysterious bleep-infused landscapes with tons of psychedelic organ…
Ikon and other Early Works
This CD comprises the text-sound works (1974-1980) on which Ingram Marshall concentrated throughout the seventies and falls into two parts: the works from the Fragility Cycles period (Cries Upon the Mountains, SUNG, Sibelius in His Radio Corner, and IKON) and the earlier works (Cortez, Weather Report, and The Emperor’s Birthday).
“Cortez, Weather Report, and The Emperor’s Birthday
form a kind of trilogy representing my work with “text-sound” in the
early seventies. The techniques used to gener…
James Tenney: Selected Works 1961- 1969
This recording is a reissue of the 1992 Frog Peak/Artifact CD, the first recorded collection of James Tenney’s music of the 1960s. Many of the pieces on this CD were realized at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1961 to 1969, where Tenney used Max Mathews’s digital synthesis program that eventually became Music IV. This software became the model for many of the common computer music environments of the last forty years, and was the first system of its kind available to composers. Tenney’s pieces …
Music From The Once Festival 1961-1966
With Robert Ashley, George Cacioppo, Gordon Mumma, Roger Reynolds, Donald Scavarda, David Behrman, George Crevoshay, Philip Krumm, Pauline Oliveros, Robert Sheff, Bruce Wise. Ann Arbor, Michigan, seems an unlikely site for the establishment of a major avant-garde festival that would shake the new-music community. Tucked away in America’s heartland, the city is equally removed from the Eastern metropolises whose artists pride themselves on sensing the pulse of the times, and from the nonconformis…
ShamanSong
Composer/performer Joan La Barbara (b 1947) has been an influential figure in experimental music since the early 1970s. She has devoted her career to the exploration of the human voice as a multi-faceted instrument. Going far beyond traditional boundaries, she has created works for multiple voices, chamber ensembles, music theater, orchestra and interactive technology. ShamanSong features three premieres of vintage La Barbara "sound paintings" of pensive beauty and spiritual resonance.
ShamanSo…
O, O, O, O, That Shakespeherian Rag
O,O,O,O, That Shakespeherian Rag collects six of the most important compositions from his relatively small body of work. By the late 50s Martirano had begun to freely incorporate elements of jazz and popular music. O,O,O,O, That Shakespeherian Rag(1959), one of his two magnum opuses, is a prime example of this musical synthesis—a serialist choral setting of passages from three Shakespeare plays, accompanied by a chamber orchestra that includes a jazz ensemble. Schoenberg meets bebop in a wild, i…
Columbia- Princeton Electronic Music Center 1961- 1973
Works by Bülent Arel, Charles Dodge, Ingram Marshall, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Daria Semegen, Alice Shields. The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was the first electronic music center to be established in the United States. From 1959 to the late 1970s, it was one of the premiere sound facilities in the world. The vast majority of pieces composed at the Center - approximately three hundred - were composed during this period. Some have become classics of music history. This selection, draw…
Von Goldabfischer
CD reissue, easily one of the top 5 rarest titles on the NWW list (one just went for over $900 on ebay several months back!), this late 60's debut outing from Swiss madman Anton Bruhin (poles apart from his later tape cut up work) is trafficing in a species of demented fragmentary dadaist songform disembowelment of a very post-Zappa/Beefheart meets Futura Records-sounding sort, though this actually precedes anything from the Futura camp. Nevertheless, it's anarchic spirit is clearly informed by …
the cat inside (+ B. Gysin, W. Burroughs)
An art installment in wich the artist has imagined the room 25 at the Beat Hotel rue Git-le-Coeur, where Brion Gysin and William Burroughs lived between 1957 and 1965. The room was an improvised center of intellectual and creative avant-garde. They used there tapes and tape recorders, they discovered through their work that language manipules us and that one can enlarge his perception fields using language. The question what is the use of a tape-recorder leads to the question what is the use of …
Philomel
Compositions performed by Bethany Beardslee and Lynne Weber (sopranos), Jerry Kudern and Robert Miller (pianos). The four works on this recording span a period of a decade and are among the best of Milton Babbitt’s output, tape and otherwise. Philomel, for soprano, recorded soprano, and synthesized sound, is one of the undisputed classics of electroacoustic music and this is its definitive recording. Two versions of Phonemena —one for soprano and piano, the other for soprano and tape— another vi…
Robert Ashley
Compositions performed by Barbara Held (flute), Thomas Buckner (voice), MIDI Orchestra. Robert Ashley is known primarily for his theater-based pieces and television operas. This new release presents the world premiere recordings of two of his “orchestral” pieces, Superior Seven (concerto for flute), and Tract (for orchestra and voice), where the orchestra is provided by a MIDI synthesizer. In Superior Seven, the flute floats freely in and out of an atmospheric electronic sound tapestry. It is a …
Film Music
Ussachevsky was one of the most significant pioneers in the compositon of electronic music, and one of its most potent forces. He produced the first works of “tape music,” a uniquely American synthesis of the French musique-concrète and the German pure electronic schools. He co-founded the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1959 and directed its course for the next twenty years as the leading electronic music studio in the United States. This release couples two of his most powerful a…
New Music for Four Guitars
*2022 stock* An amazing collection of works by Loris Chobanian (Sonics), Walter Hartley (Quartet forGuitars), Lejaren Hiller (Metaphors), William Ortiz (Abrazo),Stephen Funk Pearson (Mummychogs (Le Monde)) and James Piorkowski (The Struggle of Jacob), performed by Buffalo Guitar Quartet.
Mass/Seven Pious Pieces
*2022 stock* This collection of two tonal works by composers known for their non-tonal compositional style is a fine example of contemporary approaches to sacred choral music. Salvatore Martirano’s Mass is a setting of a traditional Latin Mass whilst Donald Martino’s Seven Pious Pieces sets religious texts by Robert Herrick. The vocal writing is masterful with transparent textures and flowing contrapuntal lines.
Sound Forms for Piano: Cage/ Cowell/ Johnston/ Nancarrow
Works by John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow, Ben Johnston and Henry Cowell. Performed by Robert Miller, piano.“...in the past, the point of disagreement has been between dissonance and consonance, it will be, in the immediate future, between noise and so-called musical sounds.” — John CageThe most characteristic features of American music are its eclecticism and innovation. The works presented here are perfect examples; their only common feature is that they were written for a piano altered in some w…
Of Beauty Reminiscing
Previous LP release, now available as a new version on CD with a mini-LP style CD & new artwork. "Vikki Jackman (no relation to David of Organum fame) is the pianist that we first met in Andrew Chalk's Goldfall, her impalpable chords and notes a preponderant element of that delicate music. Now Faraway Press issues her solo debut, which comes in a stunningly beautiful sleeve, a time-consumed photo in which little Vikki is portrayed near a snowman. One can't escape memory, which is often all that …
Voice Sudies
Tip! The VocSon series presents on limited editions LP records the most advanced international vocal experiments and is mainly dedicated to the documentation of sound poetry. this series includes now the new LP record by Charlemagne Palestine titled "Voice Studies". Charlemagne Palestine introduction to music or sound was first with his own voice. he began at four years old to sing versions of popular songs and operas in his own way. later on, a director of a Jewish sacred music choir auditioned…
Sharing a Sonority
Alga Marghen proudly presents a new chapter in the documentation series of Charlemagne Palestine's historical works. This CD of previously-unavailable recordings not only presents you Charlemagne Palestine activities in 1974, collaborating with some of most important experimental artists and composers from either the New York loft scene and Cal Arts, but also features world premiere recordings of Terry Jennings and The Fundamental D Flat Group. "Short & Sweet" is the title of a breathtaking duo …
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Now out of print collection of Lard Free's four albums: Lard Free, I'm Around About Midnight, III/Spirale Malax and Unnamed, all remastered, made in Japan in strictly limited editions and released in mini-lp sleeves. We managed to get a very few of this, but it is out of print now. This set comes with 'a special outer box'.