Reissues
Still Lives
Three amazing works for pure waves and instruments. Lucier has pioneered in many areas of music composition and performance, including the notation of performers’ physical gestures, the use of brain waves in live performance, the generation of visual imagery by sound in vibrating media, and the evocation of room acoustics for musical purposes. His recent works include a series of sound installations and works for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and orchestra in which, by means of close tuni…
Theme
Theme features three works from Alvin Lucier. Music for Piano with Magnetic Strings is a work in which the strings of a piano sound by themselves. Several EBows (small electromagnets used primarily with electric guitars) which would cause the piano strings to vibrate and sound are placed on the strings of the piano. The pianist works from a prose score which describes the process and suggests she freely position and reposition five EBows on the piano strings, creating strands of sounds of v…
Crossings
1990 CD reissue of prime-era Lucier product, with works from 1982-85. Features 'In Memoriam Jon Higgins (for clarinet in A and slow-sweep pure wave oscillator)', 'Septet for Three Winds, Four Strings and Pure Wave Oscillator', and 'Crossings (for small orchestra with slow-sweep pure wave oscillator)'. Said slow-sweep pure wave oscillator produces slowly swept pure waves that oscillate (on separate occasions) a clarinet, three winds and four strings, and a small orchestra. Maximum beat frequency …
Still and moving lines of silence in families of hyperbolas
Double CD release of of a four-part work, initiated in 1972 and recorded as presented here in 1983-4 and 2001. This reissues two long-out-of-print LPs on Lovely, with four added parts (the strings) released for the first time. A series of mostly solo instrument works for the likes of: clarinet, marimba, viola, voice, xylophone, violin, flute, glockenspiel, cello, horn, vibraphone. Performed by: Thomas Ridenour, William Winant, Dan Panner, Rebecca Armstrong, Conrad Harris, Susan…
I Am Sitting In A Room
In this fascinating exploration of acoustical phenomena, Alvin Lucier slips from the domain of language to that of music in the course of 40 minutes and 32 repetitions of a simple paragraph of text.In I am sitting in a room, several sentences of recorded speech are simultaneously played back into a room and re-recorded there many times. As the repetitive process continues, those sounds common to the original spoken statement and those implied by the structural dimensions of the room are reinforc…
Music on a long thin wire
**Legendary sound installation for audio oscillator and electronic monochord** First released on Lovely Music in 1980. A 50-foot length of taut wire passes through the poles of a large magnet and is driven by an oscillator; the vibrations of the wire are miked at either end, amplified and broadcast in stereo. The thin wire is set vibrating four times at four different frequencies; what results is not the low drone one might expect from a long, vibrating wire, but a complexity of evocative, ether…
Maritime Rites
Featuring the foghorns and other maritime sounds of the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and solo improvisations by John Cage, Joseph Celli, Clark Coolidge, Alvin Curran, Jon Gibson, Malcolm Goldstein, Steve Lacy, George Lewis, Pauline Oliveros, and Leo Smith "In the middle 1970s I began to formulate ideas and projects leading to the making of music outside the concert halls-often in large open and naturally beautiful sites. Ports, rivers, lakes, caves, quarries, fields, and woods, always ready sources of …
Proposte Sonore
Seven electronic compositions from the end of the 60s by the soundscape pioneer Albert Mayr (b. 1943), incredible experimentations from near 40 years ago sounding so “contemporary”, today more than ever.“In the fifties and sixties of the past century electro-acoustic music was a very élitist affair; professional equipment was expensive, not easy to find and could be afforded - in sufficient quantity to build a full-scale studio - only by institutions such as universities or broadcasting corporat…
Hora Harmonica
"Hora Harmonica," realized in 1983 at the Pietro Grossi S 2F M (Studio di fonologia musicale di Firenze), is not a proper piece of music, but conceptual art inspired by the physics of sound. Albert Mayr proposes a harmonic clock, a model of non-linear time.. “When we slow down a sound many times, all the way below 15 cps approximately, we perceive as a series of discrete pulses. In a physical sense it remains a sound, but not for human perception. Try now to imagine an extremely slow 'sound' whe…
A New York Minute
"Alan Licht wears many hats. Over the years, he's been a curator of music as well as a tireless performer. And he's as well-known an author as he is a musician. It's one thing to have eclectic tastes; it's another to make a practice of them. While Licht's earlier records have seamlessly melded his improvisational guitar playing with extended plundered sounds, A New York Minute takes things a few steps further. Instead of fusing the many sides of Licht into one monolithic mega-mix, this disc sepa…
Impulsioni
Ákos Rózmann was born in Budapest, in 1939, where he studied organ and composition at the Liszt Academy. From 1979 to 1974 he studied composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. Since 1978 he has been organist at the catholic cathedral in Stockholm. Epithets which come to mind after listening to Rózmann´s music are "powerful", "raw", "monumental", "impassioned". He is a master of large forms. Exerpts from the booklet text (by Hans Gunnar Peterson): Impulsioni I, II, III (1973-74) ("I…
Resonances: Akio Suzuki - Ossip Zadkine
A catalog around the exhibition 'résonances: akio suzuki - Ossip Zadkine' in Paris at Musée Zadkine in 2004. Texts in French and English + CD with recordings of performances of akio suzuki and a sound walk recorded by Eric La Casa.
220 volt buddha
Another Fylkingen-related release; both of these feature previously unreleased material, in limited editions of 545 copies. "Åke Hodell was a fighter pilot in the 1940s and came into contact with literature after a bad accident which resulted in a long spell in a hospital. In the 1960s Hodell made a comeback with strongly experimental art -- concrete poetry, picture-poems, multi-media work -- playing a a prominent role in text-sound composition. '220 Volts Buddha, Electronic Purgatorium' was com…
Bunhill Row
*500 copies, numbered edition, few available* 1980 was an incredibe year for London’s experimental music scene with many different strands. Recommended Records were rereleasing the first two Faust LP’s, L. Voag had found ‘the way out’, Swell Maps were ‘in occupied Europe’. Throbbing Gristle and other industrialists were giving plenty of live actions. Nurse With Wound had just released their first LP, as had This Heat. The other great LP on Piano Records by Steve Beresford was also on the shelves…
Music and Words
As a member of British experimental group Morphogenesis Adam Bohman was no stranger to wayward sound experiments when recording this solo CD. Favoring acoustic sounds over electronic he explores the minute tendrils of sounds coaxed from any number of non-musical instruments. The standout on this Paradigm CD is a cassette piece which the artist made of candid recordings of mundane experiences and conversations, using the stop-start technique to construct a collage of text and environmental sound.…
Lookaftering
an amazing album 'Lookaftering' displays a much maturer sound and outlook than the sometimes naïve (in retrospect at least) trappings of the Brit-Folk classic. Produced by Max Richter and featuring guest spots from (deep breath) Joanna Newsom, Devendra Banhart, Adem, Adam Pierce (Mice Parade), Robert Kirby (Nick Drake / etc.), Otto Hauser and Kevin Barker, 'Lookaftering' is a Fairport Convention indebted LP of autumnal grace, dappling the likes of 'Lately' and 'Feet Of Clay' in gloriously evocat…
Tubridge 99 -00
RESTOCKED, reduced price “I think of Akio Suzuki as a kind of magician, perhaps the most charming, engaging artist I’ve seen, Japanese musician and inventor, instrument builder and shaman Akio Suzuki is probably unknown to most of you. But we think his work is utterly captivating and crucial; it deserves a much bigger audience. Akio has been performing, teaching and building instruments for nearly 40 years. His music is simple and pure, and beautifully unworried by the rules of modern music. He …
Oeuvre Désintégrale
Alga Marghen presents one of the most impressive sound poetry anthologies ever published, introducing you to the sound works of the Nouveau Realiste artist, Francois Dufrene. His work, along with that of Gil J Wolman and Brion Gysin, was a strong influence for experimental poets like Henri Chopin, Bernard Heidsieck and Ake Hodell. François Dufrene could be considered the younger of the first generation sound poets. Already in the Lettrist Group when he was only 16 years old, with his own style m…
Revue OU
1st Edition. Alga Marghen proudly presents a new edition of the already historical Henri Chopin's Revue OU. All the original contents (4CDs + book + complete inserts) have also been included here, but presented now in a more modern and flexible way. The first press heavy boxset had been substituted with a lighter and colour slipcase while many important details and info about the contents of this anthology (missing in the original layout) are presented on a new colour obi." Incredible that this …
punctum contra punctum
Aldo Clementi marks out the distance with an absolute refusal to provide narratives, whether of tension resolved, or simply of that logically unending succession of states of being so dear to many of his contemporaries. His materials, whether gathered from a tonal past, generated as a jeu d'esprìt from the names of dedicatees, or produced by a purely abstract process, are projected into a rotational steady state that has no logical end or beginning. (David Osmond-Smith, 2005)
On the occasion of …