A mind-blowing series of revelations, Recital's latest, America Lament, a stunning collection of archival works by the American sound artist, composer, conceptualist and performer, Charlie Morrow, culled from over 50 years of his archives, is an absolutely essential body of glorious sound that can’t help but rewrite how we understand the past.

From its origins in the early 20th century to the present day, avant-garde sound practice - music, sound art, sound poetry, etc - has been carried by a relatively small, close knit community of artists and fans; overlapping and passing legacies and practices from one generation to the next. Yet, despite the diminutive scale and interconnectedness, these histories have consistently suffered from the burden of loss. Major contributions, artists, and works from one era are all too often forgotten or unobtainable by those that follow in the next. This is precisely what projects like the Los Angeles based imprint, Recital - run by the composer Sean McCann - endeavor to amend. Having already dropped incredible releases by R.I.P. Hayman, Daniel Schmidt, Philip Corner, Adriano Spatola, Geoff Hendricks, and numerous others in the last year or so, their latest LP, America Lament, by Charlie Morrow, takes these activities toward astounding depths.

Given the incredible quality of his work, and the list of accomplishments that flows behind him, it’s a confounding wonder that Charlie Morrow isn’t a household name among fans of avant-garde and experimental music. Born in 1942, Morrow attended Columbia College working under the composer Otto Luening and the ethnomusicologist Willard Rhodes, who introduced him to oral cultures and shamanic traditions, before, during the early 1960s, encountering notable figures from the New York avant-garde like John Cage, Alison Knowles, and Philip Corner, the latter with whom he began a lasting, productive working relationship. During the same period, he also met the poet Jerome Rothenberg, with whom he founded and ran The New Wilderness Foundation, staging concerts and releasing the legendary New Wilderness Audiographics cassette series between 1974 and 1989, as well as publishing EAR Magazine, run by Beth Anderson, Laurie Spiegel, and R.I.P. Hayman. Always a facilitator and a collaborator, as much as a singular artist in his own right, during the mid-1960s Morrow also helped Charlotte Moorman organize her acclaimed annual Avant Garde Festival in New York City, as well as organizing a Summer Solstice celebration that ran between 1973 and 1989, giving platform to innumerable experimental artists. Scratching at the surface, he’s everywhere you look.

Over the years, Charlie Morrow’s projects have included chanting and healing works, museum and gallery installations, large-scale festival events, radio and TV broadcasts, film soundtracks, commercial sound design and advertising jingles, performed using conch shells, cow and goat horns, Jew’s harp, ocarina and homemade electronics, with a focus on breath, vocalization, gesture, and mental dream states. It is into these worlds that America Lament delves, pushing his known sonorous palette by deploying electronics, Irish lap pipes, ambient flutes, a string quartet, and a great deal more, to create a beguiling, jubilant body of sound that stretches over 9 freestanding works spread across its two sides.

Ranging from the astoundingly beautiful and the minimal, to funky excursions in jazz and explicit avant-gardism, America Lament - building on the back of the ground covered by 2018’s Toot! Too - takes a deep dive into Morrow’s expansive and diverse practice, and in so doing follows a widely unacknowledged trajectory in experimental practice, moving far beyond the notion of any single aesthetic into the rich realm of raw and direct conceptualism that feels vital, relevant, and timeless as it reaches our ears.

Culled by the artist and Sean McCann from 50 years of Morrow’s bottomless archive, covering the period from 1970 to 2020, America Lament is a towering accomplishment of astounding scope. Yet another in the long line of the important historical / archival work being done by Recital.