Emak
Remastered from the original tapes. Limited edition of 300 ** These three legendary LPs (in their original covers) of electronic music from Cologne were released 1982 - 1985. The Emak project, founded by Matthias Becker, was influenced by German experimental music – from Stockhausen to Can – and by minimal music, musique concrète and ambient music. Some of the tracks presented in this first complete edition of Emak’s recordings became very popular in Germany’s eighties club scene because of the…
The Mysticism of Sound & Cosmic Language
Double CD edition. A previously unreleased series of astounding recordings, made between 1972 and 1973, by the collective Hy Maya, pull the rug from beneath the standing narratives of history. Never before released in any form, The Mysticism Of Sound & Cosmic Language is a revelation in sound. Incredibly diverse - an absolutely intoxicating, immersive journey through collective creativity which shatters the standing narratives, and foreshadows nearly every important movement of counter-…
Terminal Drive
Terminal Drive is studio recording of a mythical piece of electro-acoustic music composed and performed in 1975 by Allen Ravenstine (b. May 9, 1950 in Canton, OH) with assistance from Albert Dennis on string bass. Terminal Drive’s significance in terms of Cleveland underground music cannot be understated and has been cited as partially responsible for Ravenstine’s invitation to co-form the musical unit Pere Ubu in September 1975. Ravenstine gained recognition for his unusual and inventive synthe…
Universel
For the impeccable MAT label, Denamrk’s Central tends hitherto little known ambient aspects of his sound as Palta with a fine selection of feathered rhythms and gauzy, painterly sounds. Nesting amid good company for this kind of thing, Universel quietly unfolds scuttling, jazz-wise geometries and keening subaquatic chords in the title track, then drifts with scratchy tribal drums and tropical greenhouse sounds in Tabt Optagelse into frayed, frothy new age feels in På Gensyn. It would appear…
A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound
**US import** Ian Fenton’s Frozen Reeds label finally unveil this epic, years-in-the-making the release of Roland Kayn’s fourteen-hour masterpiece, A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound, as a sixteen-CD boxed set. Mind-bending. Edition of 750. Audio restoration by Jim O'Rourke. Sweet jeezus...Roland Kayn was a composer who rejected composition, a human who gave machines the benefit of the doubt. A German who began making music in the twentieth century with a pencil and paper, Kayn ended up spen…
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…
Aniseikonia, Zeitsplitter, 4 Etüden
Warped, asynchronous, mid-80s FM Synthesis assemblages, captured at the absolute cusp of the Analogue-Digital transition, from Czech-Swiss Composer Jan Beran. Ages dormant on the Creel Pone shortlist, endlessly vetoed by yours truly for breaking the cardinal rules of comprising a total sum of post-1984 activity (pending a rewrite of the foil-stamp copy) and, specifically, explicitly incorporating the "Devil's Xylophone" amongst its tonal palette. But ah, the times, the times. After a few caref…
Electronic Music in Canada, vol.1 & 2
Epic, double-disc edition covering three LPs of formative Electronic Music from Canada; both volumes of the Melbourne-label "Electronic Music By Canadian Composers" series - presenting both cover-variations of each in a metallized variant of the de facto Creel Pone "grid" - then the internal Radio Canada pressing of "Music Canada Vol XIII Electronic Music in Canada." Starting with an amazing, side-length piece by "Sky-Sails" co-author Ann Southam (more about her later in the series) & continuing…
Reidarin Sähköiset Kuvat, Ode To Marilyn
A pair of mid-70s Finnish Experimental Electro-Acoustic gems featuring "Suomalaista Elektroakustista Musiikkia" 's Antero Honkanen, masquerading as 1). a picturesque "Music To Accompany Paintings" affair and 2). a straight-ahead jazz-fusion session. The first disc here covers "Reidarin Sähköiset Kuvat," a wonderful set dovetailing pieces by Honaken & Åke Andersson, composed after paintings by Reidar Särestöniemi at the Experimental Studio of Yleisradio. With a production style owing to the forma…
Conrad & Sohn
Thus far the creel pones have all been academically-inclined in some way. by contrast, here’s a repro of a very bizarre one-off private-press lp “released” in 1981 by one-time tangerine dream / Kluster associate Conrad Schnitzler and given only to friends and family ...The b-side is pretty odd, even for schnitzler, with its pitched up vocals & arbitrary lo-fi synth drippings ; but the real prize is the a-side featuring his teenage son gregor on electric bass and completely fried vocals (in en…
Music From A Small Planet, Paths Of Motion
Two discs covering three self-issued LPs of 8-bit digital grind by Boston-area composer John Holland; as unheralded and unbeknownst as they come. Despite living in the hub for 24 years, and being a rabid fanatic of exactly this sort of thing, I had never seen nor heard head nor hide of either release, proving all too well that there are still gems out there waiting to be mined. On par with such proto-Digital-Synthesis masterworks as Daniel Arfib's "Musique Numerique", Pietro Grossi's "Compute…
Kulthan
Extended hypnotic explorations from Brooklyn’s experimentalist Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (Lichens, OM). Two long-side pieces of futuristic afro-dub, slowly evolving arrangements of voice and modular synthesizer soundscapes. Ethereal and melancholic on the first side with Magnamite, exhibiting 'the relationship of machine and human, showcasing the coupling of the two instruments'. Drifting and wildly pulsating on Heart of Sogguth that 'transforms this relationship into a unified human machin…
Embrace
Nice ambient/minimal reissue from the good folks at the Italian label Orbeatize. The duo of Martin Kornberger and Volker Kuhn put out two lone cassette tapes back in the 80s that all but vanished from the public eye bar a few hardcore collectors of the era. The music sits somewhere between post-kraut German synth and the electronic fourth world excursions of Per Tjernberg. Drifting piano and basic drum machine patterns also recall the work of Paki & Visnadi, the new age stylings of Paulin…
Lixiviation (1969-1985)
2017 repress. With a sonic portfolio that boasts commissions for the Xenon classic pinball machine, the sounds for the Meco Star Wars theme, the Atari TV commercials and the electronic sound effects in the original Stepford Wives film (amongst many others) the mutant electronic music CV of Suzanne Ciani is proof that in a 1970s commercial world of boys toys, monopolized by a male-dominated media industry, a woman's touch was the essential secret ingredient to successful sonic seduction. A classi…
Reconstructing Debussy
Double LP version. Includes download code. Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was one of the most popular and forward-thinking composers associated with impressionist music. His innovative and at this time new way to compose music with non-traditional scales and chromaticism inspired countless artists from the likes of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Miles Davis, and Herbie Hancock. Remarkable attributes of his music include the usage of parallel chords, bitonality, and the many compositions using whole…
Fish Music
Single-sided "aquatic clear" 7". Includes a copy of the original press release as well as a press cutting from the time. Limited edition of 500 for Uk. As the first and only label dedicated to liberating the private, non-commercial artifacts from Suzanne Ciani's groundbreaking Ciani Musica studio vault, Finders Keepers Records presents the first release of an incredible cryogenically suspended slice of precious, precocious, immersive fledgling synthesis. Ironically well removed from the intentio…
Pythagoron
Bridging the worlds of fine art, drug culture, high New Age thinking, and musical Minimalism, Pythagoron’s sole LP is a near perfect artifact of its era - a mysterious sonic wonder, emerging from the fog of time. Privately issued in 1977 - sold via advertisements in High Times - America's iconic stoner publication, the album is thought to be a product of Usco (The Company Of Us), one of the earliest multimedia art collectives based in New York - pioneers in the field of immersive sound and light…
Riflesso
Filtro was born in 2016 from the meeting of Angelo Bignamini and Luca De Biasi already active in the Italian psychedelic and noise scene (The Great Sanuites, Sukkia, Satantango, etc). In the grammatic of Riflesso magnetic tapes articulate with modular synthesizers and improvisation that the duo manipulates till they get a canvas of twines and multicolour stitches curves and corners sound scraps calibrated and polished get born again and find new context in the shape of patterns repeated sequence…
Music To Wash Dishes By
Nice to see this 1982 “Private Press” LP by Chicagoland’s Tom Cameron in the program; I’ve long felt this was one of the better “One Man Against the World ... with Synthesizer” LPs self-financed during the late-70s / early-80s. Each side features an extended, gorgeous take on analogue “Automation” book-ended by two, shorter, more “Accessible” numbers. The A-side’s “Another Question” is an impeccably gaseous, floating void of minimal diminished-minor filigree that rates up there with thebest of…
Galactic Fantasy, Eastern Reflections
Criminally under-rated set of Early American Moog Modular Synthesizer Music - the sole release by composer William Hoskins, the "Director of Electronic Music and Composer-in-Residence at Jacksonville University in Florida." Issued in 1979 by the Harriman, NY-based Spectrum - a "Division of UNI-PRO Recordings, Inc." the LP consists of a pair of discrete pieces, with each taking up a side of its own. "Galactic Fantasy" lives up to the premise of its title, its far-reaching narratives are concerned…