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…
Worlds Within Worlds
Unwinding history - catching a glimpse of its truths, can be a near impossible task. There’s an understandable tendency to look in the obvious places, seeking generality and concise definition to guide the way. While this presents obvious paradoxes within the fields of avant-garde sound practice and experimental music - territories which, by their very nature, are resistant to genre, categorization, and definition, the impulse persists, allowing strange and singular free-standing efforts to slip…
Musikaliszer Pinkos
This music was inspired by “Musikaliszer Pinkos” – a collection of more than two hundred Hebrew religious hymns and Chassidic songs compiled and published by Abraham Berenstein in the year 1927 in Wilna (nowadays Vilnius). The selection of songs from “Musikaliszer Pinkos” was used by Arturas Bumšteinas as a source of fragmentary pitch material and re-interpreted in a new context of electronic sound and cut-up composition. All music was recorded with the use of Soviet-era Russian synthesiz…
Ändere Die Welt, Sie Braucht Es
It’s raining “Musikalische Jugend Österreichs” titles! This collection of agit-prop tape music & raw tone-combination studies by the Austrian composer Wilhelm Zobl was recorded (with Eugeniusz Rudnik’s invaluable aid) at Studio Eksperymentalne & Vienna’s Institut Für Elektroakustik der Musikhoschule Wien in 1973 & 1971 (respectively) & remains (other than an appearance on a super-weird 1985 collection entitled “Antithesis” - where he appears alongside “Works of Electronic Music” alum Thanos Mikr…
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…
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…
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…
Suomalaista Elektroakustista Musiikkia
Reproduction of this superb 1978 pressing, realized at the Finnivox-studio & issued on their in-house Fennica Nova imprint, covering early- to late-70s work by a coterie of composers working largely in & around various public & private studios in Helsinki, including Yleisradion Kokeilustudio (Finnish Radio's Experimental Studio), Helsingin Yliopiston Musiikkitieteen Laitoksen Studio (The Electronic Music Studio at Helsinki University Music Department), Osmo Lindeman Kotistudio (Osmo Lindeman's p…
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…
Cosmographie
Once again, i’m reminded that one can twist & turn, uncovering rocks looking for stray Paleozoic lifeforms one’s whole life and still never find 0.01% of what’s out there. To my knowledge, the early 70s platter replicated here is the sole LP by one Bruno Menny; he’s mainly known for his endless CV of engineering, arrangement, and production credits for people like Mouloudji - yes, the voice on the Jean Genet / André Almuro "Un Condamne a Mort" LP - Michel Portal, Benoît Widemann, and a little-kn…
Parmak Çocuk, Çizmeli Kedi
While there’s no explicit date listed anywhere within, I’m guessing the pair of 45rpm 7”s in question - released only in Turkey - date to the mid-60s, with each featuring Solmaz Sporel reading a different fairly tale over a completely amazing Musique Concrète tape-backing by Ilhan Mimaroglu, produced at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York. Personally, these particular outings are some of the most gratifyingly zonked things I’ve ever heard, having much to do with the lan…
Independent Electronic Music Composer
Now that the Creel-Pone series has reached its teens, its time for an irreverent late-60s blast of heavy Synth-Freakout / Tape-Psych weirdness from this Cicero, Illinois based composer Edward M. Zajda, about whom i can’t find a single bit of information - other than that he has a piece included in a 1964 radio program called “Electronic Music in America” that’s archived in the Brandeis library. Originally issued in the late 60s on the regional Ars Nova / Ars Antiqua” label, “Independent” star…
Celebration
Even to a die-hard Early Electronic Music acolyte, Frank W. Becker's name isn't a readily familiar one, despite issuing a half-dozen LPs of vaguely Berlin-school music via Toshiba EMI while based in Japan in the mid-late 70s. "Celebration," a "Private" issue on his own Gorilla imprint, starts out sure enough with the titular, 1976 side-length bit of protracted sequencing and minimalism-inspired forms - all with a vague new-age lilt to it b/w of calming ocean noises & an almost Terry Riley-ish …
in Celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the Experimental Music
Replica edition covering this wonderful 2LP boxed set, issued on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Experimental Music Studios of the University of Illinois School of Music. Features work by a largely otherwise undocumented array of midwest composers, including Antonio G. Barata, Paul Christian Koonce, Carla Scaletti, Michael Kosch, Brian E. Belét, Sever Tipei, & Nelson Mandrell alongside those by more well-known ones such as studio head Herbert Brün, Mary Ellen Childs, and recent Cre…
Electronomusic, 9 Images
Much in the way I was confounded by Rod “A Safe Place to Land” McKuen’s forays into noise-oriented electronic music - see: Heins Hoffman-Richter, “Symphony for Tape Delay, IBM Instruction Manual, & OHM Septet," aka "Music to Freak your Friends and Break your Lease” - this set of “Electronomusic” by RCA-Victor “Living Stereo” architect - he recorded the vast majority of the legendary classical label’s productions, working with Van Cliburn, Heifetz, Horowitz, Leontyne Price, Fritz Reiner, Toscan…
Stoned - An Electronic Symphony
Official re-issue of Danish electronic music from 1974! Vinyl LP comes with booklet and limited to 500 copies - no repress. Frederiksberg Records announces the first re-issue of ‘Stoned’ which is exclusively licensed from Gunner Møller Pedersen in person and has been carefully restored from the original master tapes. It comes with a booklet of liner notes by Thomas Knak. ‘Stoned’ by Gunner Møller Pedersen is a pioneering partly-electronic composition from Denmark. Gunner believes that it’s m…
Live on the Boffomundo Show
By October 1979, Aaron Weiner and Ron Curtiss had produced a handful of Boffomundo Shows at Los Angeles' first public access television studio at Theta Cable in Santa Monica. Joined by eventual partner Tony Harrington of All Ears Records, The All Ears Boffomundo Show was born!
Tony Harrington introduced legendary synthesizer master, Fumio Miyashita, founder of The Far East Family Band (space-rockers considered to be Japan's first prog band!), to the show and the rest is history. Fumio brought mu…
Trax Test
Trax Test’ is the first ever survey of Italy’s pioneering, visionary and influential label and mail art collective Trax, which ran from 1981 - 1987 as a network for the creation of collaborative projects. The collective included a pre-NWW Colin Potter and some of the earliest work from Masami Akita aka Merzbow, but also had deep connections with the art world; a few trax members went on to become famous designers and artists - Ettore Sottsass of hugely influential Memphis Group even guests on vo…