For its first ever archival release, the Root Strata label delves into Bay Area composer Maggi Payne's computerized music experiments from 1984-87. Composed for a unique dance/video project collaboration with experimental video maker Ed Tannebaum for a series of performances called Technological Feets. For these performances, the movements of three dancers live on stage are captured on camera and processed in real time on a screen above them. The dancers can view the processing on video monitors in front of them and thus react to their own movements. The music is then a mixture of live performed responses over prerecorded tracks. You can check one of the videos here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98fvPSNJHpw
Payne, who is a dancer herself (as well as flautist, who performed on David Behrman's "On The Other Ocean" from 1977), imbues her music with a fresh rhythmic energy that makes these pieces instantly engaging. The terrific opener, "Flights of Fancy" is full of dynamic uplift but countered by a brooding undercurrent of minor key melancholia that for us outshines many current synth practitioners, the way it inches quite close to pop music. Titles like "Gamelan" and "Shimmer", give pretty clear clues to their direction, but the title piece, "Ahh-Ahh (Ver 2.1)" sourced from many forms of white noise, flute and snare drum, where, according to the liner notes, "spatial location and modulation are of primary concerns in this piece", is all subtle layered shifts of audio spectrum effects that is a tranced out disorientating delight. Root Strata has done a great service in getting this little known composer some much deserved wider attention. Payne who is currently the Co-Director of Contemporary Music at Mills College probably has had a hand in inspiring scores of young musicians and composers, we're sure among them the likes of Mariell V. Jakobsons and Gregg Kowalsky as well as Roger Tellier-Craig (Le Revelateur) and Sabrina Ratte who had a hand in getting this release to see the light of day. We can't recommend this enough!
Wow. This has got to be the thickest heftiest gatefoldlp sleeve we've EVER seen. Not just the kind that cracks and creaks when you open, no, it's the sort of lp that when you do finally crack it open, it's like in the movies when the main character is finally opening the long lost crypt, muscles bulging, tendons straining, sweating and grunting, as it slowly opens with the grinding scrape of metal on concrete... Okay, so maybe it's not quite -that- intense, but heck, EVERY single person who picks it up does a sort of double take and utters something like "Woah, wow... WOW!" Plus the cover images are gorgeous, the front is a stark black and white landscape of gnarled dead trees, the back is a makeshift gallows, occupied by two unlucky souls, with an ominous pile of human skulls in the foreground. Crack it open and inside the gatefold you'll see a acid drenched burnt out kaleidoscopic photo of Krysztof Penderecki behind a huge pile of analog studio gear. Penderecki? Yep, Pendercki! This is the long lost soundtrack to the 1965 classic The Sargassa Manuscript, AKA Rekopis znaleziony w Sarogossie, AKA The Manuscript Found In Saragossa, one of the greatest Polish films ever made, and most definitely one of the strangest, most fucked up visual trips EVER. Think Bunuel, Lynch, Jodorowsky, Tarkovsky, Gilliam and then realize you'd most definitely need to include Sargasso director Wojciech Has. But the sounds are as strange and wondrous as the sights, due in no small part to Penderecki's lovely, haunting and downright bizarre score. Dark delicate piano filigree hovers in wide expanses of barely there ambience, grunts and groans and mumbled vocalisations drift in and out, western steel string guitars play tiny boleros before being overtaken by majestic church organs, snatches of refined chamber music are interrupted by strange soundscapes of what sounds like thunder or trees being felled, hypnotic stretches of No Neck Blues Band-like rattle and clatter, mysterious percussive interludes, woodblocks and rattles and shakers, and surrounding it all, little bits and pieces, scraps of sound, all manner of strange audio delights. A completely intense and intensely strange musical trip, even without the equally bizarre visuals of the film. In fact the images these sounds conjure up in your head, in the dark, with headphones on, might just be even stranger than the movie itself. If that were even possible...
Pressed on INCREDIBLY thick vinyl, and oh, did we mention the sleeve?!?!
And as you might imagine, this vinyl-only Polish import is EXTREMELY LIMITED!!!!
Complete sacred works for chorus a cappella 1962-92.
This is the second collaboration between the stalwart minimalist composer Charlemagne Palestine and the electro-acoustic ensemble Perlonex, who may be Germany's answer to AMM. Yes, the title is an allusion to the Gershwin tune, since the name of the club where these recordings took place in Vienna is called Porgy & Bess - the opera from which that song is taken. The division of labor for these sessions found Perlonex on sinewave generator, turntable, guitars, motors, and percussion, mustering huge swelling arcs of drone, texture, and controlled chaos, with Palestine taking up piano, vocals, and cognac glass, which he's presumably emptied a number of times throughout these sessions. Palestine cycles through rather graceful notes on the piano, building the intensity alongside his German compatriots. Each of the three extended pieces is a variation on a theme of restrained electro-acoustic explorations with slow-burning dynamics and with Palestine offering a gravelly Beefheart-like vocal extemporization of the lyric "it ain't necessarily so" - at times nasally thin, at times a plaintive spoken delivery, at times a thick bellow, at times a raving lunatic. With the arrangements here taking up the more subdued sounds of Supersilent / AMM through scrapes and drones, Palestine's vocals stand in stark relief. Limited stock.
We heart Bo Anders Persson! What a hero. Still going strong well into (and beyond?) his sixties, leading a band that's been around in one form or another more or less SINCE the sixties - we're talking about the those joyful psychedelic heavies, legendary Swedish "krautrockers", the timeless Trad Gras Och Stenar, and the group's prior incarnations as International Harvester, Harvester, and Parson Sound. The amazing archival release of Parson Sound's Terry Riley inspired drone-psych, circa 1967-'68, was until now the earliest music we'd heard from Bo Anders. But what was he up to even before that? We know that as a guitar player, he was hugely influenced by seeing Jimi Hendrix. But this new disc of his earliest, previously unreleased recordings, brought to us by the same label that did the Parson Sound set, shows a different side to Persson, being a portrait of the artist as a young academic composer. Persson has tape machines in hand, not an electric guitar. It's some wonderfully droney, avant garde 20th century classical music, from before Persson heard Hendrix and got into more rock-oriented music making. The experimental nature of these compositions however is in keeping with the adventurous direction of Parson Sound, et.al., later on.
These pieces, recorded when Persson was a student at the Royal Academy Of Music In Stockholm, from 1965 to '67, constitute a mixture of eerie drones, minimalist electronic loopscapes, and, at times, what we might describe as beatnik sci-fi exotica. There's a female singer on much of this who provides wordless, abstract vocal acrobatics (she's good - this type of singing requires a lot of control), her delicate cries variously accompanied by fluttering flute and unidentified electro-acoustic noises, jazzbo hand percussion and equally jazzical contrabass, as well as the ever-present shivering electronic atmospheres. It's all very out-there, but still quite listenable, even as it sometimes gets darker and more dramatic, almost claustrophobic in its subtle intensity. We kept being reminded of some of the music from the original Star Trek TV series soundtrack! Also, Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio, composers like that. We're no experts, but this sounds pretty good to us, and we'd guess Persson could have continued on with a highbrow career as an arty musique concrete composer, if radical hippie communal psych sounds hadn't become his thing.
Our favorite track may be the last, the disc's longest at over 24 minutes - a rhythmic abstract dronescape constructed from a short sampled bit of speech, that as it's looped and layered becomes more blurred and burbling, turning into a mesmeric mumbled murmur. Nice! Dronophiles will want this for that track, "Proteinimperialism", alone.
Includes a booklet, with vintage photos & graphics and extensive liner notes (in the form of an essay entitled "The Utopian Dreams of Bo Anders Persson") Note: there's a much more expensive double-lp vinyl version of this as well, currently on backorder, but we will be able to get more eventually if you're interested, let us know!
Duane Pitre, whom we were first exposed to through collaborations with Justin Wright from Expo 70, and his 2010 solo debut Origin on the Root Strata label, is a composer who likes to work with organizing principles. For Origin, he had a sextet of bowed guitars tuned to 'just intonation' and freed from any use of effects and overdubs to create tapestries of richly layered overtones and droning frequencies.
One might think from the title that Feel Free would suggest a freedom from such organisation, but it's actually a push toward a more systematic impulse, but one that allows an infinite set of variations. Creating the centerpiece of the work through guitar and electronics and filtered through a computer, he then asks a sextet of string musicians (harp, cello, contrabass, hammered dulcimer and violin) to respond to the work. The performers are instructed to "feel free" to respond to or ignore their fellow contributors. But in creating a rule-based system rather than one based on musical notation, the piece becomes a lattice work of rhythms and textures that sounds spontaneous and unpredictable, but never careens out of control. Reminding us of the resulting compositional strategies of David Behrman's On The Other Ocean, Christian Jendreiko's God's White Noise or even Terry Riley's In C in the way that there's a harmonic congruence from a randomizing system, Feel Free is a beautifully interwoven composition with hypnotically mesmerizing results.
The Holy Mountain label has been forging a new trajectory as of late into the kosmiche realms of new composition. We last reviewed M. Geddes Gendras' Modular synth solo debut, Test Leads, and following that we now have local San Francisco composer, Henry Plotnick, channeling the big three of minimalist composition, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, in his delightful debut release Fields, a composition in nine parts. Plotnick, using digital synthesizer and piano, begins with a piece built from simple repeating melodic phrases that bloom into interlocking repetitive and exploratory filigrees, sometimes with orchestral strings or tinkling bells and gamelan sounds, rising in terrifying intensity or diluting into gorgeous gaseous clouds of vapor. The whole collection exploring the boundaries and limits of a simplified strategy, but one done with an intuitive sense of play and structure that is both hypnotic and tantalizing.
An auspicious debut - oh, and did we mention that Plotnick is just 11 years old??
The Finnish avant-classical duo of pianist Eva Polgar and visual artist Sandor Valy are back with a brilliant postmodern musical reimagining of one of the oldest surviving pieces of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh. This is the duo's third collaboration together and unlike the first two, The Bruegel Variations and The Mondrian Variations, where the scores were defined by visual elements found in the paintings of Breugel and Mondrian respectively, Gilgamesh was conceptualized in a completely different way. The Epic of Gilgamesh was an epic poem from Mesopotamia dating back to the 18th century BC, and chronicles the mythic life and adventures of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk and his companion Enkidu, a wild man created by the gods to distract Gilgamesh from oppressing his people. Together they fight monstrous mountain guardians, giant bulls, battle jealous Ishtar, and in the end after Enkidu's violent death, the story chronicles Gilgamesh's desperate search for Immortality and the meaning of life beyond death. The epic was originally discovered carved on twelve stone tablets, and here lovingly reproduced as 12 QRC codes (when scanned, each brings up part of the poem), the duo of Polgar and Valy have created a 12 part musical piece that doesn't seek to illustrate the text as much as to compartmentalize the story into the moods of its integrated characters and the ancient civilization they inhabited. Valy began creating key melody lines for each part which Polgar would elaborate on then give back to him and slowly, through an exchange of female and male composed tropes echoing the back and forth male and female interchanges of Gilgamesh and Ishtar, the piece came to fruition. Gilgamesh finds in itself a companion to their earlier work, in the duo's penchant for minimalist composition and complex rhythmic structures, this time adding instrumentation of clarinets and violins, zithers, kettle drums and chaotic horns to the fray, channeling not only Philip Glass, but John Zorn at times as well. Epic indeed!
Using visual artworks as a means of musical composition often sounds better in theory than in practice. Take the recent book and cd of Baudouin de Jaer's solo violin interpretations of the musical motifs in Adolf Wolfli's cosmological drawings where the audible results were less dazzling than the images would suggest. But not so in this latest experiment from conceptual composers Eve Polgar and Sandor Valy who turn the nonrepresentational paintings of Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian into beautifully vibrant minimalist scores. Mondrian, who started out as a representational painter, became increasingly interested in a process of reduction from nature into essential forms that soon evolved away from any overt natural reference. Most famous for his painting of bold black lines on white grounds and geometric forms in primary colors, and their perhaps musically influenced titles (Broadway Boogie Woogie!), it's not hard to see a correlation of sound and vision in his work.
There is an interesting booklet that comes in the slipcase with this, detailing the process of how the pieces were composed to which paintings, where we also learned that this is not the first time the composers have worked in this manner. They previously worked out scores based on paintings by Breugel and there are cool pictures of how they designed scores based on how the orientation of the heads of peasants in Breugel's paintings followed a kind of musical order. Would like to see how that turned out musically, but getting back to the Mondrian Variations, the music starts out with repetitive solo piano figures that have a simple but idiosyncratic repetitive quality with sudden pauses that seem to follow a precise structure. With each composition, we're introduced to something new sonically through computer programs and samplers: an organ, pitched string modulations, then some minimal percussive rhythms until the pieces grow more epic in scope with choral like sounds, vocal counting of the odd tempos and blocks of interweaving rhythms. Of course, the musical corollary of this is Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but the music feels somehow different as if Polgar and Valy were reaching the same place through a completely different approach. Regardless of the process, the music is engaging and a delight to listen to. An extraordinary release on Circle's Ektro label that comes highly recommended! Please note: these cds have cardboard slipcases that arrived in somewhat less than pristine condition due to shipping, so persnickety collector types be warned. And, like most Ektro titles, these aren't limited but might take a longer time to restock, once we're out, since they come all the way from Finland.
Taking an electronic work first realized in 1972 by Belgian avant-garde composer Henri Pousseur, Sub Rosa have arranged for new mixes to be done by three of today's most talented electronic experimentalists: Robert Hampson (of Main fame), AQ-fave turntable specialist Philip Jeck, and Markus Popp of glitchsters Oval. It's not technically a *re*mix project, it seems, as Pousseur's original piece allowed for multiple, equally valid mixes (or studies). He did eight of 'em himself back in the day (released as a four cd set, now unavailable, on Sub Rosa two years ago) and contributes a new one, done digitally this time, as the first track on disc one here. Hampson, Jeck, and Popp follow with their varying takes on the same material/composition, Popp's maybe being the prettiest, all of 'em very blippy and bloopy -- the original piece(s) having a kind of sci-fi spaceship/upset stomach sound. But of course, Jeck's mix is our favorite, as it brings in some of his trademark warm and crackly, antiqued vinyl-y sounds (adding such is apparently in accordance with Pousseur's open-ended concept for this piece).
Henri Pousseur is one of the lesser known European avant-garde composers, and has been active since the '50s embracing most of the various trends within the 'academic scene' (dodecaphonic, serial, electronic, aleatoric, etc.). "8 Etudes Paraboliques" finds
Nocturnal Earthworm Stew? Ew. Well, perhaps the French title of this Canadian record will tempt your appetite: Bouillabaisse Nocturne Aux Vers De Terre. Sounds much tastier, eh? Actually as long as you have an appetite for unusual, analog-synth based, musique concrete fashioned psychedelia, you'll find this to your liking! Yes, that Hans Edler album isn't the only weird and wonderful, long lost '70s electronic music artifact that we've been digging here at AQ lately. Lucky us, we also just got in this reissue of an amazing 1976 album from one David Pritchard, a Canadian underground radio DJ who was so into the experimental electronic sounds coming out of Germany at the time (Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Kluster, Kraftwerk, and the like) that he started collecting the requisite equipment and began writing music that proved well worthy of his overseas influences. Seriously, this could be one of the best Krautrock rarities ever, if Pritchard were German not Canadian. His instrumental compositions feature both an array of analog synths (vintage machines cooler today than ever, the ARP 2600 and EMS AKS) and more conventional instrumentation (violin, guitar, drums, etc.) as well shortwave radio noise / samples and field recordings. All of which you'll hear, for instance, on the fifteen-minute album centerpiece "Thunderpeat", a true tour-de-force of headphone listening, as is the rest of this disc. Quite rhythmically soothing, but with challenging and unusual sonic textures, recalling everything from
Stockhausen to Eno to Dr. Who soundtracks to AQ-fave obscure krautrocker Gunter Schickert. Maybe because of the title, we had expected this to sound like some dark, scary proto-industrial thing, but instead it's remarkably pleasant, full of pretty little melodies -- including a synthesized version of "My Favorite Things". But although Pritchard was the first Canadian artist signed to Island Records, we can't imagine that Nocturnal Earthworm Stew ever hit the pop charts in Canada or anywhere else. It's just too weird and eerie and arcane. Despite how lovely his songwriting can be, this certainly does possess a hefty share of foreboding atmosphere, some of this (tracks like "Evil Orge Interlude / Satan's Seaside Walk" for instance) coming across like an ominous mixture of Tangerine Dream and Italian horror soundtrack masters Goblin. Not a bad thing! This cd reissue includes four bonus tracks and a thick booklet full of photos and informative text, including notes from Pritchard himself. Note to Canadian music nerds: this album also marks the recording debut of none other than Nash the Slash, who guests here on a couple tracks on violin.
We're so happy to have been introduced to the idiosyncratic experimental sound-worlds of Swiss artist Israel Quellet, via his several releases thus far on Sub Rosa. This is his third disc for the label and is as fantastic as the first two. When the first one, Oppressum, came out in 2007, we were like, Israel who? But upon hearing it, we quickly became fans of his home/field recorded, non-academic "musique concrete", microphone-as-instrument compositional technique, Quellet's mysterious, percussive music being both intriguing and original. 2009's Soni Sclavus was also great, and now at last here's Rhythmes d'Etain, to which we say, yay! And yep, Rhythmes is rhythmic all right, in fact some of the tracks here, like "L'Ere des Anches a Sonne" ("The Age Of Reeds Is Upon Us"), bordering on a sort of DIY, accidental techno.
One of the few conventional instruments, as opposed to non-instrumental sound-producing objects, heard on Quellet's debut was his town's local church organ. A church organ plays a much bigger role here, along with human voices singing in Latin, giving this something of a liturgical feel - but not as much as you'd expect, perhaps, because the organ is used more as a source of sampled sounds, for its majestic drones and tones, rather than being played as an organ normally would; and the voices, while suggestive of monkish murmer, are almost always manipulated or processed in some way, "sped-up, slowed-down, doubled-up, played backward" as he explains. The use of Latin is meant to create an abstract wordless-ness to the vocals, deliberately without meaning, the singers not affected by any understanding of what was nonsense Latin text to begin with.
Along with the organ and the voices, Quellet has restricted himself to just one more significant sonic element on this disc's compositions - that being, of course, percussion. Listed inside the digipack are a host of symphonic and improvised percussion instruments, including tympanies and bell-like tubular idiophones; the toms, cymbals, and hi-hat from a "deconstructed" drum kit; a bass drum and large skin drum; as well as "brutally shut drawers, slammed doors" and other ad hoc percussive devices.
So you can be sure it doesn't sound like you're in a church, when the beautiful, glorious pipe organ is accompanied by the rhythms of slamming doors, etc.! Or at least it would be a very unusual sort of church, filled with screwed-and-chopped choirs. 'Tis true too, the clink-clonk of the percussion sometimes takes on a carillion-like character, as if ringing from the church tower. Often lovely, quite dreamlike and mesmeric, all these sounds layered and looping, Quellet comes up with tracks here sometimes dominated by the playfully active rhythmic elements, at others by the ominous drones of the pulsating organ sub-bass frequencies (Quellet recommends listening on appropriate headphones), or both at once. Despite the varied character of Quellet's carefully constructed tracks, the focus on organ, voice, percussion gives this a definite cohesiveness, often calming into head-noddingness amidst eerie atmospheres.
Three cds worth of vintage Dutch tape music from one of the masters, Dick Raaijmakers! Maybe you remember him from the Popular Electronics box set on Basta. This is the second edition of this collection, nicely presented in a colorful cardboard box, with 124 page booklet with text in English. Raaijmakers was active in the Philips Labs in the late '50s, and this contains material from 1959 all the way up to 1996, mainly from the '60s. Those big into early electronic music will want to check this out, as will anyone who gets turned on to Raaijmakers thanks to the the nifty various artists tribute comp also reviewed this list.
We first heard this beautiful, hypnotic recording when it was reissued on compact disc back in 1997, on the Dexter's Cigar label that Jim O'Rourke used to do, via Drag City. It was one of the best Dexter's Cigar releases we remember, but sadly has been our of print for many years. But, we're certainly not the only folks to consider it a classic, as now Important has reissued it again on cd for those who missed it before. It's an album of minimalist electronics, sounding way ahead of its time, recorded in 1967 in the studio of Swedish Radio, Stockholm, by a young composer (and former jazz trombonist) named Folke Rabe. There's two tracks here, the second a half-speed (and thus, one octave lower) version of the first, for advanced exercises in drone-absorption. The first 25 minute version of "What??", originally released on vinyl by the Wergo label in 1970, consists of gentle, wavering drone-tones, shimmering blissfully, continually morphing, forming pulsating, fluttering "beats" as the various vibrations interact. The subtle shifts of these pulsations seem somehow to come into being from nowhere, even though your ears must be perceiving the gradual changes. This is active dronework, there's a lot going on here, over time, despite the "minimalist" tag. We suspect a Terry Riley influence on this piece, and not just because we know that Rabe was an associate of Bo Anders Persson, of Parson Sound/International Harvester/Trad Gras Och Stenar, also big Terry Riley fans.
Not that the first track by itself wouldn't be enough to transport you to drone nirvana with its pulsing shimmer and glimmer, but the second version of "What??" found here, 50+ minutes long, slower and lower, and if anything even more glowing, will REALLY send you into a trance!
It's so great to have this deceptively simple, but so effective, obscure avant-electronic classic back in print.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Off the top of my head, I can think of the Monks, Glenn Branca, and Eliane Radigue as some of the musicians who've admitted that their unwitting discovering of feedback profoundly altered their ways of thinking about music. Similar to Eddie Shaw's epiphany about feedback in his biography about the Monks, Radigue's revelation about feedback might warrant religious proportions, given that her meditative compositions led her to become a disciple of Buddhism. It was in the mid-60s, when Radigue was a protege of musique concrete legend Pierre Henry, that Radigue first stumbled across electronic feedback in the studios of INA-GRM. Unfortunately, Henry (with his unwavering insistance on the Modernist superiority of musique concrete) did not share Radigue's enthusiasm and Radigue parted ways to build her own studio that centered around the technologies of the Moog and the Arp synthesizers.
Composed in 1972 and 1973 respectively (though these recordings were made several years later), "Geelriandre" and "Arthesis" represent some of the earliest work of Radigue's maturation as a minimalist. While neither of these pieces appear to use feedback, Radigue's subtle shifting drones within these pieces mirrors the fluttering complexity that a feedback loop (when carefully controlled) can achieve. "Geerlriandre" for prepared piano and Arp synthesizer ripples with a melancholia through a beautiful chorus of tightly oscillating electric drones occasionally punctuated by the sustained yet muffled resonance of the piano. "Arthesis," using the Moog, is a more ominous affair, whirling back and forth between low end frequencies amidst a glacial progression of bleak ambience.
This album isn't only good for historical documentation, but also is an exceptional precursor to the dronological pursuits of current artists like Jonathan Coleclough, Thomas Koner, and Andrew Chalk. Highly recommended.
A much needed reissue of two magnificent pieces of Holy Minimalism from Eliane Radigue! Much of Radigue's classic work from the late '60s and into the '80s had never been presented outside the context of live playback, due to the simple fact that vinyl couldn't handle more than 25 minutes to a side without serious loss of fidelity. So with the advent of cds, the vast archives of her reel-to-reel tapes of very-long form compositions and stasis-oriented dronemuzik began to see the light of day well after the work had been completed and shelved. Radigue had studied composition in the INA-GRM studios in the mid-'60s and was one of many artists who became enamored with the potential of feedback as a tool within composition. The long sinewy drones of a controlled feedback loop became a signature of her earliest works, with synthesizers gradually enveloping those sounds with their greater control and tonal palette.
Composed in 1972 and 1973 respectively (though these recordings were made several years later), "Geelriandre" and "Arthesis" represent some of the earliest work demonstrating Radigue's maturation as a minimalist. "Geerlriandre" - for prepared piano and Arp synthesizer, ripples with a melancholia through a beautiful chorus of tightly oscillating electric drones occasionally punctuated by the sustained yet muffled resonance of the piano, anticipating what Brian Eno would present many years later on Thursday Afternoon albeit with none of the romanticized impressionism. "Arthesis," using the Moog, is a more ominous affair, whirling back and forth between low end frequencies amidst a glacial progression of bleak ambience. This album isn't only good for historical documentation, but also is an exceptional precursor to the drone-tastic pursuits of current artists like Thomas Koner and Andrew Chalk.
Originally released about ten years ago on Giuseppe Ielasi's Fringes, and Ielasi wisely reclaimed these recordings for his new imprint Senufo. If you didn't get it the first time, you should certainly pick this one up now!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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Much of avant composer Eliane Radigue's work dating back to 1967 has yet to be heard, as she would construct her long form minimalism through feedback (for the earliest compositions) and synthesizers (particularly the Arp and occasionally Moog and Buchla) to be played back on a reel of tape with durations often lasting longer than an hour. After an installation or a performance, she would box up the results and work on something new. It wasn't until the advent of cds that technology allowed for her work to made commercially available, as she was unwilling to allow these pieces to be sliced into 20 minute excerpts for vinyl playback.
In 1974, she presented 4 nights of her work in New York - three nights at Phill Niblock's loft (where the man is STILL hosting shows!) and one at the Kitchen. A handwritten invitation to these gigs is included in the liner notes, mentioning various pieces that are now appearing on cd releases some 30 years later. Transamorem - Transmortem was one of these pieces, now part of the reissue series spearheaded by Manu Holterbach and reissued by Important. This 67 minute monolith undulates slowly through a series of "waves in tune" (as she calls them) from her Arp. The strategy is very simple, but the choices Radigue makes are perfect. Her tones are primal and earthen, grounded in plenty of low-end that gives the impression that whatever notion of the eternal she is seeking to describe, it's located physically in the here and now. This is a beautiful piece of minimalism, certainly ranking with her chilling Trilogy Of Death and Adnos.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Back in 1970, Eliane Radigue ran off ten copies of her final composition for feedback on magnetic tape, each of which included a small handwritten note. She intended for the piece to be played back at any speed and at any duration and either backwards or forwards. Given the smooth polish to her sustained drones that could easily blur into infinity, such instructions to her audience of ten seems quite reasonable, even if the tiny edition of 10 is far from a reasonable amount. Fortunately, the French sound artist Manu Holterbach (whose minimalist work is awe-inspiring in its own right) has been sifting through Radigue's archives and came across this incredibly rare document which Radigue originally released for the Lara Vincy Gallery in Paris as part of a group sound exhibition. For the cd repackaging of this lone composition, Holterbach curated a double disc of various mixes of the original recordings. The first disc being the straight versions of the composition, played back at the four standard speeds of a reel-to-reel tape deck; and the second disc being backwards versions, also played back at those four speeds. The longest version is a little over 13 minutes long, with the shortest being a bit under 3 minutes; and all four mixes exhibit variations in tonal colors and slight oscillating modulations not heard on previous mixes. The first mix is the longest, slowest, and thus deepest plunge into the Radigue drone, which balances an asymmetrical undulation of low end against a static vibration which sits a couple octaves higher than the super-low rumble and pushes a little farther into the distance. As the track develops, Radigue seems to be gradually increasing the tension of these pieces, as if tension were just a knob she were effortlessly twisting, but in fact she's deftly controlling all of the parameters of her feedback loop to cause such effects. The second piece clocks in under a brisk 9 minutes with that irregular hovering sounds more pronounced. The next two pieces are a bit over four and two minutes respectively, each brightening vibrations to a sharp resolution on the finale. Both discs exhibit essentially the same sounds, which might be accentuated if you were to play both discs at the exact same time. A peculiar excerpt, yes, but a wonderful record for sure from one of the finest authors of 20th Century minimalism.
Back in 1970, Eliane Radigue ran off ten copies of her final composition for feedback on magnetic tape, each of which included a small handwritten note. She intended for the piece to be played back at any speed and at any duration and either backwards or forwards. Given the smooth polish to her sustained drones that could easily blur into infinity, such instructions to her audience of ten seems quite reasonable, even if the tiny edition of 10 is far from a reasonable amount. Fortunately, the French sound artist Manu Holterbach (whose minimalist work is awe-inspiring in its own right) has been sifting through Radigue's archives and came across this incredibly rare document which Radigue originally released for the Lara Vincy Gallery in Paris as part of a group sound exhibition. For the cd repackaging of this lone composition, Holterbach curated a double disc of various mixes of the original recordings. The first disc being the straight versions of the composition, played back at the four standard speeds of a reel-to-reel tape deck; and the second disc being backwards versions, also played back at those four speeds. The longest version is a little over 13 minutes long, with the shortest being a bit under 3 minutes; and all four mixes exhibit variations in tonal colors and slight oscillating modulations not heard on previous mixes. The first mix is the longest, slowest, and thus deepest plunge into the Radigue drone, which balances an asymmetrical undulation of low end against a static vibration which sits a couple octaves higher than the super-low rumble and pushes a little farther into the distance. As the track develops, Radigue seems to be gradually increasing the tension of these pieces, as if tension were just a knob she were effortlessly twisting, but in fact she's deftly controlling all of the parameters of her feedback loop to cause such effects. The second piece clocks in under a brisk 9 minutes with that irregular hovering sounds more pronounced. The next two pieces are a bit over four and two minutes respectively, each brightening vibrations to a sharp resolution on the finale. Both discs exhibit essentially the same sounds, which might be accentuated if you were to play both discs at the exact same time. A peculiar excerpt, yes, but a wonderful record for sure from one of the finest authors of 20th Century minimalism.
We know you've all be waiting for us to weigh in on one of the burning issues of our time: just how terrible IS the Lou Reed / Metallica album? Is it terrible terrible, or maybe so bad it's good (but still terrible)? Or, perhaps, like The Wire, would we be all contrary and proclaim it to actually be brilliant, not terrible? Well... let's just say that actually writing a review of Lulu is difficult 'cause simply sitting through Lulu is difficult! Imagine a random rock band (Metallica) jamming on some generic stoner riffs they wrote in like 5 minutes, while Grandpa Simpson (Lou Reed) speak-sings disturbing/cryptic/asinine lyrics from the POV of an underage girl prostitute and whatnot over the top... and it's TWO freaking discs long!
Well, even opinion here at AQ is divided... just like when Morbid Angel's Illud Divinum Insanus came out. We DO like stuff that's "fucked up" after all, and certainly this is. And there's ways in which the "transgressiveness" of this might appeal to Oxbow fans, for sure (and we're Oxbow fans). But if you're a Metallica fan... well you're a glutton for punishment already anyway at this point, and this IS better than St. Anger (what isn't)? Is it possible that Lulu is Lou Reed's laughing-all-the-way-to-the-bank joke on a clueless, desperate-to-be-artistic Metallica?
Maybe we should just cop out and say that Lulu stands outside of any conventional good/bad judgment. It's just...ludicrous. And not 'cause it's Lou Reed and Metallica, as a concept, per se. Actually, when we first heard about Lou Reed teaming up with Metallica, some of us thought it had potential. On paper. After all, Lou Reed had written songs for KISS before (on 1981's Music From The Elder) and look how that turned out. No, seriously, we dig that KISS album. And if Lou was good enough to write songs for KISS, he should be good enough to write songs for Metallica, heck they should have brought him in sooner. Or, another possibility, was that they would do a full-on noise album together, conducted by Reed: Metallica Machine Music, perhaps?! That could have been cool. Instead, we got this arty absurdity. Which, to be fair, does have its (unintentionally HILARIOUS) moments. For instance, "I Am The Table" (not the name of the song, but it should be, it's actually called "The View", after the TV talk show) is almost worth the price of admission, it's already a classic. Or, check out the very next song, "Pumping Blood", sample lyric from Reed: "Waggle my ass like a dark prostitute coagulating heart pumpin' blood... c'mon, James!"
Yes, he really says/sings that. Wow.
And if Reed's half-assed spoken word style, way-too-high-in-the-mix vox weren't ruinous enough, James Hetfield then sings backup throughout, in his usual heartfelt, gruff, rock dude croon. Singing stuff like the aforementioned, "I am the table!". The juxtaposition is, again, just so ridiculous. As is the entire album. We're not sure what's worse, when they try to do "songs" (like "Iced Honey") or when it's just Lars on the drums providing random backup for Reed's beat poetry.
Ok, it's not all laffs. Ferinstance, in the finale of the set, the whole second half of the epic 20 minute "Junior Dad" is just droning somber strings, and that's quite pretty, although that part doesn't appear to involve either the members of Metallica OR Lou Reed...
So, our "verdict": you should definitely hear this, a least a bit of it, for a laugh. But buy the thing? Well, we've got one copy, and expect to have it for a while. But please go ahead, buy it. We dare you. And when you're listening to it, try not to imagine this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRPzElP_eSI
It was a happy day at AQ when we saw that two of our favorite Steve Reich pieces of all time were now finally available again. Both recorded in 1970, one at the Guggenheim in NY and the other at the University Museum in Berkeley. This is electric organ overdrive! Four Organs not surprisingly is a piece played on four electric organs (with Reich playing one as well as his good friend Philip Glass... we hope that someday we can get a cd issue of Glass' "Music in 12 Parts" which is maybe his best ever and has a very similar feel to these two great Reich pieces), while beneath the organs is the repetitious shaking of maracas. The short pulsations of the organ gradually stretch out, lasting longer and longer, creating a totally dynamic tension that evokes standing in a massive and grand church that's empty except for the mesmerizing sounds of the organs lulling you into some sort of a trance. Phase Patterns manages to increase the tension with the four players using identical organs and playing to a precise strategy that Reich has calculated. These pieces predate and predict so much of the minimalist electronic and experimental music to come over the next three decades, and are well worth checking out again!
Without a doubt Steve Reich is one of the most important composers and music makers of the last quarter century. "Music For 18 Musicians" still stands as one of the most hypnotizing and well exectuted pieces of music we've ever heard. After being credited with being at the forfront of Minimilist composition with the likes of Terry Riley and Philip Glass he has spent the last decades continually composing and collaborating with the likes of Kronos Quartet, exploring textures and sub-texts of Jewish music, scoring for theatre, and working with chamber ensembles. There is no mistaking that you are listneing to Reich here as the record begins and his signature sound of building tension with repitition begins. Using four pianos, mallet instruments and exploring the use of voice as a textural and harmonic focal point for the four part suite that makes up You Are (Variations). The vocals push and sometimes take the already chilling climate of Reich's recent work over the top but for the most part you still give into the polyrhythmic pulses that he so carefully constructs. For us the shining moment of the record comes after the four part suite, on the last track, the latest in his ongoing counterpoint series. "Cello Counterpoint" is Reich at his pinpointed best, stripped away of all elements except the solo cello of Maya Beiser, and its 11 minutes are so stunning.
Max Richter first caught our attention with his gorgeous arrangements on Vashti Bunyan's long awaited return to the world of music, 2005's Lookaftering. He's put out several of his own post-classical works, and his latest is just simply stunning. 24 short tracks made for gray days spent looking out the window as rain falls gently and memories drift to the surface. Most of these tracks are under two minutes and were actually intended to be used as ringtones. Somehow Richter is able to pack such strong emotions into these short tracks but also allows the listener to fill in the blanks and wander away. Anyone who uses these as ringtones will for sure be sporting the most elegant and classy cell phone around. Simply beautiful!
Not many musicians and composers are able to create music as beautiful and elegant as Max Richter. Whether it be his stunning albums, soundtracks or arrangements for folks like Vashti Bunyan, Richter has proven to be one of the most restrained and versatile composers of the last decade. Infra was a work originally created as a score for a Ballet called The Waste Land. These fragile, subdued miniatures create such a dislocated and gray musical mood. Allowing your mind to wander or stay frozen in a numbing disbelief. Our only complaint regarding some of his previous work was the incorporation of unneeded and heavy handed spoken word/voices which tended to ruin the flow of the music, but luckily on Infra he smartly keeps that out of the mix and allows the haunting, cloudy sounds he's created to speak for themselves. While this may have been made for a ballet we are finding it the perfect soundtrack to those foggy/cold days we've been having in July (oh San Francisco summer) and those early mornings you find yourself awake but bleary headed and needing a musical companion to your clouded vision and foggy mind. So nice!
The recent vinyl reissue of this totally essential Terry Riley album has given us the opportunity to finally review a record that holds a special place in many of our hearts. A Rainbow In Curved Air is pretty much the ultimate in hypnotizing cosmic bliss out. Two long tracks in which Riley used electric organ, harpsichord, rockischord, dumbec, saxophone and tambourine, to create a sound in which his minimalist background served as a launching pad for him to really reach the outer limits of sound, a sound that is about as perfect as a soundtrack to sunrise we could ever imagine.
A Rainbow In Curved Sky was originally released in 1969, it was the first album Riley made for Columbia records and it's still so baffling and amazing to think there was a time when major labels would release such brilliant, noncommercial transcendent music like this. After doing some digging around we realized that one of the main reasons that Riley amazingly ended up on Columbia was because fellow electronic pioneer David Behrman had landed a job at the label, so he brought Riley into the land of Columbia and produced this amazing album.
Forty years after it's genesis, these are still sounds that make us stop in our tracks and suck us in, allowing us to get lost in the most amazing sonic daydreams one could imagine. A Rainbow In Curved Air has proven to be a model for several generations of cosmic music makers. It's safe to say that without this record there wouldn't be folks like Arp, Growing, Emeralds, White Rainbow, etc. Beyond recommended and totally essential!
We've only got ONE of these limited edition pressings of Terry Riley's first release on his new label Sri Moonshine Studios. Perhaps you read the (positive) review in The Wire. Well, WE can't say it's all that good, but we can say it's nicely packaged and signed and numbered by the artist! You need to know more? It's a "74-minute seamless journey featuring voices, strings, synthesizer, piano and loops from India" and includes the final scene of Riley's opera "The Crucifixion of My Humble Self". There's got to be one Terry Riley fanatic out there who will want this, right? The less fanatic but still curious might wait for a normal, not-so-fancy, cheaper edition that may surface some day, or not.
Recent recording of Terry Riley's seminal work "In C." Because of its ambiguous instrumentation and relative ease of performance, "In C" has been performed and recorded in a multitude of varying arrangements in its 37 years of existence. In this version, "In C" is attacked with sitar, tabla, percusssion, voices (mostly extended technique, ie: growls) and orchestra. The performance was
The Terry Riley reissue campaign is in full effect and this week we were delighted to see his little heard seventies soundtracks, Les Yeux Fermes (Eyes Closed) from 1972 and Lifespan from 1974 arrive in our store (well, maybe Scott wasn't so delighted after shelling out $30 dollars for Lifespan on vinyl, just a couple of weeks ago). Le Yeux Fermes is comprised of two nearly twenty-minute pieces that are reminiscent of his early work on Reed Streams. The first is "Journey From A Death of a Friend" involving multiple organ and piano lines in counterpoint and the second is a more involved piece with delayed saxophone and organ counterpoints called "Happy Endings". The selections for Lifespan are six shorter pieces, which are a bit more diverse and melody oriented in their structures. "G Song" begins with an organ fugue repetition before the sax melody gives the piece more of a soundtrack theme, while "M.I.C.E.", short for Music In Curved Entrances, begins with a sustained organ and tabla drone before the melodic organ progressions kick into gear leading into the raga drones of "Slow Melody in Bhairavi" and the chanting Tangerine Dream-ish, "In The Summer". "The Oldtimer "is the most playful with an almost carnivalesque organ vamp, while "Delay" is just that, a slow burning organ drone with building and repeating organ lines that coalesce in a sea of pensive harmonics. We're surprised Riley hasn't done more soundtrack work. Listening to this makes us want to see the movies, especially Lifespan, which stars Klaus Kinski as a biochemist on a frantic search for the fountain of youth!
Elysium Fields has reissued this fine collection of Terry Riley pieces that was the kick off release of a fantastic string of reissues put out by the Cortical Foundation years ago. Here's what we said, way back when...
This release compiles four early tape-works from Terry Riley that are linked by their common usage of jazz passages, even as they deteriorate over the course of the disc. Beginning with "Music For The Gift" (1963), Riley works with Chet Baker who provides his signature downer jazz warbly horn and a painterly stand-up bass, which Riley in turn tosses into his tape-loop mechanisms for some pretty tremendous, hallucinatory drones and phasing patterns. Think of the manipulations of "You're No Good" but with jazz instead of R&B. "Birds Of Paradise" (1965) is a tape-manipulation piece which loops seemingly random tape segments of jazz horns (probably from those Baker sessions) with a phasing delay predating the work of Zoviet France. "The Mescalin Mix" is a murky Robert Ashley-esque collection of neurotic whispers. The finale of the disc is "Concert for Two Pianos and Five Tape Recorders" which could easily be a No-Neck Blues Band pipe fight with an odd play-by-play narration of the concert. Certainly the current crop of drone artists can learn a thing or twelve from this collection of seminal recordings by the West Coast master of minimalism.
This compiles four works from Terry Riley that are linked by their common usage of jazz passages, even as they deteriorate over the course of the disc. Beginning with "Music For The Gift" (1963), Riley works with Chet Baker for a pretty straight meditative jazz composition for Baker's warbly horn and a painterly stand-up bass. "Birds Of Paradise" (1965) is a tape-manipulation piece which loops seemingly random tape segments of jazz horns (perhaps from the Baker sessions???) with a phasing delay predating the work of Zoviet France. "The Mescalin Mix" is a murky Robert Ashley-esque collection of neurotic whispers. The finale of the disc is "Concert for Two Pianos and Five Tape Recorders" which could easily be a No-Neck Blues Band 'pipe fight' ('pipe fight' being a utilitarian term we've come up with for field recordings that sound..well..like a pipe fight) with an odd play-by-play narration of the concert. An awesome collection of seminal recordings.
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
SORRY.
Never before available. In 1967, students of the Nacka High School of Music in Stockholm performed this phase-shifting composition with Terry Riley accompanying on soprano saxophone. As much a pedgogical experiment as a performance, this recording is great moment in early minimalism--repetitive and hypnotic and slightly overwhelming orchestations that pulsate for a seeming eternity. Artwork by Riley and Bruce Conner. Liner notes by Folke Rabe.
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At last reissued (again), this live performance of minimal pioneer Terry Riley's signature piece, "Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band" from 1968. Using organ, saxaphone, and a "Time-Lag Accumulator" to create an echo effect (hence The Phantom Band), Riley's original performance was six hours long and lasted all night. Versions of this piece have appeared before on the B-side of A Rainbow in Curved Air and on the second disc of the Cortical Foundation's release of You're No Good (which we're hoping Elision Fields will also reissue!). This is a 40 minute edit of the original performance first released on Cortical Foundation in 1999. and we would gladly hear five hours more of this organic, lilting, and mesmerizing loveliness. Highly Recommended!
An absolutely stellar reissue of Terry Riley's debut album from 1966, Reed Streams.
Containing two long pieces, "Untitled Organ" and "Dorian Reeds", we see the initial foundations of Riley's spiritualized minimalism that would culminate in the wide releases of A Rainbow in Curved Air and In C a few years later. "Untitled Organ" is a series of four- and eight-note patterns exchanged and interchanged in idiosyncratic modulations inevitably creating a third complex pattern. The effect is rigorous, repetitious and astounding for its lack of delay effects. "Dorian Reeds" makes use of more undulating and circular pulsations but this time is aided with tape echo to create a more time-altering effect. But the real treat of this reissue is the bonus track from 1970 of "In C (mantra)" performed by L'Infonie, a ragtag group of French-Canadian free players directed by Walter Boudreau. What L'Infonie adds to this piece is the use of propulsive percussion jettisoning this classic piece of conceptual music into a grooving krautrock tribal spree. Highly Recommended!!!!!!
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.
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