[ aquarius records — 20th Century Composers ]

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Showing results 551 through 600 of 652.

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SORRY. While Karlheinz would certainly object to one of his scores lovingly described as a pipe fight (the AQ-coined term for a bunch of guys randoming tossing large pipes in a reverb laden warehouse - see also No Neck Blues Band and Organum), the aural similarities between "Microphony" and a pipe fight are indisputable. Instead of choosing the palette of the industrial wasteland, Stockhausen has scored a piece in which six classically trained percussionists tinker with spaghetti forks, tea china settings, suction cups, and cardboard tubes on a gong. But somehow this manages to be downright stunning.

After a decade of parallel work in the synthetic sound production of electronische musik and in traditional orchestras, Stockhausen strove for a union of the two possibilities. "Mixtur" (1964) was one of the first far-reaching compositions that achieved his goal, as this piece is for 5 orchestra groups, 4 sine-wave generators, and 4 ring modulators.

"Prozession:" for tam tam, electrochord, electroniyum, piano & filters, potentiometers, and sound projection. "Ceylon:" for electronium, Persian camel bells, triangles, synthesizer, modulated piano, tam tam, and kandy-drum. Two pieces featuring small ensembles and electronics, with the performers processing their parts live. "Ceylon" in particular is quite successful.

"Since the time of 'Mixture' and 'Microphony II' the sound of ring modulation belongs to my musical language." If you needed more proof of Stockhausen's megalomania, that statement should tide you over until you next encounter his monologues. "Spiral" (1968) consists of a "sequence of events in which the imitation, transformation, and transcendence of short wave radio is experienced as an organic network of relationships" with vocalist Michael Vetter whose operatic training seems unneccessary as his 'singing' is closer to Jaap Blonk's dadaist sound poetry. Bursts of tuning shortwave radio with voice.

"Musik Im Bauch" was composed in 1975 for music box and percussion. Originally, "Tierkries" was composed for a solo instrument to be accompanied by a chordal instrument. On this recording, Stockhausen has arranged "Tierkries" for 12 music boxes - each with its own melody representing a character of the Zodiac. The results are quite beautiful.

AQ's Byram Abbott has resigned himself to the fate that he must own one of Stockhausen's limited edition music boxes which were prominently featured in the "Tierkreis" performance. This "70th Birthday Edition" is limited to 40 music boxes for each of the star signs. The melodies are encased in a light-colored natural wood box measuring 17.7 x 12.1 cm. The notes of the melody are silkscreened onto the lid of each of the musicbox. Support the Stockhausen drug habit, buy a music box!

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Why look it's a 20th cent. new music/electronica classic.

Collection of recordings spanning American electronic composer Morton Subotnick's career. It includes a remastered version of Touch, originally released in 1969 (his third commercially released composition) and created on the Buchla synthesizer and a four track. Also included is "A Sky of Cloudless Sulfur" (1978) also created using the Buchla, and a new piece entitled "Gestures"

RealAudio clip: Touch Part One
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Japan's Taku Sugimoto is best known for super minimalist guitar improvisation. But he also writes for other stringed instruments, as this new collection of Chamber Music will attest. The first track, which clocks in at just under a half hour, is entitled "Sonata for Violin and Piano". Yet, there's a third 'instrument' here, one present on all Sugimoto recordings: silence. Part of listening to and enjoying Sugimoto's music is, simply, waiting. Waiting for the next sound. It's not music for the impatient. Brief bleatings from the violin take turns with lonely notes from the piano. When one instrumental voice occupies the sound field for longer than a second, it's an event. Next is the 33 minute "Music for Violin, Cello and Piano" which follows the same minimalist scheme, the cello certainly not elbowing the silence out of the picture. There's almost a monk-like discipline required to enjoy this music. It's meditation as much as it is listening, the pay-off is in the process. A three minute coda for guitar and banjo (and silence) wraps things up, jaunty by comparison to the rest of the disc, but just barely. As always with Sugimoto, spending an hour with this will provide a kind of perverse delight to those attuned to his aesthetic.

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Wow, Preston Swirnoff has been one busy (and versatile) bee over the last several years. From his collaborative vinyl only releases on Eclipse with Ilya Monosov, to their blown out psych-rock band The Shining Path, his avant jazz outfit, The Seesaw Ensemble and his amazing dub project Habitat Sound System, a record we were blasting all last summer. Maariv is a collection of solo works composed and performed by Swirnoff from 2004-05 only now finally seeing its much deserved moment in the sun. Using 20th century minimalism, ritual drones and early tape and electronic sound experiments as his launching pad, he's tapped into a mystical realm that can be both gorgeous and disturbing. Each of the four pieces use a different set of instrumentation and various tape loops. The opener filled with rolling piano thunder and a delicious fog of electronics had some of our favorite AQ customers drooling as they heard it blasting from our speakers, as it recalls some of the most breathtaking work by Charlemagne Palestine. The next piece is probably the most intense and disturbing of the lot, as a room full of organs create a cacophony of sound which radiate with a scary and relentless passion. Then comes the most delicate and pretty track in the collection where Swirnoff uses a sequence that Ilya Monosov played on electric-guitar and uses a tape machine and speed control to create an otherworldly gamelan-like sound that would be right at home on a Colleen record. The album ends with a really nice nod to the kind of works that came out of the SF tape music center of the '60s as four tape machines go back and forth between speeds and pitches to create a mesmerizing mood that we could listen to forever! Whether tapping into the power of Gyorgy Ligeti or showing an amazing range that rivals Barton Smith, Preston has created a vivid work of electroacoustic music that will most surely stand the test of time! Highly recommended!

MPEG stream: Maariv 1 (For Piano & Electronics)
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MPEG stream: Maariv 2 (For A Room Full Of Organs)

We could think up better ways to market this record that what Table Of The Elements came up with. They *could* have shrouded this album in mystery, saying: "Truly hypnotic, vangarde turntablism and cut-up audio collage by unknown sound artist Ted Conrad, circa 1973- '74 -- predating Christian Marclay and Boyd Rice!" Or they could have said what is probably the truth: "Legendary minimalist Tony Conrad smoked a lot of pot in the early '70s while stuck in Ohio. Instead of making films or composing abrasive minimalist music, he made recordings of his young son playing around his toy Fisher-Price record player. Indeed, he probably was playing with the turntable himself." But Table Of The Elements chose instead to present this album with such hyperbole as: "Is it fair to argue that a precocious Ted [Conrad -- Tony's at the time infant son], the once and future Thuunderboy, anticipated in these excursions of the early '70s everything from the rise of turntablism and hip-hop to the creative strategies of such disparate entertainers and / or conceptualists as Fatboy Slim, Christian Marclay, and that erstwhile Savior of Pop (circa 1997), Beck? Or, rather does it affirm some unerringly democratic quality inherent in the very act of scratching and spinning, that a toddler could create hypnotic loops and decontruct pop banalities into perversely humorous after-the-fact commentaries on the star-making machinery?" Arghhhh. So lame. Rant aside, the Thuunderboy recordings -- regardless of whether it was Tony Conrad or the toddler Ted Conrad making these sounds -- is a pretty amazing album of locked grooves worn into Donny Osmond 45s, played back at the wrong speed. If anything, it should be appreciated for what it is, a humble peek into the lives of Tony Conrad -- the minimalist trying his hand at fatherhood -- and young Ted Conrad -- the two year old kid who put up with a dad who kept playing with all of his toys.

RealAudio clip: At Last
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SORRY. Electronic music from composer pianist David Tudor, realized at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in 1973. Two tracks, consisting of two different mixes, each 27 minutes and 30 seconds in length. Unfortunately the liner notes are all in Italian, but judging from the schematics included in the booklet and the sound of the recording the process appears to function as such: two boxes, each containing a speaker and two microphones, are set up in a feed back loop. Integrated into this loop are several devices for processing the envelope of the sound, gain, etc. resulting in swells of reverberant feedback drone which are constantly shifting in timbre and color. Not unlike Arcane Device.

The last record from Alexander Turnquist, the lovely and exquisite As The Twilight Crane Dreams In Color, was a fantastic surprise from this fairly new to us (but quite prolific) composer/guitarist. That record was a lush landscape of glimmering harmonics, and crystalline ambience, all woven around Turnquist's strange and inventive guitar playing. This new record seems to follow suit, with Turnquist again setting the foundation with impossibly dense little soft squalls of steel string tangle, lush with overtones and unlikely harmonics, it's like some avant Appalachia, a sound we wish would go on much longer than its way too brief 2 minutes. But then that feeling is washed away by the equally lovely title track which follows, a swirling, sweetly melodic guitarscape, again, a looped set of steel string tangles providing the anchor, creating a billowing cloud of washed out melody, not unlike pianist Lubomyr Melnyk, a rapid succession of notes somehow transformed into something tranquil and serene, the tangled melodies further tangled by vibes and violin, those two elements providing the melodic counterpoint, and some extra sonic pathos, adding a dark bit of tension, and a sweet melancholia. The sound is dense, while remaining ethereal and dreamlike, the repetition adding a drone element, that makes everything hypnotic and totally mesmerizing. On "Spherical Aberrations" the trio apply the same methodology to chamber music, the vibes almost jazzy, the violin achingly melodic, all the while the guitar spinning impossible webs of melody and texture underneath. The record's centerpiece would have to be the sprawling "Waiting At The Departure Gate", which take Turnquist's Reich/Riley compositional style and lets it spread out into a gorgeous layered epic, the guitars impossibly intricate and dense, eventually sounding nothing like guitars at all, instead like some sort of sound generator, while the vibes and violin weave magical melodies over the top, the sound stately and darkly romantic, Turnquist's guitarscapes constantly slipping from background texture to main melody and back again, before finishing off with a bit of minimal Appalachian folk drift. The record is bookended with another brief bit of harmonics heavy steel string tangle, that sounds like a way more avant experimental Michael Hedges. So fantastic. Turnquist is fast becoming one of our favorite modern composers/guitarists!

MPEG stream: Running Towards
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MPEG stream: Spherical Aberrations

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For a man who could have been the Prince of Mongolia (read the liner notes for the whole story...), Ussachevsky has made it into the history books not for political but for musical reasons, as he was the founder of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and the originator of the school of "tape music", the American experimenation developed independently of the French "musique concrete" and the German "elecktroniche musik". This collection features six compositions for electronic tape (including the awesome "Wireless Fantasy" in which bursts of electrical noise and morse code tappings are collaged over a fragment of Wagner's "Parsifal", which in turn was treated to sound like a short-wave radio transmission) and six pieces of choral work (which are often accompanied the electronic medium).

Inspired by past compilations of avant-garde guitar explorations assembled by John Fahey and Fred Frith, the Bay Area's own well-known guitar experimentalist Henry Kaiser has put together this collection of acoustic solos by many of today's most amazing guitar innovators, 19 of 'em in fact: Duck Baker, Stefan Basho-Junghans, Raoul Bjorkenheim, Jean-Paul Bourelly, Nels "AQ Loves Me" Cline, Janet Feder, Fred Frith, Michael Gulezian, Richard Leo Johnson, Mike Keneally, Peter Lang, Scott McGill, Shawn Persinger is Prester John, Rod Poole, Gyan Riley, Miroslav Tadic, Richard Thompson, U Tin, and Kaiser himself (hey, why no Eugene Chadbourne?). These guys (yeah, they're all guys except for Ms. Feder, but what can you do?) hail from around the world and have unique, personal approaches to playing. Moods here range from the pastoral idyll of Brit folkie Thompson to the minimalist soundscaping of Frith, from the faux-raga like slide work of Bjorkenheim to the authentically Robbie Basho-like exotica of U Tin, from the country pickin' of Lang to the percussive melodicism of Bourelly, from the scraping drone-folk of Feder (we want to hear more!) to the repetitive trance-induction of Rod Poole, from the sprightly, jazzish jingle of Persinger to the melancholic classical playing of Gyan Riley. The disc ends with Steffen Basho-Junghan's epic, experimental, fucked up but lovely sounding "Part 1 from the Virgin Orchestra No.1", a piece that Kaiser cites as the cornerstone of this comp. And it's the pretty great finale to this gorgeous, fascinating album. Kaiser intends "156 Strings" to highlight those carrying on the work of iconoclastic instrumental steel-string guitar pioneers like Fahey, Basho and Kottke, a tradition driven underground by the more commerical, less challenging New Age guitar genre those same folks helped create. Also, funnily enough, a portion of the proceeds from the sales of this comp go to benefit H.E.A.R. (Hearing Education and Awareness for Rockers). Don't worry, there's no need for earplugs with this one!

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RealAudio clip: Part 1 from the Virgin Orchestra No.1

This is a compilation of various interpretations / performances / covers of John Cage's infamous composition 4'33," by Keith Rowe, Artificial Memory Trace, Thurston Moore, Pauline Oliveros, Jio Shimizu, Voice Crack, Clive Graham, Toshiya Tsunoda, Alignment, and

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The curators of the fourth volume of the seven part series of Anthologies of Noise & Electronic Music are correct when they point to the fact that the history of the avant-garde is a messy one with tangled connections between competing factions, ideologies, methods, and personalities. The Sub Rosa compilations are dotted with a who's who of the electro-acoustic avant-garde from the past century, tossed in with a smorgasborg of previously unknown (and often very interesting) artists as well as contemporary musicians who are well on their way to establishing themselves within the canons of the institutional avant-garde. Sub Rosa has gone out of its way to compile a collection to scramble one's notions of the taxonomic rhetoric that may influence the perception of any of the artists present; hence you'll find Les Rallizes Denudes (already you can tell this series is not very reverential of the academic definition of experimental electronics music, with the inclusion of this incendiary Japanese psych band) next to Vibracathedral Orchestra followed by one-time Blind Idiot God guitarist Andy Hawkins then Alvin Lucier. Sub Rosa boasts that more than 75 percent of the album is unreleased material, which is all the more impressive considering that the compilation features the likes of Gyorgy Ligetti, Oliver Messiaen, William S. Burroughs, Milan Knizak, Steve Reich, Halim el-Dabh, Jean-Claude Risset, Stephen Vitiello, Laurie Spiegel, and many others. To top it all off, it's surprisingly pleasing to listen to. What that says about the state of 'noise' music may be another question.

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Originally conceived in Paris in 1924, George Antheil's ideal instrumentation for Ballet Mechanique called for 16 synchronized player pianos, in addition to two human-played pianos, percussion, electric bells, a siren and three airplane propellers. Despite his close relationship with a Parisian manufacturer of player pianos who had in fact patented a way to synchorize the "pianolas," the piece has never been possible to fully realize and has been played only in scaled-back versions until last year when the piano parts were sequenced for MIDI. The result is a 30 minute rampage of frantic, beautiful, insane brilliance. Just fucking incredible. Seeing it at SF's Davies Hall a couple months ago, the cute little-old symphony-subscriber-lady next to me alternately had her hands over her ears, jerked back and forth to the rhythm and yelled at me over the cacophony, "Can you believe you're seeing this!?" It's that great! Oh yeah, there are also six other pieces on this disc by John Cage and Lou Harrison, Richard Grayson, Amadeo Roldan and Mendelssohn.

This collection documents a unique method of computer synthesis called UPIC that was developed by Greek avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis in the late '70s. This system did not use the traditional method of having a keyboard hooked up to a computer. The majority of the composers closely follow Xenakis' approach -- a novel method that was also quicker means for Xenakis to compose electronic music along the lines of his legendary works "Bohor," "pH," and "Persepolis", full of sweeping drones of tense crackling electronic tones. Occasionally, these composers augment their electronic manipulations with traditional instruments with varied success: Jean-Claude Risset's duet for UPIC and saxophone is simply gimmicky, but Julio Estrada's full orchestra with UPIC works is as effective as any Luigi Nono composition.

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"The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was the first electronic music center to be established within the U.S. This selection, drawn from those seminal years from 1959 - 1973, is an excellent overview of the wide variations in musical style and aesthetic that was encouraged by the center's guiding spirit Vladimir Ussachevsky." With breathless electronic experiments by Bulent Arel, Charles Doage, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Ingram Marshall, Daria Semegen, and Alice Shields.

Dada is nearly 100 years old; yet the ideals of Dada which adamantly insisted on the negation of its own aesthetics and an espousal of transgressive irrationality still resonate with elements of contemporary culture. Due to the volatility of Dada and its resistance to grounding aesthetics, Dada has proven to be a very difficult movement to document; hence, the collection Dada et la Musique reads as a historical document that only sporadically taps into the agitation and provocation that Dada intended. There's no doubting the historical importance of Erik Satie in the development of 20th century composition; but Satie's playful and impressionistic piano works hardly engender the ideas of Dada. The same should be said for Authur Honegger and Francis Poulenc; yet all of these composers feature prominently on Dada et la Musique. After listening to Nurse With Wound, Luc Ferrari, R.H.Y. Yau, and Merzbow whose work may not be true Dada but comes closer to its lunacy, noise, abjection, and irrationality, we may be comparing apples and oranges. Yet the underlying question remains, are the musical entries on Dada et la Musique actually Dada? Probably not. Even the frenzied cacacophony of the semi-automated "Ballet Mechanique" by Georges Anthiel from 1917 engages a whimsy that could be mistaken for Carl Stalling's cartoon scores. So what makes this collection Dada is not really the music, but the sound poetry from Kurt Schwitters (e.g. the ever-baffling glossalia of Ursonate) certainly does qualify as Dada. There's plenty of sound poems from Raoul Haussmann, Richard Huelsenbeck, Jean Arp, Hugo Ball, and Tristan Tzara, many of which have conetmporary recitations and reinforce the fact that we need to learn French.

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Compiled in part by Rob Young, editor for the exemplary UK magazine The Wire, "Early Modulations" tracks the historical birthing of electronics within the academic framework of European and American institutions. The scope of the compilation is not so much an analysis of the importance of these pieces but a celebration of contemporary electronica by looking to its past. And if you can handle the K-Tel musk of the project, this makes a pretty cool primer. Founders of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in the late 1940s, Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky found within the tape machine a means by which to scramble the structuralist codes of musical notation. Their 1953 piece "Incantation" processes multiple tape machines in which flutes, pianos, and gongs flicker in metaphorphic sonic swells. Similar experiments were made in France by Pierre Schaeffer, the inventor of musique concrete. His featured piece "�tude aux Chemins de Fer" (1948) stitches together tiny fragments of tape, collaging repeated signatures of chugging locomotives stopped in mid-stride by a variety of whistles, offering a new experiential sonic landscape of the familiar. The earliest and perhaps most breathtaking piece on the compilation is John Cage's "Imaginary Landscape No. 1" (1939). Pure tones bleep and modulate against an a prepared piano, whose internal organs are exposed and prodded to coax a secondary palette from the piano. While Iannis Xenakis, Morton Subotnik, and Luc Ferrari are also documented, the one glaring omission is Karlheinz Stockhausen (strange, 'cause he's so prominent in the historical parts of the "Modulations" film).

We hadn't heard of DIEM before, but the title - and the cover art of a couple dozen VU meters in action - whet our curiosity. Turned out to be an awesome collection, of just what it says, a curated selection of electronic music produced at the Danish Institute Of Electronic Music (originally the Danish Institute Of Electroacoustic Music), since its founding in 1987: everything from conceptual, computer processed droneworks to the skittery scribble scrobble of abstract IDM beatscapes. Some pieces hold to a more traditional, academic 'musique concrete' aesthetic; others venture into ambient, 'lower case' laptop electronica realms. Both old and new stuff flow together well (the tracks are arranged in alternating chronological order, going both forwards and backwards, so you get a piece from 1988 followed by one from 2012, then one from 1989, 2011, etc.), and all are pretty great, seeing as how they were able to chose some of the best from 25 years worth of avant-garde output. Almost all tracks are exclusive to this box, which is enjoyable for what it contains, while also serving as a sampler of sorts to the works of a host of hitherto unknown to us electronic musicians that we now may have to track down other releases by. We hadn't previously heard of most of these artists, though many are presumably well-known in academic circles and/or in the European electronic music scene - some in fact being award-winners in Scandinavia. $11.98 is certainly a "nice price" (perhaps subsidized by the Danish government?) for this, considering what you get - two cds in cardstock sleeves accompanied by a thick 30 page booklet, stuffed inside a hinged-lid cardboard box, a handsome little package indeed. The booklet contains several in-depth essays detailing the Institute's history, providing an account of all the (at the time) state-of-the-art recording equipment and computer music-making gear and software they acquired and discarded over the years, while pointing out the irony of how the rise of home PC recording rendered obsolete not only a lot of their studio's expensive machinery but also affected an aesthetic change in electronic music, where glitch and noise were to be valued rather than technologically scrubbed away. Many pages of the booklet are further devoted to providing information about each individual track and composer found on the discs. And there's photos too, some good retro gear porn for anyone into that sort of thing (you'll see the Otari MTR-90 24-track analog tape machine that was DIEM's pride and joy in 1987, and from where those VU meters on the cover come; and we're especially we're partial to the photo of the Macintosh Plus computer, circa 1988, hooked up to an Emulator SP-12 drum machine and Emulator II sampler). Rather than provide a list of unfamiliar names, we'll just mention a few favorites amongst the 20 tracks here. There's the constant-pitch drone of "Tunnel Vision" (1995) by DIEM director Wayne Siegel, the percussive onslaught and processed sound collage of Rasmus Lunding's "On Learning How To Kill" (2002), the playful mad scientist bleep and bloop mixed with sampled chamber strings of Fuzzy's "Electric Gardens And Their Surroundings" (1989), the amazing vocal experiments (from inhuman gutturals, to Yoko Ono or Bjork like babble) of Line Tjornhoj-Thomesen on her 13+ minute "Lauria" (1998), Puzzleweasel & Richard Devines's quite IDM-ish "Mad Bonce" (2008), the blissfully-blown-out whoosh of Vectral's "AC-3" (2007), the piercing, dramatic drones of Anker Fjeld Simonsen's "Octav III" (1988), the noisy/melodic mashup of Hans Hansen's "Passaics Monumenter" (1998) - and we could go on. Well worth picking up!

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We can't remember the last time a compilation so captivated everybody here, but this collection is really something else. A gorgeously compiled cd-r of tracks sourced from Japanese lps circa the years 1980-1986, featuring at least a few names we'd heard, like Yellow Magic Orchestra, Ryuchi Sakamoto, Inoyamo Land, but so so many we hadn't: Mkwaju Ensemble, Yasuaki Shimizu, Seigen Ono, Masahide Sakuma, Geinoh Yamashirogumi, Danceries, Dip In the Pool, we could go on, but we're guessing these are all new to you too. It's a single 74 minute continuous mix, that slips dreamily from synth and percussion minimalism, to mysterious electronic laced rhythms, from new agey krautrock to dreamy clouds of percussive melodies, from playful childlike toy piano melodies to synthy sci-fi drones, haunting electronic flecked Asian ballads to fluttery flute folk, from mesmerizing vibraphone melodies underpinned by haunting drones to loping jazzy almost prog, from hazy washed out kosmische electronics to lush layered chorales and on and on and on. The tracks are so perfectly combined, and so seamlessly mixed, it almost sounds like it could be the coolest, weirdest record ever by some impossibly brilliant single artist, who somehow crafted one epic sprawling sonic exploration, a series of sounds that manage to be at once warm and familiar, yet also strange and mysterious, strange looped birdsong lays atop distant choir like vocals, and a strangely mechanical rhythm peppered with strange symphonic bursts melts into soaring strings, chamber music devolves into some fantastically dada-ish assemblage of voices and sound effects, thick sitar like buzz underpins deep foghorn like melodies, the vibe strangely melancholic, deep, dense new age swirls hover above a super minimal dripping faucet rhythm, warm, muted melodies unfurl over distant bells and deep reverberating tones, vibraphone melodies are layered atop a groovy, almost jazzy rhythm, and a mournful brass melody before gradually disappearing in a washed out woozy sonic haze So fantastic, and so cheap too! Besides being just about the best mix/comp/collection we've heard in forever, odds are it'll have you trying to track down records by all the artists, which is always the sign of a good mix. The entire list of artists (some with more than one track): Yellow Magic Orchestra, Haruomi Hosono, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Mkwaju Ensemble, Mariah, Yasuaki Shimizu, Mkwaju Ensemble, Seigen Ono, Masahide Sakuma, Geinoh Yamashirogumi, Yasuaki Shimizu, Danceries, Yukihio Takahoshi, Dip in the Pool, YMO. So great! And so utterly and unequivocally and whole heartedly RECOMMENDED!! LIMITED TO JUST 100 COPIES. Each one hand numbered. Packaged with full color covers in plastic mini dvd-style sleeves. And nicely priced! We're one of only two places in the whole world where you can get these, and we're guessing they're gonna go fast, so grab one quick before they're gone.

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We've had this compilation on cd a few different times before but never on lp. As you may recall it went out of print, but then a few more were discovered a while back. Now it's available once again, only now on the long playing phonograph record format (we're still hoping that they'll work their way back to a 78 box set on this one.) The collection itself is a document of the music (and

One can always count on Johnny Trunk of the amazing Trunk records for making a mix that is as hilarious and head-scratching as it is beautifully listenable. When asked by strangers what kind of music his label releases, Trunks's response is usually, "you know, funny old shit", which if you think about it is the perfect response to describe the kinds of audible curiosities he reissues, from long forgotten children's TV show soundtracks to obscure novelty records and forgotten jazz greats. A few of the tracks included here are from earlier out of print reissues in the Trunk catalog such as Leona Anderson's wonderfully awful Music To Suffer By, but many of the tracks are from Trunk's private record collection, likely highlighting the best tracks on perhaps otherwise less interesting albums. You get a full gamut of styles and genres from novelty calypso songs from Robert Mitchum and Bernard Cribbins, space-lounge jazz from Alain Romans and Sergio Mihanovich, musique concrete from Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaffer, the punk dub of The Jellies, classical piano from Glenn Gould, ethnic music curios and warped kid songs. So great and for a real nice price, you'd be foolish not to pick this up! (And sorry, the more expensive vinyl version is now gone it seems.)

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As the distinct sounds of flutes, harps, bells, gongs, pianos and of course synthesizers fill the air, we realize it wasn't that long ago that we had to defend our love for early new age music as a kind of guilty pleasure. Basking in the soft-focus vibrational glow of long form minimal composition, packaged in naive hippie-ish spiritual conceits bordering on and often overstepping into cheesiness, it was hard to consider it a distinct D.I.Y. practice. In hindsight, new age music can be seen as an early form of the slow food movement or folk art. It was music meant for slowing down time, taking stock and increasing awareness, and we have since come to view it more influentially in terms of its antecedents in ambient and drone music. Yet, over the years new age music has made quite a revival inspiring a new generation of long-form music practitioners and spiritual outliers. Nothing proves that more than this incredible compilation of private press new age music from Light In The Attic that features some old faves and new discoveries across a 40 year span. We have written plenty on influential figures like Iasos, J.D. Emmanuel, Gurdjieff and Laraaji (all featured here), but there are many, especially women like Judith Tripp, Nesta Karin Crain, Constance Demby, Alice Damon and Joanna Brouk who are equally blowing our minds. Often pulled from rare cassettes and hard to find records, this is an incredible survey and the perfect primer for the uninitiated. Fantastic tripped out and dreamy stuff!!

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Collection of recordings made at this Utrecht, Netherlands as a studio for electro-instrumental music and attached to the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. Contains your standard academic tape and electronics fare for the period. Features pieces composed

RealAudio clip: Piano-forte
RealAudio clip: Freflexen

A 2014 Record Store Day collaboration between two amazing obscurity-obsessive labels, Finders Keepers and Dual Planet, Monster Skies features a dizzy collection of damaged library sounds, far-flung private press pop and early electronic strangeness. We've carried some of the Dual Planet releases, but have yet to review them, like the Australian electric weirdo space-funk-rock of Steve Maxwell Von Braund, who provides the titular song to this collection as well as the reclusive Italian guitarist and electronic composer, Teisco, who may be the most marginally strange of the Italian Library composers leaning more toward Bruce Haack than say, Egisto Macchi. Suzanne Cianni, Lucien Goethals and Val Stephen provide some scintillating musique concrete and electronic composition, while Don Harper, Philippe D'Aram, and Andrzej Korzynski bring some wonderfully brooding cinematic horror vibes to the table. Finally, Emerald Web, X-ray Pop, Clone and The Ultra Sonic Perception, give us some wonderfully sublime pop moments that buffer the oddities with wistful charm and eccentric groove. A fantastic collection and excellent introduction into a staggering undiscovered world of sound. Get one while they last!

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MPEG stream: Studie II
MPEG stream: Flight of The Raven

When you think weird '70s spacey synthesizer music, you might usually think of Germany and all the kosmic krautrockers over there. But as we've learned, France had their fair share of analog synth-psych pioneers too, experimenting with Moogs and ARPs and other machines... from academic electronics to proggy astral travel to noisier new wavey proto-industrial, this comp covers some fantastic stuff. We got this in when we got the Pierre Bastien 1968-1988 collection we highlighted last time, it's on the same French prog label, Gazul. But we had to wait and order more of these before reviewing it, 'cause the copies we got the first time flew out of here without us even putting it on our list. We guess customers in the store just saw the cover and were taken in by the b&w image of a vintage EMS Synthi AKS, and a few words in French. But maybe it's not just the evocative graphics that got 'em, it's the lineup on this comp: Richard Pinhas/Heldon, Gilbert Artman/Lard Free, Verto, Camizole, Video-Adventures, and Pascale Comlade (collaborating with Victor Nubla and David Cunningham). Here's the deal: if you know those names, you probably already want this compilation. If you don't know 'em, and we'll admit we weren't familiar with a few, that's all the more reason to get this. 9 tracks, 70 minutes, much of it never-before-released material exclusive to this comp. However, the Pinhas, Heldon and Lard Free tracks we know are from albums that some folks might already have, all are amazing, though, and well worth hearing again in this context... Meanwhile, we'd never encountered the likes of Verto before, ferinstance. And their 15+ minute cut has to be one of this disc's highlights, an epic for Fender Stratocaster guitar and electronics ("Modules RSF"), that sounds something like a cross between Fripp & Eno and SUNNO)))... Fairly heavy stuff for '76, when it was recorded! There's lots of other treats here, from Pinhas's masterful minimalist Moog pulsations on "Variations VII" to the drifting droning synthscapes of Camizole's "Electronic Alarm" to the dense, dubby rhythmic swirl of Lard Free's supremely tripped out 17+ minute "Spiral Malax", the disc's most out-rock selection. Video-Adventures provides the more playful gurgling and burbling, blipping and bleeping sci-fi noises, while Comelade and Cunningham's collaborative 15:07 of blissful waves of grinding hypnosis seems a lot more serious... And there's more, all of it excellent. The liner notes are all in French, unfortunately. But there is a selected discography that's not to hard to decipher, and photos of both musicians and their machines... Quite recommended!

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MPEG stream: Alice
MPEG stream: Spriale Malax

Following hot on the heels of the Early Modulations compilation from a while back, the Ohm box, takes the same general idea; a brief and cursory overview of the whole of experimental electronic music, and attempts to give it a little more depth. And it does, to a certain degree. But such a massive undertaking could fill 10 cds, or 20. So what we have here, is 3 cds, 42 tracks, from a who's who of electronic muisic in the last 32 years: Clara Rockmore, Oliver Messien, John Cage, Edgard Varese, Stockhausen, La Monte Young, Xenakis, Luc Ferrari, Terry Riley, David Tudor, Morton Subotnick, Steve Reich, Raymond Scott, Brian Eno, Robert Ashley, Bernard Parmegiani and a bunch more. A pretty great assortment, for sure, and definitely the best 20th century/avant electronica primer to come along. The only frustration is that a great number of the pieces are edits, often 5 or 6 minutes from a 20 or 30 minute piece, rendering some slow building gradual shifting works a bit limp. But other than that, the Ohm compilation is pretty excellent, packaged impeccably in a triple digipak, housed in a cool silkscreened transparent slipcase, with a fairly well researched book and some spot on musical choices. Definitely a great place to start.

With its self-explanatory subtitle, "Oasis" compiles some of the recent work from the Mills College faculty, including Chris Brown, Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Maggi Payne, John Bischoff, and Alvin Curran. What, no Willie Winant? As a whole, the Mills

THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE TO US AT THE MOMENT, SO PLEASE DO NOT ORDER IT. SORRY.

SORRY. A follow-up to "Gravikords Whirligigs and Pyrophones", this book (written again by Bart Hopkin with an introduction by Robert Moog) and cd compilation (with Aphex Twin, Tom Waits, John Cage, Stomp, Lou Harrison...) is another celebration of the creative spirit of instrument invention.

What could be better than a cd of kitschy but cool early "popular and applied" electronic music, from back in the '50s? Four cds? Yep, that's right. This sumptuously-packaged Basta box set brings together four cds worth of music originally recorded in Holland at the Phillips Research Laboratories circa 1956-1963, some of it from collectable LPs with space-age titles like Fantasy in Orbit and Song of the Second Moon, and some of it recently discovered and previously unreleased. Historical as heck and fun to listen to, too! In addition to the four discs, this box contains *seven* colorfully illustrated and info-crammed booklets along with posters/fold-outs of musical scores, schematics, and a timeline. In total, more than 180 pages of liner notes, photos, etc. Wow. Super deluxe indeed. These composers -- Henk Badings, Kid Baltan, and Tom Dissevelt -- are legends to some in the electronic music community today, and on the strength of these recordings ought to be as well-known as Pierre Henry, Tod Dockstader, Jean-Jacques Perrey, Gershon Kingsley, Raymond Scott and other AQ-faves in the 'pioneers of electronica' genre. It's a veritable cornucopia of treats here, too much to digest (or review) in a few listens...but well worth investigating! The superb graphics and mucho reading pleasure are but bonuses to go with the alternately clever, evocative, innovative, intriguing, absurd, etc. music found on the discs.

MPEG stream: Conflict, Reprise (Arioso)
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Remixes of Steve Reich's compositions from across his career. DJ Takemura (soon to release a full length on Thrill Jockey, and also known as Child's View), Andrea Parker, Coldcut and DJ Spooky absolutely rise to the occasion by preserving a bit of what gave Reich his edge, but adding their own voices to the mix creating tracks that are unique in their own right. Also included (rather straight-up remixes where adding beats is the approach) are Howie B, Mantronik, Tranquility Bass, Ken Ishii and others. LP has an extra track.

We had to do it. How could this NOT be an aQ Record Of The Week? Some folks will no doubt cry foul, and accuse us of arty pretension, but nothing could be further from the truth. Sure we love lots of strange stuff, and we love difficult listening, and challenging, arty sonic WTF weirdness, and have been known to champion some seriously bizarre records and groups, but we do love all that stuff. Like we love jangly pop, and buzzy black metal, we also love field recordings of abandoned buildings, we love the sound of record crackle, tape hiss, we love industrial sounds, the whir of heating units, the thrum of traffic bleeding through the walls, we love the drone found in everyday life, the music hidden in the most unmusical of places. In fact, it's almost become a running joke around here, we'll be somewhere, and some piece of machinery will be buzzing or humming, or some construction site will be emitting a strangely rhythmic crunch, and our first thought it often "We could definitely sell a bunch of these at aQ!" And after all these years, we know you're right there with us. Buying recordings of hospital rooms and life support machines, recordings of mating deer and drag races, records made entirely from runout grooves, we could go on and on, but c'mon, you love that stuff as much as we do. Which brings us to Sounds Of Silence, which as the title suggests, is in fact a collection of the most famous musical silences! That's right, a silent record. Or at least mostly, bear with us. We've had other 'silent' records at aQ before, from the not-so-silent Blank Tapes, which found Argentinean weirdos Reynols constructing a whole record from recordings of, yes, blank tapes, that disc a fantastic sonic landscape of hiss and hum, subtly textural and weirdly mesmerizing, to (in the used bin once), a purported compilation of Billy Joel's "Greatest Hits", which was in fact a recording with no sound at all, an obvious artprank jab at the ubiquitous piano man. Hell, we even poked fun at ourselves by listing a cd that didn't even exist on our April Fools list a while back, waxing poetic about the 'nothingness' and the 'void' and the concept behind the lack of actual music, we even made a mock up with an empty jewel case, that spent a good long while on the employee favorites shelf in the store. But the thing is, we do love silence, or at least, the attempt to capture silence, in a world, where true silence doesn't actually exist. From barely there recordings by Francisco Lopez and Bernard Gunter, to field recordings of industrial spaces, it's not so much about the silence, as what surrounds it, and what threatens to destroy it. So yeah, maybe you'd have to be a pretty big music dork to want to pay thirty bucks for a silent record, but then, we're all pretty big music dorks after all. C'mon, check out the lineup! Andy Warhol, Ciccone Youth, Sly & The Family Stone, Robert Wyatt, Afrika Bambatta & Family, Orbital, John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Crass, Whitehouse, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, Soulfly, John Denver, The Count Backwards and lots more. Maybe the most unlikely lineup on a compilation ever. Who knows if this is some super provocative art-prank, or a lovingly curated collection of experimental sound, or heck, a little of both, it's pretty goddamn fascinating, and weird, and cool, fans of lowercase sound will find much to dig, lots of crackle and hiss, of course even beyond the original recordings, depending in your method of playback, each person's listening experience will be different, more noise and hiss and hum and crackle and pop, you could even scratch the shit out if it before you play it and truly individualize it, Christian Marclay style! But the sounds themselves are surprisingly varied, those that come from digital sources, are truly nearly silent, while others are actually not so silent, and still others, don't even exist at all, their length listed as 0'0'', presented here as they were when they were originally 'released', the original intention unclear, high concept, political statement, who knows, but tracks like Sly & The Family Stone's "There's A Riot Goin' On", which was mentioned on the album cover, but was then conspicuously absent from the actual lp, or Andy Warhol's "Silence (Copyright 1932)", which was supposedly created by Warhol when he was 4 years old, or the Afrika Bambatta track "Beware (The Funk Is Everywhere) (Silent Version)", which was originally presented as a "Radical Mix". But fear not, Sounds Of Silence, is not all high concept, there are actual tracks, well, actual sort of silent tracks, it seems a little pointless to describe each one, since, they are all essentially 'silent', and they ARE, both sides, track after track of barely there thrum, fields of crackle, the occasional pop, most of that we're guessing from OUR turntable, but close listening reveals much of the source, some tracks have barely there sounds, whether it's the sound of the room, or the vinyl from which it was mastered, or who knows, maybe we're just hearing what we want to. Maybe there is nothing but silence. A long time ago, we at aQ dreamed of a record made entirely of vinyl lp crackle, which led sound artist Loren Chasse to do just that (sort of, he simulated it with field recordings of surf and rain actually), so in a way, if you remove the high concept angle, Sounds Of Silence, is kind of like that, like maybe a more minimal version of our long dreamed of record crackle record. Either way, you know if this is your cup of tea or if you think it's a total crock of shit. If you've read this far, we're guessing you're in the first camp, but really either way, we LOVE this. It's brilliant, hilarious, confusional, baffling, there are extensive liner notes too, track by track discussing where each one came from, why each one is important, the concept behind them, there's even an essay on silence, it's of course fantastically packaged, and totally over the top. Well, as 'over the top' as a silent record can be. Recommended for music nerds, weirdo sonic obsessives and anyone who would dig having such a ridiculous record in your collection. Don't believe us? Check out the sound samples? What sound samples? Exactly! Cool Simon & Garfunkle parody cover art too. LIMITED TO 250 COPIES ONLY!!

This is the third installment in an ongoing series of compilations of experimental and avant garde artists, with its profits directed toward the National Coalition Against Censorship. Compiled by Elliot Sharp, the general concept here is to compose a