Jon Gibson and Ellen Fullman
Since their launch nearly a decade ago, the San Fransisco based imprint, Superior Viaduct, has become a beacon in the landscape of underground music. Rather embracing a single focus, their catalog has grown to embrace the one and new - from vibrant contemporary efforts to stunning reissues and archival releases, spanning nearly every genre that can be called to mind. That said, it’s impossible to ignore the imprint’s deep dedication to historically seminal efforts of avant-garde and experimental music. One after another, astounding, rare efforts by many of this world’s most important names have re-emerged into the light, and the two before us now are among the most exciting to date - Jon Gibson’s Songs & Melodies, largely comprised of previously unissued recordings made between 1973 and 1977, and Ellen Fullman’s In the Sea, originally self-issued by the artist on cassette in 1987, and now as rare and sought after as they come.
Entering the fray during the 1960s, across the last six decades, the composer, wind instrumentalist, and visual artist, Jon Gibson, has remained a central player within the landscape of American experimental and avant-garde music. A rare artist, dedicating equal energy to supporting the realisation of the work of his peers - Steve Reich, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and others - as to his own, the sum total of his contribution has few equivalents. Among Jon Gibson’s most important contributions to the history of minimalist music are two remarkable LPs - Visitations and Two Solo Pieces - issued during the 1970s by Philip Glass’ private imprint, Chatham Square. Long hunted by collectors until they were reissued by Superior Viaduct, they represent a crucial expansion of how we understand this spectrum of sound, emerging from the heart of it all. Now Superior Viaduct returns with another astounding window into this world, Songs & Melodies, a body of work composed by Gibson between 1973 and 1977 - the same era that gave us Visitations and Two Solo Pieces - most of which has never before seen the light of day.
It’s been wonderful, over the course of the last decade, to witness the composer, musician, performer, and instrument builder, Ellen Fullman, emerge into the consciousness of new generations of avant-garde practitioners and fans. Belonging, along with peers like Arnold Dreyblatt, Laurie Spiegel, Arthur Russell, Julius Eastman, Glenn Branca, and numerous others, to a generation who emerged across the 1970s and '80s in New York, entirely rethinking the terms experimental and minimalist music. Of all of them, Fullman was among the most radical and forward thinking, remaining a crucial contributor to the landscape of these musics ever since. Ellen Fullman is known for her development of The Long String Instrument, an entirely singular object that she began to deploy during the early 1980s. Stretching tuned strings across the expanse of a perforce space, played with rosined hands, the instrument, with her compositions for it, radically readdressed the line between sculpture, performance, and sound, sculpting an entirely new sense of possibility for minimalism and drone. Along with her 1985 debut album, The Long String Instrument, reissued by Superior Viaduct in 2015, Fullman’s only output from the 1980s appeared on two self-released, incredibly rare cassettes - In the Sea and Work For Four Players and 90 Strings - recorded in 1987 at an unfinished office tower in Austin, Texas.
