O,O,O,O, That Shakespeherian Rag collects six of the most important compositions from his relatively small body of work. By the late 50s Martirano had begun to freely incorporate elements of jazz and popular music. O,O,O,O, That Shakespeherian Rag(1959), one of his two magnum opuses, is a prime example of this musical synthesis—a serialist choral setting of passages from three Shakespeare plays, accompanied by a chamber orchestra that includes a jazz ensemble. Schoenberg meets bebop in a wild, i…
40th Anniversary Edition - newly remastered from the master tapes, with an additional bonus LP of instrumentals and the previously unreleased “Narration Theme.”
Pierre Bastien’s "Tools" pays tribute to the Meccano screwdriver, the origin of his mechanical instruments. Using self-made devices, Bastien explores sound’s raw materiality, embracing chance and discovery, and inviting listeners to experience new musical worlds.
Milan Knízak canonical text Aktual University, dating from 1967, contains ten short lectures outlining the university's character -- On Conflict, On Dreams, On Revolutions, On Love, On Belief, On Art, etc. These lectures were to serve as inspirational schemes for lectures, seminars and discussions held at an ideal university. In the first piece, Aktual University, Milan Knízak reads his own text, with Opening Performance Orchestra providing the musical accompaniment. It was performed live in Oct…
Edition Omega Point presents work by legendary Japanese composer Joji Yuasa - Genjitsu was a film created in 1966 by a director Tetsuji Takechi, known as a legend of Showa eroticism. But this film has been hidden somewhere somehow from the public for a long time. The film’s story focuses around a prostitute and has a strong fantasy literature style to it as one may have guessed from its title Genjitsu (Sun dog; an optical phenomenon that consists of a light source alongside of the Sun in rare cl…
A series of three pieces/suites documenting David Behrman's evolved interactive computer music practice from the 1980s, featuring Rhys Chatham and Ben Neill (trumpet/mutantrumpet), Fluxus mainstay Takehisa Kosugi (violin), and Behrman himself on electronics. This essential recording captures Behrman's mature work with listening machines: thickly layered liquid sounds created through a complex computer music system which absorbs, actually hears, the sounds of instrumentalists, then plays off thei…
At Last! The new edition of this milestone release, the collected text-sound compositions of Åke Hodell, in what would have been his 100th birthday year. Åke Hodell (April 30, 1919 - July 29, 2000, Stockholm, Sweden) was a Swedish fighter pilot, poet, author, text-sound composer, and artist. Hodell was trained as a fighter pilot, but after a crash during practice July 17, 1941, he had to spend the next few years in hospital. This became a turning point and he became a dedicated antimilitarist. I…
"On the night between the 1st and 2nd of April 2001, after a period of increasing fatigue, feebleness and shortness of breath, I understood that the reason must be bad function of the heart. I felt dizzy and my heart was beating irregularly, fast and hard. I took a taxi to the hospital Emergency Room. I was in a hospital bed for one week and felt my body slowly lose all its reserve power, while the heart was beating two or three times faster than normal. Numerous medications were administered bu…
In the ensuing half century, Slovenian artist Milan Grygar, who trained as a painter, has dedicated himself to the relationship between sound and image. He has replaced paint wherever possible with sonic elements, interrogated the duration of a line, drawn with sticks, and integrated windup toys that leave noisy traces in his “mechanical drawings.” Grygar incorporates the acoustic frequencies that emerge during art making, but he also writes visual scores that musicians can interpret. His art is…
2010 release. Alga Marghen presents the first edition ever issued of Dick Higgins' music. Fluxus founding member, in 1958 Dick Higgins studied Composition and Experimental Music with John Cage in his class at the New School for Social Research in New York together with, among others, La Monte Young, Richard Maxfield, Toshi Ichiyanagi, George Brecht, Allan Kaprow, Al Hansen, and Jackson Mac Low. In the Spring of 1968, Geoffrey Hendricks and Robert Watts told Dick Higgins of a project that was afo…
2015 repress. Remastered CD edition of Tazartès' Transports, autodidact and outsider composer Ghédalia Tazartès' 1980 second LP. This album probably represents the most original example of the artist's poetical and personal approach to sound organization. The tracks for Tazartès' Transports, recorded in 1977 at Tazartès' own studio in Paris, are blends of stream-of-consciousness rippling electro rhythms, outer-national singing styles, collaged field recordings, tape loops, and chants. The …
2002 release. Alga Marghen proudly presents the first record ever produced by Ben Patterson: "This is not only my first CD, but also the first recordings of these works available to the general public." Starting as a virtuoso double-bass performer of classical music, Ben Patterson was one of the very first founders of the Fluxus Group in Wiesban. This digipak CD will introduce you to some American neo-avant garde music classics, a crossover between John Cage's exploding influences and the experi…
A surprising release from the radical Fluxus composer, Yasunao Tone
- an encoded description of the visual image in utmost detail. In the
mythical future, somebody can translate the sounds of this compact disc
back into pictures. Personnel: Yasunao Tone and Craig Kendall - image selection and processing; Craig Kendall - computer programming, digital sound creation, manipulation; John D.S. Adams - assistant producer and audio consultant.
Belgium’s avant-rock legends explore their prehistory in a special archival project. Retrieved from long-forgotten reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes, this collection of previously-unreleased tracks unveils some of the meanders which eventually led to the inception of Aksak Maboul in 1977. These 17 tracks and 80 minutes of music will take us for a stroll through moments of free rock, improv, quasi-kraut, modular & ambient electronics, and various experiments. Out on November 21 on digital, limited…
Hidden treasure is always thrilling, particularly when it means recovering the forgotten works of a great artist. This historic CD offers a selection of previously unrecorded rarities by composer Conlon Nancarrow, including Piece for Tape, a dazzling rhythmic exercise in musique concrète. Listeners are also treated to the composer’s own recording of his study for prepared player piano, as well as a rare interview with the composer himself.
New 2015 material from French experimentalists Vivenza, Brume, Le Syndicat, and Lieutenant Caramel. This is their own updated, contemporary vision of the Bruitism sounds and texts. Jean-Marc Vivenza has theoretically and politically linked himself with the Italian Futurists and Russian Constructivists since the mid '70s. Originally released in 1984, his series of Fondements Bruitistes d'Action (Bruitist Foundations of Action) recordings were inspired by the relationship between the technological…
Kenneth Gaburo (1926–1993) composed works for instruments, voices, electronics, multi-media, theater, and a variety of other resources. Foremost among his many interests was a concern with the voice and with language—how we shape language and how we are shaped by it—and with making works that existed somewhere between the boundaries of music and language. Of the works on this CD, three are intensely concerned with what Gaburo termed “Compositional Linguistics” (Antiphony III, Antiphony IV, and M…
Published for the opening of Ben Patterson's first large retrospective exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, this double CD anthology includes both historical recordings taken from the Early Works, from 370 Flies CDs as well as the first digital version of the no longer available LP titled A Fluxus Elegy and a previously-unpublished track. The first CD starts with the first-ever recording of "Ants" (1960), one of Ben Patterson's first graphic scores, pre-dating the Fluxus group. …
Roberto Cacciapaglia is an Italian composer and pianist who started out in the fertile Milan avant-garde scene of the 1970s, which included Franco Battiato, Giusto Pio, Lino Capra Vaccina, Francesco Messina, among others. After studying at the conservatory, he worked at RAI's Studio of Musical Phonology – an electronic music laboratory similar to NDR/WDR in Germany, GRM/IRCAM in France or BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Sonanze (Sonatas) is Cacciapaglia's debut album, a monumental work that was record…
Logos Works contains eight works by the Logos Duo featuring both Darge and Raes on various instruments, as well as other performers on a wide range of instruments. "This latest recording comes as they look back upon 25 years of collaboration as the Logos Duo. More than a retrospective, we see them affirming a long artistic relationship and forging new horizons--together and on divergent musical paths. In this, their work is a metaphorical journey: an inward exploration of the elegance of algorit…
Alga Marghen is proud to now present this new edition of "Poème-Partition X", extended to the CD format and included in a luxury 96 pages hardbound book, limited to 350 numbered copies. The book reproduces for the first time the complete score, a visual wonder and a major experimental printed work. Bernard Heidsieck memories of an historic lecture at the Jean Tinguely atelier is included as an introduction, as well as his testimony on Ian Sommerville and Brion Gysin's "Dream Machine". Also on th…
Another crucial excavatio from the elusive The Balsam Flex legendary catalog is now available again thanks to Jan Van Toorn Slowscan imprint. Balsam Flex was a cassette label run by the artist Erik Vonna-Michell in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and evidence of a relatively overlooked moment when a number of London-based British poets were producing work that was influenced by performance art, conceptual art, sound art, text-sound composition, Fluxus, and situationism.
Publisher and poet …
Ghédalia Tazartès left us in February 2021 when we had just finalized the editing and the cover art of his new album with him. Unfortunately he will never see the finished object. This record is therefore particularly important for us. He opened his archives to us so that we could select unpublished pieces with him and organize them in two long suites. This work took almost two years (finding the pieces among dozens of sometimes very old CD-Rs, checking that these pieces had not already been pub…
Released on Electronic Music Foundation (EMF), and now distributed via Waveshaper Media, is a series of four retrospective CD releases by electronic music pioneer Joel Chadabe. Chadabe was featured in Waveshaper Media’s 2014 modular synthesizer documentary I Dream Of Wires, and also features prominently in their forthcoming Bob Moog documentary, Electronic Voyager. This is the 2nd volume in the CD series, first released in 2017, though never widely distributed until now. The CD comes housed in a…
Mere words can’t describe the impact of an album where the only instrument is the voice of Demetrio Stratos (actually, there are few synthesizer inserts played by Paolo Tofani). Originally released in 1976: a unique work where Demetrio Stratos makes any kind of experiments and sounds with his voice, reaching and going over the limit of human capabilities. Beautiful digipack
Running and Chanting and Falling and Ranting is an immersive multimedia work by Charlemagne Palestine, combining his signature ecstatic minimalism with visual and textual explorations of ritual, trance, and performance.
David Rosenboom (b. 1947) is a composer/performer known as a pioneer in American experimental music. This series of eight works, created between 1978 and 1981 and presented on these discs in chronological order of their composition, demonstrates a remarkable extension of Rosenboom’s techniques from his …Plymouth Rock… series of 1969–71 using the harmonic and sub-harmonic series.
The In the Beginning series exemplifies the idea of model-building as a compositional process. A simple process is def…
For the first time ever the entire "Fondements Bruitistes" session from 1984 with unreleased tracks. « The Bruitist Foundations of Action » (french title « Fondements Bruitistes d'Action), which came out in october 1984, opens the period in Vivenza's work on Bruitist sound when he started to incorporate the question of the relationship that holds between the technological and mechanical industrial fabric – which makes up the reality of the modern world – and the human and socia…
2025 stock. Three rather meditative pieces from the repertoire of Ars Acustica, the series of radio art edited by Klaus Schöning, but nevertheless: Fluxus! Philip Corner, Alison Knowles and George Brecht appeared together in performances, and they are also connected by their relationship to John Cage's aesthetic, by work with chance operations, and by Zen. Explaining Fluxus is like wanting to hold a river in your hand.
Corner's Satie's Rose Cross as a Revelation takes its cue from Erik Satie's m…
For the first time a full album with recordings based on Yoko Ono’s 1964 collection of texts, event scores and drawings “Grapefruit”, a foundational cornerstone of what became known as conceptual art, and enveloping the orbits of Fluxus and experimental music. Performed by The Great Learning Orchestra which has during the 25 years of its existence worked with Gavin Bryars, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, J.g. Thirlwell, Arnold Dreyblatt a.o.
Originally self-published in 1964 in a limited edition …
2001 release. As Walter Marchetti told to the producers of De Musicorum infelicitate, i.e., The Unhappiness of Music, this will probably be his last music work, but this is not the only point making this edition a very special one. After two CDs previously issued for Alga Marghen (Antibarbarus in 1998 and Nei Mari del Sud in 1999) these "Ten Pieces in the Form of Painful Variations" dispose in their unceasing and implacable sequence the landing at an anaphorical finis terrae, the extreme and imp…
2002 release. Gong + presents three previously-unpublished compositions by Philip Corner recorded in New York City, 1974. "Metal Meditations with Listening Center," a 29-minute long piece, is a collaboration between Philip Corner and Bill Fontana. At that time Bill Fontana was very interested in the resonance properties of every object, putting his ear to everything, and sometimes recording what he called "Listening Centers," a microphone placed in a resonating space (for example a jar, or a pip…
Le pionnier légendaire de La poésie sonore Henri Chopin (1922 - 2008) livre ici sa dernière composition datant de novembre 2003, réalisée chez lui à Dereham en Angleterre avec son micro et son Revox stéréo. Cette pièce de 51 minutes en trois volets témoigne de La vitalité et de La créativité dont faisait preuve Henri Chopin qui travailLait encore à plus de 82 ans !, avec acharnement et passion.
*2024 stock. Custom CDr* Commissioned by the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation to enter in the 1977 Italia Prize Competition, Lars-Gunnar Bodin - For Jon (Fragments of a Time to Come) 1977 is structured as a “dramatic cantata…with vocal sections for both chorus and soloists alternating with recitatives and ‘instrumental’ interludes.” The texts are based on “’surrealistic science fiction’—testimony and reports about experience in other worlds, real or imaginary.” The liner notes provide an introdu…
Tip! *Repress with new obi-strip* Japanese label P-Vine sure know how to pick out the essential spiritual jazz reissues. This is another gold standard that came originally on Strata East in 1974. Vocals feature throughout and often soar to the highest of heights and make it a charismatic album. Sample hounds and hip hop lovers might well recognise the track 'Optimystical' which has been pillaged by Detroit great Andres before now. Elsewhere there is real freeform magic on 'Music Is Nothing But A…
Nicolae Brînduş's Match / Soliloque 1&4 / Antifonia reissues the composer’s most eccentric works from the PHTORA cycle (1968-1972), blending collective improvisation, spectral tradition, Romanian folklore, and free jazz into a mesmerizing tapestry. Tape manipulations and reverberation add depth, while Ana Golici’s sleeve art captures the album’s vivid sensibility.
Iannis Xenakis's late electroacoustic music became electronic: all sounds are synthetic "explicit computer music" as Peter Hoffmann called it. The music presented here shows Xenakis's way back from spatialized immersive music and multimedia spectacle to simple loudspeaker music. The sound does not move anymore, there are no synchronized visuals: nothing remains but structured noise. Xenakis used two inventions he had already presented in the context of the Polytopes: sounds created by stochastic…
2022 Repress "Fractals" (1981): Composed at the GMVL from December 1979 to September 1981, this work was commissioned by Fnac. Fractals are mathematical oddities that, when crossing our path, turn the smallest island into an immensity to be explored. "Fractals" is a series of short studies, all based on the same sound source. Seeking in the sound and its very logic a proposal upon which a construction is elaborated, each Fractal remains open and is a mere fragment of itself. "Fractals", music p…
Roberto Fabbriciani plays the complete flute works of Henri Pousseur, including Flexions I, Éclipticare and Zeus joueur de flûtes with live electronics by Alvise Vidolin, plus the 1957 tape piece Scambi.