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Ithaca, Agincourt And Other Psych-Folk Fairy Tales
If one is aware of high prices on online music sites or is a part of any worldwide record collectors' circles, albums from groups such as Ithaca and Agincourt might sound familiar. Producers, composers, singers and multi-instrumentalists Peter Howell and John Ferdinando are two English musicians who started their partnership in the mid-1960s. From 1968, with the release of their soundtrack for the play Alice Through The Looking Glass, until the release of a project called Friends in 1974, they p…
Wir Bauen Eine Stadt
*2022 stock* In 1930 the German composer Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) wrote a series of small pieces for school orchestras. It was described as a “play for children” depicting the construction and survey of a modern city. The unusual thing about it is the age of its inhabitants:“In our city the grown ups have no say (…) Our mayor is seven years old, and all uncles and aunties are children. Even the traffic warden is a child.” We Build A Town comes across as strange in more than one way. Firstly, …
Biologic Music
"1973, in the south of the Netherlands, the city of Heerlen and its surroundings nurtured a strong musical heritage and culture. A number of young musicians were developing their skills in one of the many music schools established in a 30 km radius. This new blood would join fanfares, symphonic orchestras, choirs, and later have a strong influence on dutch pop and jazz music. Founded by Jelmo “Pio” Piovesana, teacher and key musical figure in the region of south Limburg, Heerlens Percussie Ensem…
Guitar
There are few instruments more uniquely suited to capturing the beauty and ennui of the rural American midwest than the acoustic steel-string guitar. In the hands of a master, the range of evocable emotion and experience is truly limitless. Daniel Hecht is one such master. His 1973 self-released debut album, simply titled Guitar, is an indispensable piece of the endless puzzle that is instrumental Guitar Soli music. Guitar was written and recorded while Hecht was living and working on a commune…
The Roots of the Moment
* Recorded November 10, 1987 at Studio Lussi, Allschwil/Switzerland. * For more than 50 years, Pauline Oliveros has been on a continuing mission: “... to explore new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.” If those words bring to mind the voyages of the Starship Enterprise from the television series Star Trek, the parallels are more than coincidental. In fact Pauline would be as able a captain of any Starship in the fleet of the United Fede…
Electric Holy Man
Exact repro edition of this LP, originally issued in 1968. 180 gram vinyl reissue of pioneering electronic and psychedelic albumby Henry Tree, a trio that features Leroy Markish on guitar and lead vocals, Carmen Castaldi on drums and Charles McLauughlin on bass. One of the best Mainstream psychedelic Lp's of the second generation from 1969. The tunes are all pretty long
Unquenchable Fire
Joe McPhee's Unquenchable Fire, a work inspired by Rachel Pollack's award-winning novel of the same title, was commissioned by The Deep Listening Institute for the Deep Listening Band and premiered at Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors. The Deep Listening Band explores the sensual combination of musical sound combined with natural sound, as well as the sounds of daily life and one's own thoughts. One never knows what Pauline Oliveros will do next, but whatever it is, she is sure to go beyond boundaries…
1978-1983
John Bischoff, Jim Horton, Tim Perkis, David Behrman, Paul DeMarinis, Rich Gold. 'The League of Automatic Music Composers was a band-collective of electronic music experimentalists active in the San Francisco Bay Area between 1977 and 1983. Widely regarded as the first musicians to incorporate the newly available microcomputers of the day into live musical performance, the League created networks of interacting computers and other electronic circuits with an eye to eliciting surprising and new '…
Rainforest II / Mureau
This historic release of a simultaneous performance by David Tudor and John Cage of Rainforest II and Mureau, recorded live by Radio Bremen on May 5, 1972, preserves the only surviving performance of the second of Tudor’s "Rainforest" series. In addition, it documents one of the precious few recorded collaborations between these two visionaries. In 1970 Cage composed the piece called Mureau, in which phrases from Thoreau’s journals (in particular, passages which touch on the subject of music) ar…
Birds + Machines
Co-founder of Pogus with Al Margolis, Gen Ken Montgomery is often unfairly disregarded when assessing the history of radical music in the last half-century. This collection – another clarification of a unendingly probing creativity – examines works from the decade in which the American composer’s terminology was first met by yours truly, at that time seriously hooked in the unearthing of entrancing materials of post-industrial derivation. But don’t let this piece of news mislead you: Montgomery’…
Counterfeiting in Colonial Connecticut / a lot of tiles (trivial scan)
XI Records is very pleased to announce the release of a 2 CD set of Michael Winter’s music organized by guitarist Elliot Simpson. Each CD features a single composition, demonstrating different sides of Winter’s work. The first, Counterfeiting in Colonial Connecticut, is a socially-engaged piece written for Simpson and in honor of George Floyd. The second, a lot of tiles (trivial scan), derives music from a set of mathematical tilings (often referred to as tessellations). The album art features r…
Stone Music
Unprecedented cosmology music arrived by Tokio Hasegawa, who lives in the forest of space after completing the "journey" with the Taj Mahal Travelers.
Red / Machinic Fantasies
** 2021 Stock ** XI Records presents Involution by Cecilia Lopez. Red is more than a musical composition. It roots lie in its physicality. Nestled on a large cargo-like cable web are an array of small speakers and contact microphones. As this web sways the speakers and microphones come in and out of proximity and form an evolving feedback network, which slowly reveal themselves as a myriad of permutations accompanied by sympathetic synthesizer tones. Zero-input mixing works seem to be very popul…
Stormcock
Hyper-expensive edition on LP, but quality is over the top. Stormcock was born in 1969 as Roy Harper began to stretch his wings. He’d been there a few times before, but this time he gave himself the space to go deep and stay there. “Hors D’Oeuvres” is perhaps the lightweight in the collection, but after all, it’s the starter… The Same Old Rock records Harper’s opposition to continued dependence on the cheap opium of convenient mass religion. This year marks two important milestones for Roy Harpe…
Flat Baroque And Berserk
Hyper-expensive edition on LP, but quality is over the top. Flat Baroque and Berserk was the first record of Roy Harper’s to go into the charts. Peter Jenner was assigned by EMI Records to produce the recording – the two have been good friends ever since. EMI Studios, Abbey Road was at that time the most advanced studio in Europe, and over the next ten years Harper was to record in near-perfect conditions.Over those years, the studio buzzed with four separate Beatles, some Stones, The Pink Floyd…
Folkjokeopus
*2022 stock* 'This Shel Talmy-produced album is as sprawling and unwieldy as its title. Always a determined eclectic, Harper tries to cover a lot of ground here, and his effort is impressive. The influences of Bob Dylan, Bert Jansch, Donovan, and maybe even early Al Stewart hover over most of this folk-rock. Harper tries to cram too many musical and (especially) lyrical ideas together here, and several of his heart-on-the-sleeve narrative folktales ramble on for too long, with an obscurity that …
Same same
"The relentless sounds are absolutely spell-binding. The music is vibrant, immediate, and compelling; it fills the air with a tangible presence that you can almost reach out, grab, and embrace." --Dean Suzuki, Option Fast Forward is a composer and performer best known for his compositions for percussion, and music theatre works for diverse instrumentation. His compositions push the juxtapositions of structured rhythms and total chaos to their limit, delivering a sonically dense and thea…
Pondfloorsample
These two discs represent some of Gen Ken Montgomery's sound art and compositional work from 1981-2001. Pondfloorsample is a collection of sonic explorations utilizing common devices meant to hold something other than sound. As with much of his sound work, the sonic material contains many sounds of everyday life. Having composed extensively for multi-channels, Pondfloorsample was specifically designed as a stereo audio piece enabling Montgomery to reach a larger audience."His work always begins …
Canada
*2022 stock* Argonne Thornton (who in the late '40s changed his name to Sadik Hakim) had a particularly unusual boppish style in the '40s, playing dissonant lines, using repetition to build suspense, and certainly standing out from the many Bud Powell impressionists. Later in his career his playing became more conventional. Hakim originally studied music with his grandfather and started performing at local gigs in Minnesota. After a period in Chicago, he was heard by Ben Webster, who hired him t…
Favorite encores
A split CD of works by Noah Creshevsky (4 tracks) and If, Bwana (3 tracks). While on the face of it this may seem a somewhat odd pairing, the pieces recorded here comment on and highlight each other. And an aural adventure is indeed in the offing. Trained in composition by Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Luciano Berio at Juilliard, Noah Creshevsky has taught at Juilliard, Princeton University, and Brooklyn College. He was director of the Center For Computer Music (1994-2000) and is currently Profes…