People The Sky
Nicely timed replication of this 1969 Vanguard “Cardinal” series LP, offering a pair of side-length “Automatic” Buchla pieces by Composer / Producer Michael Czajkowski - then and now known mostly in music circles for his odd, post-production contributions to Buffy Saint-Marie’s “Illuminations” LP.Recorded at NYU’s famed Intermedia Center - see Charlemagne Palestine’s 60s Electronic Music, Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples” - this one falls squarely into the “hands-off” master-patch canon o…
Paesaggi Intravisti
The sole solo release by Il Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza AND post-MEV ensemble "Elettronica Viva" member Walter Branchi, "composizione elettronica realizzata in occasione della mostra "Il luogo del lavoro" XVII Triennale di Milano." with Mauro Bortolotti - a student & assistant of Pietro Grossi at the latter's Florence studio. Branchi jointly founded the Studio R7 in 1967 w/ Franco Evangelista, Gino Marinuzzi Jr., "Syn-Ket" inventor & John Eaton collaborator Paolo "Paul" Ketoff, Eg…
Homo Faber, Dum Spiro Spero
Creel Pone treatment of this majorly slept-on set of dark, minimal, surrealist electro-acoustic & Musique Concrète pieces from the Polish composer Joanna Bruzdowicz, a member of the GRM under Pierre Schaeffer’s tutelage between 1968 & 1970 & long-term collaborator of Agnes Varda’s, for whom she scored several films from the mid-80’s on, including “Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse.” The LP in question (the only one to feature her electronic work) consists of the three-part “Homo Faber” suite - compose…
The Harmony of the World
Fascinating one-off Computer Music curio from 1979, released, incredibly, on Book-of-the Month Records, "a Division of Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc." Much like Laurie Spiegel's Voyager "Golden Record" piece, "Harmonices Mundi," Johannes Kepler's star-math was used as a template for the cyclical periods of a series of Digital Oscillator algorithms, which were then sent spinning in & around each other. The result is not unlike the Pythagoron™ LP, or even Thorkell Sigurbjornsson's somewhat contempor…
Tapes
Hamburg’s Growing Bin go back to the roots of Trance, as in hypnotic electronic rhythms for dancing, with this Baldelli-favoured suite produced in Germany 1983-86. “If you’ve kept a keen ear to the underground, you may have noticed a trance revival creeping into the dance floors and darkrooms of late; a post ironic return to the 64 bar breakdowns and peak time key changes of your serotonin drenched youth. So what’s this then? Has Growing Bin gone from groundbreaker to copycat? Dig a little deepe…
Unearth
Unearth is the first solo recording from Australian born, Berlin based composer and drummer Tony Buck in 15 years. Many would recognise Buck from his work with the iconic Australia avant trio The Necks. His history as a player however reaches much further than this engagement. Over the past few decades, Tony has cultivated a language that escapes easy categorisation. With Unearth he delivers his most accomplished solo composition. Built across several years, the record is the culmination of his …
Meta
Fascinating collection of Minimal Sound-Art / Musique Concrète works by the obscure Belgian artist Paul A.R. Timmermans, privately issued in 1983 - with the aid & additional insight of his neighbor & friend Badouin Oosterlynck - in a perfectly minimal edition: a lead slug embedded with the artist's name is clamped onto the top left of an otherwise blank LP sleeve, with only a text-insert in four languages either affixed or inside. Containing four pieces composed between 1980 & 1982 of a very pec…
Cordes-Ci, Cordes-Ça, La Discordatura
1972 split release on Pathé Marconi EMI by the GMEB - Groupe de musique expérimentale de Bourges - founders & wife-and-husband team of Françoise Barrière & Christian Clozier. This is the first issue of Barrière's work & only the second of Clozier's after the Perspectives Musicales "Lettre À Une Demoiselle / Dichotomie / Petite Suite / D'Une Multitude En Fête" split w/ Jacques Lejeune (Creel Pone #073). Barrière's three-part "Cordes-Ci, Cordes-Ça" coats the A-side, electronically warping her Harp…
Abattage
Recorded in 1981 & issued “privately” in 1983 (on Jean Marc Foussat’s own Pyjama imprint) this is a screamer of a record, taking in a decidedly unique approach to minimal musique concrète assemblage (there’s an emphasis on presenting banal, interstitial in-situ sound-events [coughs, footsteps] that reminds of Luc Ferrari one minute ... before a sudden barrage of jackhammer-noise, plunderphonic mangling [is that ... Barbra Streisand !?!], and high-end oscillator scree takes over pushing this clos…
The Pulses of Time
Creel Pone of a 1981 LP privately released by the University of East Anglia containing three sparse Musique Concrète pieces composed between 1974 and 1979 at the GRM and UEA studios by New Zealand born/bred composer Denis Smalley. Widely considered to be one the classics of early British electro-acoustic music - alongside Trevor Wishart’s “Journey Into Space” & “Red Bird”, Desmond Leslie’s “Music of the Future”, and Basil Kirchin’s “Worlds Within Worlds”), the three pieces on “Pulses” each wor…
Oeldorf 8
Issued by the Dutch "Nea Mousa Promotion Centre for Contemporary Music", the initial 1976 issue of this music documents the 8th meeting of "The Oeldorf Group" of Composer-Performers Pëter Eótvös (whose "Cricket Music" graces Creelpolation 1), Joachim Krist, Dietrich Frische, Gabriele Schumacher, and Mesias Maiguashca, who met annually at the barn pictured on the cover to workshop & perform each other's pieces from 1971 on. The two-part "Oeldorf 8" suite, composed in 1975, is a thing of wonder; f…
Suomalaista Elektroakustista Musiikkia
Reproduction of this superb 1978 pressing, realized at the Finnivox-studio & issued on their in-house Fennica Nova imprint, covering early- to late-70s work by a coterie of composers working largely in & around various public & private studios in Helsinki, including Yleisradion Kokeilustudio (Finnish Radio's Experimental Studio), Helsingin Yliopiston Musiikkitieteen Laitoksen Studio (The Electronic Music Studio at Helsinki University Music Department), Osmo Lindeman Kotistudio (Osmo Lindeman's p…
Aniseikonia, Zeitsplitter, 4 Etüden
Warped, asynchronous, mid-80s FM Synthesis assemblages, captured at the absolute cusp of the Analogue-Digital transition, from Czech-Swiss Composer Jan Beran. Ages dormant on the Creel Pone shortlist, endlessly vetoed by yours truly for breaking the cardinal rules of comprising a total sum of post-1984 activity (pending a rewrite of the foil-stamp copy) and, specifically, explicitly incorporating the "Devil's Xylophone" amongst its tonal palette. But ah, the times, the times. After a few caref…
Saturday’s Notes
The debut LP by Chicago-based artist Guido Gamboa, Saturday’s Notes is a multi-faceted collection of sonic studies born from a day of studious and diaristic note-taking. The music flows in idiosyncratic segments taking on a form akin to an artist’s sketchbook, constantly crossing and challenging the line between the aesthetically curious and the personally candid. Various influences are apparent as the listener is weaved in and out of hollowed concrète construction zones, beds of frayed a…
Electronic Music in Canada, vol.1 & 2
Epic, double-disc edition covering three LPs of formative Electronic Music from Canada; both volumes of the Melbourne-label "Electronic Music By Canadian Composers" series - presenting both cover-variations of each in a metallized variant of the de facto Creel Pone "grid" - then the internal Radio Canada pressing of "Music Canada Vol XIII Electronic Music in Canada." Starting with an amazing, side-length piece by "Sky-Sails" co-author Ann Southam (more about her later in the series) & continuing…
Reidarin Sähköiset Kuvat, Ode To Marilyn
A pair of mid-70s Finnish Experimental Electro-Acoustic gems featuring "Suomalaista Elektroakustista Musiikkia" 's Antero Honkanen, masquerading as 1). a picturesque "Music To Accompany Paintings" affair and 2). a straight-ahead jazz-fusion session. The first disc here covers "Reidarin Sähköiset Kuvat," a wonderful set dovetailing pieces by Honaken & Åke Andersson, composed after paintings by Reidar Särestöniemi at the Experimental Studio of Yleisradio. With a production style owing to the forma…
Ramasses-Miettes, Nouveaux Modes Industriels
Long on the Creel Pone radar has been this pair of LPs by French bandleader Philippe Doray, recorded in conjunction with the aid of his five "Asociaux Associés" & issued in 1977 & 1980, respectively, via Jean-Marc Patrat & José Serré's Gratte-Ciel & Invisible, the house-label of the inimitable Jacques Pasquier's Société Coopérative d'Ouvriers-Producteurs Artistiques. Centered around Doray's Synthi VCS3 playing & sprech-stimme vocal stylings, the selections here run the gamut from puerile, absurd…
Automare
From the city that brought you LSD comes a new album by Marco Papiro, a Swiss-Italian musician and graphic designer who has gained some notoriety with his album covers for the likes of Panda Bear and Sun Araw. "Automare" is Papiro's seventh solo album, recorded on 4-track cassette, on hard-disk, in public and in private, entirely self-produced and now released on Nikolaienko's Muscut label. The five hauntingly evocative tracks offer a variety of atmospheres from surreal to arcane, from ce…
Cosmographie
Once again, i’m reminded that one can twist & turn, uncovering rocks looking for stray Paleozoic lifeforms one’s whole life and still never find 0.01% of what’s out there. To my knowledge, the early 70s platter replicated here is the sole LP by one Bruno Menny; he’s mainly known for his endless CV of engineering, arrangement, and production credits for people like Mouloudji - yes, the voice on the Jean Genet / André Almuro "Un Condamne a Mort" LP - Michel Portal, Benoît Widemann, and a little-kn…
Conrad & Sohn
Thus far the creel pones have all been academically-inclined in some way. by contrast, here’s a repro of a very bizarre one-off private-press lp “released” in 1981 by one-time tangerine dream / Kluster associate Conrad Schnitzler and given only to friends and family ...The b-side is pretty odd, even for schnitzler, with its pitched up vocals & arbitrary lo-fi synth drippings ; but the real prize is the a-side featuring his teenage son gregor on electric bass and completely fried vocals (in en…