La Trilogie de la Montagne
Gorgeous, three-part Musique Concrète suite, composed at McGill's Electronic Music studio during 1977 & 78 by Quebecois composer Michel Longtin, timbrally presaging much of the FM synthesis-laden work of the early 80s & onwards, acting a bridge between the two sensibilities.
Computer Music, Musica Elettronica+
Handy collection of all of Composer James Dashow's early Computer Music issued in the vinyl era, including his 1982 Edipan "Computer Music / Musica Elettronica" LP, plus his track from the "Computer Directions" collection on CRI & the piece "La Pianta Di Livio" tucked onto the end of the soundtrack to the film "Oedipus Orca" released on Cinevox. Dashow started out in the Chicagoland area, studying with J. K. Randall amongst others before heading to Italy on a Fulbright in the late 60s where he s…
Te Deum - An Electronic Realization
"I have a soft spot for "Religious" Early Electronic Music outings - secular or not, the "Provocative Electronics" LP is one of my favorites in the C.P. series, as are Ralph Swickard's "Sermons Of Saint Francis" & "Hymn Of Creation," both present on the first "Creelpolation" - so this "Private" 1979 outing, the sole release by Composer Henry Sweitzer of beautifully hand-played advanced synthesizer motifs & home-studio Musique Concrète is a real find. Starting with the side-length title piece, Sw…
Osterreichische Musik Der Gegenwart, Elektronische Musik 1-3
Reproducing a trio of mid-late 80s LP titles on the Amadeo label; "30 Jahre Elektroakustik," "Tonband Und...," & "Tape Music," this double-disc set offers an incredibly wide breadth of work either by composers of Austrian origin - or by those closely aligned with the Austrian Electro-Acoustic community - over a 30-year timeframe. The first set includes early work by Roman Haubenstock-Ramati (whose "L'Amen De Verre," composed at the GRM in 1957, opens the set), Max Brand (a 1962 piece, "Die Astro…
Galactic Fantasy, Eastern Reflections
Criminally under-rated set of Early American Moog Modular Synthesizer Music - the sole release by composer William Hoskins, the "Director of Electronic Music and Composer-in-Residence at Jacksonville University in Florida." Issued in 1979 by the Harriman, NY-based Spectrum - a "Division of UNI-PRO Recordings, Inc." the LP consists of a pair of discrete pieces, with each taking up a side of its own. "Galactic Fantasy" lives up to the premise of its title, its far-reaching narratives are concerned…
Elektronische Kompositionen
Privately released as a pair of LPs in 1981 & 1983, respectively, this set covers the early electro-acoustic work of German composer, guitarist, and electronic percussionist Klaus Röder, a student of Milko Kelemen & Günther Becker’s - more on Becker later in the series - member of the free jazz band Synthesis - along w/ Gerhard Illi ... not to be confused w/ the Arthur Blythe / Olu Dara / David Murray group of the same name - who formed an Electronic Music studio in Solingen to realize his idios…
Deflections
Fabio Perletta and Asmus Tietchens’ hermetic micro-cosmos of Deflections unfolds by exploring instability and physical decay of sound. Built upon liminal forms and atonal passages, the six near-silent pieces of the work traverse empty space by means of elementary sonic emissions and drifting nano-structures. Among sound collisions and evanescent masses, the almost immaterial yet corporeal nature of Deflections, embodies sound in its most subliminal and contradictory form.
Fabio Perletta cr…
Faust, Electronische Chöre, Lichtfäden
Compendium of early German Electronic Music Composer Peter Hübner's first two self-issued releases - via his "Enjoy Records" imprint - covering a series of extended drone forms for Synthesizers & treated vocals composed & executed as his private "Studio für Elektronic Music Cologne / Kassel" between 1967 & 1970.A Student of both Herbert Eimert & Bernd Alois Zimmerman, Hübner studied Electronic Music at the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in the early 60s before, amongst other things, establishin…
Forest Structures
Thé Déluge is the new moniker of French musician Vincent Caylet. While Caylet’s previous outings as Cankun (released on Not Not Fun and Hands in the Dark) were blissful psychedelic sundrenched jam sessions, Forest Structures sees Caylet largely jettison cosmic tropical islands and guitar twang. Thé Déluge deals in moonlit electronics and nocturnal transmission that consistently bleep into each other and overlap. Recorded mostly on analog gear and inspired by both nature and urbanism, Thé Déluge …
Dame Ningen
Mukqs is the solo moniker of Max Allison from Chicago trio Good Willsmith. ダメ人間 ("dame ningen," which translates into "useless person" from Japanese) comes off the heels of Good Willsmith’s well received Things Our Bodies Used to Have (their third release with Umor Rex). For ダメ人間, Allison assembled his analog rig (four-track tape player, two EHX2880 loop pedals), and recorded the full 40 minute suite in one live take with no overdubs. The goal was to make a piece of music just as dense / intense…
Old Speakers
Missing Organs is Tristan Bath, a British musician and writer based in Vienna, Austria. Old Speakers deploys a bottomless variety of instruments, beats, and techniques, all refined and rewritten —somewhat accidentally— into a document of the period of personal and international upheaval during which they came to life. Old Speakers is his Brexit album; a document of the dread, quiet chaos, and bitterness in European society which came to the surface in 2016. Field recordings and improvisations fo…
Evolutions, Contrasts & Electronic Music
Pioneering electroacoustic and tape music LP with additional 5 Bonus Tracks! This is the reissue of a 1958 album by Henk Badings and Dick Raajmakers (aka Kid Baltan) composers, arrangers, conductors and pioneers in the field of electronic music. The 1968 release Evolution & contrasts contains the same recordings as the 1958 „Electronic music“ album. But what exactly do these nowadays scarce as gold dust albums. Bading and Raajmakers create electronic soundscapes with a rather creepy atmosp…
Heterozygote / Petite Symphonie...
In the field of biology Heterozygous (Hétérozygote) means: a plant whose heredity is mixed. It implies that Hétérozygote, composed between December 1963 and March 1964, is an attempt to engineer a language located both on the musical and on the dramatic plane. You could call this music "Anecdotal Music" for if the organization of events is purely musical, their choice suggests situations justified at two levels: the music and the anecdote. Luc Ferrari explains the piece Petite Symphonie Int…
Rubisco
Following Fiume Nero (2014), the young Italian composer has moved from the raw primordial chaos that characterized his first work to develop a reflection on how a hypothetical absence of humans and biological life could modify industrialized and civilized spaces. Using field recordings, obscure samples, and FM synthesis, Epiro draws his abstract landscapes as a series of overexposed and imprecise pictures made by concrete and organic architectures, amorphous rhythmic patterns, and repetit…
Interrogation Of The Crystalline Sublime
"I hear atmospheres, sound shapes, gestural narratives, spectral trajectories, stochastic rhythms and phasic space when I encounter an environment rich in sonic phenomena. But in order to be open to this meta-sensory information, I must first get my ears out of the way. I don't listen with my ears but with an inner sensory apparatus, what Goethe called "organs of perception," that I have developed over the years. Once opened to this world sound becomes something very different—it's as if one cou…
Uno Todo Tres
A beautiful drone like a line shaping in time, from silence to silence. Clara de Asís is an electroacoustic music composer and experimental guitarist, born in 1988 in Spain and based in France. Her musical practice is held away from any formal academicism, aiming to transcend conventional instrumental approaches. She works mainly on prepared electric guitar, focuses on exploring the specificities of her instrument, and develops them both in live situations and throughout electroacoustic composit…
UBEK
Dystopian soundscapes weaving through insinuated actuality. A collection of paranoid realities, implied certainty through testimonies given freely, observed by ever watchful eyes, detected by attentive ears and committed to record. It was at this moment he realised that he was actually living two parallel lives, he was living in both worlds simultaneously. The memory of the other had come back to him in that moment. On leaving the bathroom he was now on an alternative track. An alternative reali…
Matieres Premieres
A double CD featuring some incredible unearthed material from Bernard Parmegiani curated by François Bonnet. Starting as a sound engineer for French TV in the early '50s, Parmegiani has established a connection between sound and vision which he would explore to the deepest degrees after joining Pierre Schaeffer's Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM) in 1959 for a two year masterclass. With his first works composed in 1962 and released in 1969, he essentially headed up the 2nd wave of sonic …
Luc Ferrari Prix Presque Rien Prize
In 2010, Brunhild Ferrari decided to make public some of Luc Ferrari's original sound archives by offering a selected collection of recordings to other composers who may wish to use the material for the creation of original musical works. Her desire was to open this sonic treasure to other artists without wanting to impose any aesthetic direction on them, and with the only purpose of encouraging new artistic inventiveness. This edition presents the "Presque Rien Prize" winners and other selected…
Undying Color
Jaime Fennelly’s ever-evolving Mind Over Mirrors project shifts once again on this album for Paradise of Bachelors that features a full ensemble of celebrated vocalists and musicians. First introduced on Brad Rose’s sorely missed Digitalis platform back in 2011, Jaime Fennelly’s work as Mind Over Mirrors has centred around his mastery of the Indian pedal harmonium amidst an arsenal of synths and delay units. Each new MOM album has seen the Chicago-based musician take on an ever-more ambitious ap…