Pioneers of Electronic Music
In 1950, the Columbia University Music Department requisitioned a tape recorder to use in teaching and for recording concerts. In 1951, the first tape recorder arrived, an Ampex 400, and Vladimir Ussachevsky, then a junior faculty member, was assigned a job that no one else wanted: the care of the tape recorder. This job was to have important consequences for Ussachevsky and the medium he developed. Electronic music was born. Over the next ten years, Ussachevsky and his collaborators established…
Wind Shadows
The music on these CDs takes us into a new realm of music making, one that Alvin Lucier has defined for us and one that demands that we start to listen anew. His work has been more often described in terms of science than of art as if it were a series of quasi-scientific experiments, but to put the emphasis here is to miss the point, for its purpose is never “explanatory” (the goal of science) but, like all art, “revelatory.” This is not to suggest that the composer has some spiritual agenda in …
Schlingen Blängen
Schlingen Blängen is an invaluable addition to the slender but precious discography of Charlemagne Palestine, one of the legendary figures of the amazingly fertile New York and West Coast experimental music/art scene of the sixties and seventies. He is considered to be a seminal figure of early minimalism—as important as his better-documented contemporaries. His performances on the giant bells at St. Thomas Church and his evening-length Bösendorfer shows are still spoken of with awe by those who…
Electronic Field. Obscure Tape Music of Japan vol. 8
*2022 stock* This is volume 8 in Omega Point's Obscure Tape Music of Japan series, featuring the recorded live performance of Japanese avant garde maestro Toshi Ichiyanagi. He has stood out from the other more moldy academic groups of composers due to his groundbreaking and mindblowing work during the '60s. Thus, he was invited to perform as part of the concert series "Japanese Experimental Music 1960s" at the Art Tower Mito in Ibaraki in 1997. The noisy and radical sound of this performance sho…
Totentanz and other electronic works 1958-1973
by far the most anticipated early-electronic music reissue around these parts since it was announced a year or so back ; this double-disc collection of just about everything by bay-area outsider / composer warner (ne “warren”) jepson, including his totemic (... and previously creel pwned) lp “totentanz”. what we do get here : a bunch of amazing bedroom-lineage electro-acoustic experiments dating back to 1958 (!!!) - most invoking mysterious bleep-infused landscapes with tons of psychedelic organ…
Ikon and other Early Works
This CD comprises the text-sound works (1974-1980) on which Ingram Marshall concentrated throughout the seventies and falls into two parts: the works from the Fragility Cycles period (Cries Upon the Mountains, SUNG, Sibelius in His Radio Corner, and IKON) and the earlier works (Cortez, Weather Report, and The Emperor’s Birthday).
“Cortez, Weather Report, and The Emperor’s Birthday
form a kind of trilogy representing my work with “text-sound” in the
early seventies. The techniques used to gener…
James Tenney: Selected Works 1961- 1969
This recording is a reissue of the 1992 Frog Peak/Artifact CD, the first recorded collection of James Tenney’s music of the 1960s. Many of the pieces on this CD were realized at Bell Telephone Laboratories from 1961 to 1969, where Tenney used Max Mathews’s digital synthesis program that eventually became Music IV. This software became the model for many of the common computer music environments of the last forty years, and was the first system of its kind available to composers. Tenney’s pieces …
Columbia- Princeton Electronic Music Center 1961- 1973
Works by Bülent Arel, Charles Dodge, Ingram Marshall, Ilhan Mimaroglu, Daria Semegen, Alice Shields. The Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was the first electronic music center to be established in the United States. From 1959 to the late 1970s, it was one of the premiere sound facilities in the world. The vast majority of pieces composed at the Center - approximately three hundred - were composed during this period. Some have become classics of music history. This selection, draw…
And the Butterflies Begin to Sing
Both works on this disc share the trademarks of his unique style: the relentless, pounding motoric energy that merges, sometimes with startling suddenness, into a dreamlike texture that seems to float, the continual sense of something magical occurring, often produced with no more paraphernalia than a desktop computer. And the Butterflies Begin to Sing [for string quartet, bass, MIDI keyboard, and computer (1988)], conceived as music for an imaginary ballet, is based on The Hundred Headless Wome…
Film Music
Ussachevsky was one of the most significant pioneers in the compositon of electronic music, and one of its most potent forces. He produced the first works of “tape music,” a uniquely American synthesis of the French musique-concrète and the German pure electronic schools. He co-founded the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in 1959 and directed its course for the next twenty years as the leading electronic music studio in the United States. This release couples two of his most powerful a…
Ghosts On Water
"The second full release of recordings by Naoko & Daisuke Suzuki with Andrew Chalk, now titled as Ghosts on Water." Naoko Suzuki (vocals), Daisuke Suzuki (vocals, flute, percussion, field recordings), Andrew Chalk (keyboards, kantele). "'Pale shadow" whispers its intentions to the wind amidst gentle melodies (courtesy of Chalk's keyboards and kantele) whose East-tinged imperturbability attribute a deep thrust to something that, coming from other hands, could even have been classified as an outta…
Shadows from the album skies
This CD contains two pieces (the first just under a half-hour, the second over 45 minutes) originally “issued” by three poplars in 2004 in some nanometric edition 3 years back. Each are concerned with only the slighest gradient-shift of quiet, hovering tonality resulting in a fine array of upper-partial activity fine for deep listening.
Blue eyes of the march
New gatefold handmade cover. 500 copies. "There's an amazing attention to aesthetics that Andrew Chalk undeniably pays for each release with his name on it. It starts with the music and continues through the cover artwork, packaging, and presentation. The first part of Blue Eyes of the March is a 20 minute long piece which sounds like it was created by a prepared guitar, tuned only to play a limited number of pre-determined notes as they're quietly plucked and resonate for long stretches. The to…
Vega
Packaged in mini-LP style gatefold jacket. Beautiful hand-made mini-LP style gatefold sleeve. "Andrew Chalk has again walked a very fine line between complete abstraction and conscious identification...Chalk steps a bit differently, proceeds with his sound in a fulfilling fashion, and somehow works with his sound more like a composer than anyone else. I can imagine him toying with his sounds like they're clay, shaping them to make an architecture or to plan an entire geographic region. Every rel…
The Days After
Originally released in 2003 as a limited CD-R. It is now back in print as a pressed CD with facsimile sleeve of the original artwork in a mini LP style jacket as previous Faraway Press releases and new insert. It features two tracks recorded over approximately seven years and the second track is now in an extended version here, making the album running time 50 minutes.
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Now out of print collection of Lard Free's four albums: Lard Free, I'm Around About Midnight, III/Spirale Malax and Unnamed, all remastered, made in Japan in strictly limited editions and released in mini-lp sleeves. We managed to get a very few of this, but it is out of print now. This set comes with 'a special outer box'.
Box Set Part 1
A massive 6xCD box that includes the six titles (Cluster, Moebius & Beerbohm) with special outer box and replica paper sleeve of Cluster (Philips version) '71: the first release of Cluster on Philips in 1971 and reissued on Sky Records in 1980. Experimental electronic sound! Producer: Conny Plank. Sowiesoso: the original LP was released on Sky Records in 1976. The fourth Cluster album produced by Conny Plank. Grosses Wasser: the fifth album on Sky Records in 1979. Produced by Peter Baumann (ex. …
Zuckerzeit
Zuckerzeit marked a turning point for these seminal German space rockers. Recorded shortly after their move away from the metropolis of Berlin, it sees some of the abrasiveness of their earlier material slightly diffusing. With the addition of proto drum machines and the producing talents of Michael Rother, their sound here -- while remaining firmly anchored in experimental territory -- has more pop sensibility." New liner notes by Asmus Tietchens (which mention that the title translates as "Sug…
II°
Cluster were key members during the formative years of the Krautrock movement. They initially released 2 LPs in '69/70 with the Kluster spelling that are amongst the earliest Teutonic pulse masterworks. Their first album with a "C" spelling was the s/t LP on Philips (currently o/p as a CD on Sky), before they moved over to the Brain label. This is their first of 2 for that label, from 1972, and is a great, confused space classic by this duo (Roedelius & Moebius). Utilizing primitive synthesizer …
guitar trio is my life
Utilizing multiple electric guitars and a single chord, 1977's Guitar Trio is composer Rhys Chatham's signature work, and a euphoric, minimal-punk classic. Now, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Guitar Trio on an epic scale, Chatham musters an all-star guitar army for the 3CD set, Guitar Trio Is My Life! The sprawling collection features members of Sonic Youth, Swans, Tortoise, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Hüsker Dü, Modern Lovers, Silver Mt. Zion, Town and Country, Die Kreutzen, 90-Day Men, …