Unfolding
No Obi. Awesome CD release documenting the 'magic' world of Harry Bertoia sound scuptures. This reissues two of this American genius's many self-released LPs as a great public service. His "sounding sculptures" consist of "ranks of tall slender rods, placed either upright or at special slants in rectangular formations. These metallic faces are not rigid, but 'give' when stroked -- at the same time releasing lingering musical chords of a weirdly haunting nature."
Theremin in the rain
A theremin controls a MIDI interface that manipulates several sound sculptures. The results range from abstract atmospheres to heavy low-frequencies and driving rhythm, with nary a dull moment. Long piano strings are beaten senseless by metallic strikers while water droplets fall in rhythmic patterns onto amplified percussive plates suspended above the ground, blurring the borders between the electronic and the organic. This piece, which had its premiere at the 2003 Open Ears Festival, is, in th…
Speaker swinging & Piano mechanics
This release is the first of three discs that C3R is slated to release by Gordon Monahan, and represents his first release in fourteen years. This CD is a re-release of two of Monahan’s best-known early works: ‘Piano Mechanics’ (which won first prize at the 1984 CBC Young Composers Competition), and ‘Speaker Swinging’ (his universally acclaimed, manually-operated sound installation). Both of these remastered pieces are awe-inspiring sound experimentations, possessing a visceral quality th…
untitled music for Geography
Specially re-mixed material Francisco Lopez created for the dance work, Geography, by the The Ralph Lemon Dance Co. which premiered at Yale in New Haven. At the time Francisco already had established himself as an important new composer working with huge pools of silence that then build in time stretching waves of sonic purity. This work is certainly in the vein but there’s also subtle percussive elements woven in, drawn from an African percussion ensemble that performed live during the perfor…
untitled (2005)
On the new Untitled (2005) CD the Spanish composer Francisco López presents four recently composed pieces which span a broad dynamic as well as stylistic range. Together these constitute a fascinating and intense research exploration into the deep essence of sound. From sizzling jungle atmospheres to rumbling subterranean drones and microscopic details, this is a Francisco López tour de force. In addition to three pieces based on environmental recordings, Untitled (2005) features also an instrum…
Hortexte
Six radio texts by Ferdinand Kriwet in a beautifully designed 3 LP Picture Discs Luxury Box. Ferdinand Kriwet (born in Duesseldorf in 1942) is a multimedia artist and poet who has produced many seminal films and sound works for radio and television, in particular throughout the 1960's and 1970's. His works 'Apollo Amerika' 1969 and 'Campaign' 1973, rank today as outstanding artistic documents of these spectacular events in the history of mankind. Kriwet created the work 'Apollo Amerika' whilst i…
Radio territories
The legacy of radio and the arts has spawned forms of radical culture, from early Modernist notions of the “Wireless Imagination” and its subsequent vernacular tongues to Acoustic Ecology’s call for “Radical Radio” based on removing the DJ, transmission and broadcast media upsets and redistributes understandings of place, corporeality, social exchange, and the politics of information. Such instances of radicality find their current expression in radio networking and streaming, which seek to coun…
Stratosfera
"Stratosfera" offre in cd tutta la sua produzione per la Cramps con ben cinque album raccolti in uno splenido box deluxe ["Cantare la voce", "Metrodora", "Le milleuna", "Recitarcantando" e "Concerto Dell'Elfo"] Awesome deluxe 5 CD box set documenting one of the most important artists in Italian musical history. As lead singer for prog art terrorists Area, the Greek-born Stratos used his voice as an instrument in ways never heard before or since. Some of the weirdest purely vocal music ever made …
My Dear Siegfried
"David Behrman has been active as a composer and artist since the 1960s. Over the years he has made sound and multimedia installations for gallery spaces as well as musical compositions. Sam Behrman and Siegfried Sassoon met in 1920, when Behrman, then a young writer working at The New York Times, was sent to interview Sassoon at the start of the English poet's postwar American lecture tour. In that tour Sassoon was billed as 'England's Soldier-Poet.' He had a reputation both as a war hero and …
Unforeseen Events
Unforeseen Events is the latest of many pieces Behrman has made with computer software designed to interact in real time with a solo performer. The four sections recorded here were made specifically with Ben Neill's performance style in mind. The electronic timbres are intended to complement the sounds of his instrument --the admirable and humorous mutantrumpet, with its three separately-mutable and playable bells. Refractive Light consists of three small pieces based on an interweaving and over…
Cornelius Cardew. A reader
A very nice book brings together a diverse collection of Cornelius Cardew's major essays and writings from different stages of his career, together with commentaries by other writers associated with his work. It reflects developments, changes and contradictions in his thinking about music from the late 1950s to the end of his life. As a companion volume to John Tilbury's biography 'Cornelius Cardew a life unfinished', Copula, 2006 (ISBN 0 9525492 3 9) it provides essential material for the study…
Vex
Vex consists of three sections, each section features a different collaborator: Michel F. Côté, Louis Ouellet, Gregory Whitehead. Vex is a meeting place which is divisible by three: Erik Satie, Gilles Deleuze, Antonin Artaud. Vex is a series of accidents, problematic strategies, absurd tactics and misunderstood languages. Communication between two persons becomes a third. This other is the territory where the two coexist and translate each other. It is a junction where collisions abound, a site…
Twelve signals
New CD from German sound artist Christina Kubisch on Semishigure, a similar exploration of sound & silence as the first one, Diapason (SEMI 002). On Twelve Signals Kubisch used original miner bells from a German mine to produce an hour long piece of bell tones. Several electrical bells were hit with small hammers each giving forth a sequence of clear bell tones that hover in the air. This live recording was made in the St. Matthaeus-Kirche in Berlin: halfway through the recording the original ri…
Diapason
Germany most famous sound artist with a new album recorded exclusively with tuning forks. A meditative album that takes on a different meaning, feeling and association with every sound, in places almost microsound-ish and in others like a heavily delayed gamelan set. CD comes with a beautiful 16-page colour booklet with shots of the tuning forks and the installation where this is piece is taken from. Last copy available
Dreaming of a major third
The second Christina Kubisch CD on RZ, from one of Germany's more important sound composers. This features is a composition for the clocktowerof the MA Museum of Contemporary Art. All the sounds derive directly from the original bells from the MASS MoCA clocktower. The sounds have been pitch shifted and attack shaped, but have not been electronically altered. The result is a CD of ultimate installation drone and a must for fans of the Het Apollohuis aesthetic, sound artists like Bill Fontana, et…
Vier Stücke
Four pieces from arguably the most cited sound-sculpt of our time, recently fêted via an exposé in The Wire (October 2001). 'Vocrolls II' (1988) consists of recordings of a glass sphere coming to rest in a Tibetan metal bowl, processed in physics-defying fashion through an early desktop port of the now-prevalent phase vocoder algorithm. 'Mouse Ware' (1998) is the soundtrack to an installation (10 different makes and models of computer mouse are preserved in alcohol, accompanied by 10 user-friend…
Live improvisations
All live improvisations should be this much fun! This live date between turntablist and electronic weirdmeister Christian Marclay and percussionist and electronics tinkerer Günter Müller is what the art of improvisation is supposed to be: fun, continually compelling textually, and inspired. While many intellectuals have made wild pronouncements about Marclay and his art -- and it is art, make no mistake -- writing all sorts of blather about how he strips the adult century bare by his cutting up …
More encores
Since 1979 Christian Marclay has been experimenting, composing and performing with phonograph records. His interest in records, both as objects and bearers of sound, is expressed through sculpture, performance, video and music. In performance, he mixes a wide variety of records on up to 8 turntables, fragmenting, repeating, altering speeds, playing the records backwards, etc. More Encores was originally released as a 10" vinyl record on No Man's Land (Germany) in 1988, composed entirely of recor…
Replay Marclay
extremely limited LP by the artist/turntable god Christian Marclay’s ‘Guitar Drag’. The piece was originally a video, shown in 2000 at London’s Hayward Gallery, following an electric guitar lashed to the back of a pick-up truck in dusty San Antonio, Texas. The guitar was dragged by the truck for 15 minutes and the sound recorded, which resulted in otherworldly rumblings, hissing, buzzing and crunching – even the odd chord strangely enough, and of course, the soundtrack quickly achieved cu…