★Creel Pone
No Imagination
Upon first glance at this Creel Pone reproduction of an obscure 1980 private-press Synth / Art-noise LP - originally issued on “Vinyl Records” - two things caught my attention: the phrases “Electronic Instruments designed by: Serge Tcherepnin” & “Special thanks to California Institute of the Arts”, both in small text on the back of the jacket - as I understand it, Serge Tcherepnin himself was on faculty at CalArts from the early 70s until he left for San Francisco to start the serge company in 1…
Greek Electronic Music-1
Jeeeezus ... so here’s just about the best record ever, a collection of late 60s pieces from 6 Hellenic composers, only one of which even rates a single listing in the Hugh Davies book, Michael Adamis. See that on the cover? it’s the patch-bay of an EMS VCS3, arguably the most legendary / covetable analogue synthesizer. Here is an exchange that i’ve fabricated as a possible explanation of how this record came to be: Adamis: “I’ve just come back from London and look what i have: it’s an EMS VCS3.…
Who Says Birds Don't Do Things Just For Fun?
Wow, just wow. One of the dynamics at play in the C.P. program that has been all but absent in the recent catalogue is the "one man against the world" spec. These politically-charged times make me hesitant to use the catch-all "outsider", although, in the case of upstate-New York Composer Glenn Williams, it's clear that a palpable distance from the greater world was, indeed, in effect. Let's first focus on the music; the A-side's side-length title piece works a long-form take of the exact sort o…
Weird Sounds, Crazy Sounds
Spot-on reproduction of this mythical 1969 TVMusic library (TVM 102, right after TVM 101’s “Cosmic Sounds b/w Electro Sounds”) offering a side of “Weird sounds” by Georges Teperino (again, aka Nino Nardini, Peter Bonello) & one of “Crazy Sounds” by Roger “Cecil Leuter” Roger (aka Archie Gun, Eric Swan.) While “Cosmic b/w Electro” has some nice moments of “lyrical” electronic music that presage pretty much the entire “Library” spec, this one is completely bonkers, throwing any & all “Groovy” conn…
Chimie Du Son / Stoeien Met Geluid
I hope you're been enjoying the Creel Pone 19x "Doubles" series; some great multi-disc titles that simply couldn't wait for their usual "every ten catalogue number" positions, especially as the series is running out of spots approaching its intended 200-title terminus. Here we've got an absolute corker, offering a mid-50s, private-press 10" release by Swiss sound engineer Francis Jeannin, who, verbally, takes us through the techniques of making Tape Music before letting loose with a side of home…
Omnicircus
Creel Pone replication of this wonderful 1979 Chicagoland "Paste-on" Private Press LP offering a single "Electronic Composition" in two parts, "Kriegspiel" & "Eropoc," intended at the soundtrack "for the first 2 sections of 'OMNICIRCUS', a theatre piece for electronic music, computer graphics, video synthesis, dance, sculpture, architecture, and drama" by one Frank Garvey. Garvey is an intriguing character; born & raised in Urbana in an artistic family - his father was a close collaborator of Ha…
Canto Ecuménico/Litania/Homo Sapiens
Composed at the GRM - the two B-side pieces, both in 1972 - & at his own “Private” studio in Porto - the A-side, 1979 - this trilogy of Musique Concrète pieces by the Portugese composer Filipe Pires was initially issued in 1980 as part of Imavox’s “Discoteca Básica Nacional” series - #13, alongside Jorge Peixinho’s epic “Elegia a Amílcar Cabral” - #6.“Canto Ecuméncio” is a beautifully chaotic & extended ride, wherein we’re taken through a brutalist, man-on-the-street voyage through various folk-…
Espace et Actualité, Lunar Probe
Issued simultaneously in 1967 as eye-popping Musique pour l’Image - subtitled “Espace Hostilité Apesanteur Sciences • Danger” - & Music De Wolfe 10”s, this collection of Musique Concrète & experimental compositions marked the vinyl debut - discounting the “internal” release of excerpts of his work via the “Solfège de l’Objet Sonore” 3LP the same year - of François Bayle - pre-dating his Philips Prospective 21º Siècle lp “l’Oiseau Chanteur” by a good year - issuing two pieces of formative Musique…
Elektronski Studio Radio Beograda
1975 collection, the first to offer pieces from the Serbian electronic music studio “Elektronski Studio Radio Beograda,” with work from Paul Pignon (his “Hardware Performance” trilogy, split across two sides - supreme, distant analogian bleep of the highest order), Vladan Radovanovic (high-spec mutating bell-klang orbits & chopped-up ghost-vocal rituals), Natko Devcic (aleatoric clusterings of scattered stereo-field bleep), and Josip Kalcic (dark, filtered-out buzz, culminating into a dense bed …
Electronic Music, University of Melbourne
Remarkably consistent collection of pieces composed / executed between 1973 and 1979 by students at the University of Melbourne on the megabeast of modulars: the EMS Synthi 100 - now residing, unplugged and finally at peace, at the Percy Grainger museum. Why is the Synthi 100 so impressive? Simply put, volume; I can only imagine the amount of headaches and brain-stem rot that went on went on whilst Uni students tried to get their heads around the twin patch-matrices.The 6 composers on this disc …
Electronic Music, Experimental Studios In Prague, Bratislava, Mu
Welcome back everyone! Hope you enjoyed those few weeks off from the natural Creel Pone "Cycle." We continue, as promised by Mr. P.C. C.P., "Unabated throughout the end of the summer." First up, "Electronic Music - Experimental Studios in Prague, Bratislava, Munich, University of Illinois, Warsaw, Paris" - this is just a great compilation, assembled by one Vladimir Lébl and released on the Czech Supraphon label in 1968 - on glorious, crackly Eastern-European wafer-thin vinyl no less - featuring …
Electronic Music by Caron, Perron, and Dawson
Reproduction of this 1981 collection, issued by McGill University (making it the other covetable French-Canadian collegiate-issue Electro-Acoustic side ... along with the Bengt Hambraeus “Concrète & Synthesizer Music” set) covering the work of three Québécois composers :: Claude Caron, Serge Perron, and Ted Dawson.Caron’s side-length “Japa” is a gorgeous (extended) stretch of post-Philip Glass modal fury, replete with churning arpeggiated analogue synths & a nice, light, wafting tonality. On the…
Musiques Électroacoustiques
Creel Pone treatment of two issues of Chilean Composer Edgardo N. Canton’s Early Electro-Acoustic music, entirely composed & executed during a residency at the GRM that started in 1959 & ended in 1965 - although he stayed on as an adjunct composer until 1973 - inlcuding a hen’s-teeth rare 1984 Moshe-Naim label collection, then two variants of his score to Serge Roullet's film of Sartre's "Le Mur" on Disques Ades.As the central & southern-american territories have been fairly under-documented - a…
Still Life in Concrete
After a fruitful think-tank session (during which a selection of the european faction of the C.P. cognoscenti met in one of Berlin’s seedier bars to brainstorm new “candidates” for inclusion in the series, now in its 8th year) a couple of great titles were unearthed, the first of which is this fine outing, originally issued by the Columbia, MO -based Garuda label in the mid-80s consisting of a selection of “Imaginary Electroacoustics” by the composer Ed Herrmann, primarily composed utilizing the…
Avant Garde
Trucking right along, here’s the 1974 second entrant from British library Studio G’s “Avant Garde” series, featuring a trilogy of pieces composed by none other than “Acezantez” head Dubravko Detoni - only his second LP release following the storied “Graphie I.II.III / Phonomorphia 1.2.3” LP for Philips’ Prospective 21e Siècle series from a few short years prior.Laid out with familiar Library-lexicon panache - the three pieces are described as “Acoustics for Piano Effects and Cello,” “Piano Effec…
Entropical Paradise
Hope you all had a fine summer off. As something of an “Autumn Welcome” here’s a treat - Mr. P.C. C.P.’s reproduction of Douglas Leedy’s groundbreaking 1972 Seraphim-label triple-LP boxed set “Entropical Paradise” - in my mind, the lodestone of all Moogsplotation LPs in that it consists solely of side-length pieces not played by human hands on keyboards - or in fact any other gestural, real-time interface - but in fact produced “Automatically” using Control Voltages assigned to the various funct…
Herbstpathetique, Bildnis
Issued by the mythical “Musikalische Jugend Österreichs” (the same who bestowed Anestis Logothetis’ “Hör!-Spiel / Nekrologlog 1961 / Fantasmata 1960” LP onto a confused, irradiated public a few years later) in 1972, this, frankly, batshit outing of Sound-Poetry lineage vocal gymnastics (courtesy of the composer’s wife - noted actress Gunda König) & analogue blat ℅ Dieter Kaufmann hits an ardent stride during the A-side’s Rilke adaptation before launching into the stratosphere via the B-side’s ex…
April Orchestra Vol.5
Impeccable short-stab collection of bizarrely prescient rhythmic synthesizer metallics from Amedeo “Di Jarrell” Tommasi (rumor has it that Di Jarrell is his wife’s maiden) - an Italian jazz pianist that, from the mid-70s on, dabbled in crushing analogue devastation(s) and assorted proto-industrial moves across a series of libraries for Cenacolo, Orly, Costanza, and CBS Disques France’s “April Orchestra” series.Each side here presents three more “lyrical” numbers (still quite well produced & arra…
Musique Numérique
Creel Pone treatment of this Private-Press LP of late-70s spectral computer music by Daniel Arfib. Aside from Conrad Cummings’ review of the LP in the fall 1981 issue of Computer Music Journal, I’ve seen nary a mention of Mssr. Arfib’s early Digital Synthesis work, which seems something of a glaring omission in the historical annals given the particularly misted nature of these pieces, often utilizing an upgraded spec of Stockhausen’s rhythm-to-pitch methodologies & sharing something in common w…
Aphorisms Insane, 00 Time
A pair of albums at the absolute extreme edge of what can rightfully be considered "Berlin School" Electronic Music music, conjured by the core duo of Walter Heinisch & Karl Kronfeld - with Gerhard Lisy participating only in the former - released in 1980 & 1984, respectively, on (oddly) CBS Austria, and the pair's own Synoptik imprint.
Coming from an aesthetic waypoint far closer to Seeselberg's "Synthetik-1" than anything from the cosmos-gazing Schülze / TD canon, the (burnt) offerings herein, …