★Pogus Productions
Love & Lamentation
It must have been quite some years since I last heard music by Simon Wickham-Smith, but there was a time when I played it a lot, especially the various albums he recorded with Richard Youngs. But I guess that's how things go. Interest shifts I assume. To be honest, again, I have no idea when I left off, or why. But its good, as well as strange perhaps to see him back on Pogus Productions. On the cover I read that 'not satisfied with making music, he has also been a Buddhist monk in the Tibetan t…
Lingua II: Maledetto / Antiphony VIII
The work and thought of the American composer Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) exhibited many striking changes during his lifetime. In fact, while the world of commercial endeavor still insists that artists develop a recognizable personal "style," Gaburo's life-work can be seen as one of continual change and exploration, rather than one of codification and promotion. Some of these changes are beautifully illustrated by the two works on this CD, Maledetto, for seven speaking voices, from 1967-68, and A…
Prochronisms
Morphogenesis, made up of: Clive Graham, Roger Sutherland, Ron Briefel, Micha, Fred Sansom, and Andy Courdry, was formed in 1985. They were interested in exploring the possibilities of live electronics and collective improvisation. The members have diverse musical backgrounds, including teaching electonic music at Morley College and playing in other groups ranging from Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra, Nurse with Wound and Organum. Only one copy available.
Combine And Laminates
long time deleted now, this recording is one of their finest. "Combine + Laminates" tends to seesaw between aggressive, noisy sections dominated by Prevost and softer drone-like territories with Tilbury's muffled piano tones in the foreground. Both areas are given immense structural support by Keith Rowe's tabletop guitar arsenal: earthshakingly deep tremors in the louder portions, quietly keening harmonics in the more serene ones. Tilbury's unique genius in integrating the piano's more "traditi…
Montreal Sound Matter - Montréal Matière Sonore
Works by Francisco López / Louis Dufort / Steve Heimbecker / Hélène Prévost / Mathieu Lévesque / a_dontigny / Chantal Dumas / Tomas PhillipsMontreal Sound Matter / Montréal matières sonore brings together eight Canadian and international sound artists. The project began with a workshop on environmental sound collecting by Francisco López and led to the development of a collective sound project including an album, a sound installation, and a concert. This is the recording.The artists create an im…
DIY Canons
"The pieces on this CD are all based on the ideas in Larry Polansky's four voice canons, a series of pieces he began in 1975. These canons are usually "mensuration canons," which means that the tempi of successive voices is proportional to their start times, so that the voices end together. They also use simple ideas of moving through a list of permutations, and applying the elements of those permutations to various musical parameters. A set of Polansky's canons was produced on Cold Blue Records…
Birds + Machines
Co-founder of Pogus with Al Margolis, Gen Ken Montgomery is often unfairly disregarded when assessing the history of radical music in the last half-century. This collection – another clarification of a unendingly probing creativity – examines works from the decade in which the American composer’s terminology was first met by yours truly, at that time seriously hooked in the unearthing of entrancing materials of post-industrial derivation. But don’t let this piece of news mislead you: Montgomery’…
Kientzy plays Johnson
In Kientzy Loops, the accompanying loop is a mix of six alto saxophones played in continuous blowing, while the principal lines are played on alto saxophone, except for the third section, played on baritone. The piece, premiered at the auditorium of the ADAC in Paris, was awarded a French national prize in the Victoires de la musique as the best piece of contemporary music for the year 2000. We are indebted to our friend Marc Chemillier for La Tortue de mer. As a mathematician Chemillier became …
Objekt 2
Volume 2 of the music of RUNE LINDBLAD (1923-1991). This cd consists of the remainder of the long out of print Radium double lp. These works cover the years 1962-1988. Lindblad, a Swede began composing music in 1953. Ignored by the musical establishment in Stockholm, Rune went his own merry way, composing over 200 works of electronic music. Limited in the early years to often primitive equipment, he carved out his own musical niche. The sounds were often raw, occasionally scary.
Death of the moon
This disc is a reissue of lps on Pogus and Radium. Rune Lindblad (1923-1991) was an early pioneer in electronic and concrète music. Lindblad did not see these genres as mutually exclusive. Important and wonderful works by a composer who represented no institutionalized school of thought. At a concert in 1957, the critics called his music "pure torture."
Crow Country
Australian Ross Bolleter's new disc features five compositions. Four of them are solo works: "Unfinished Business" for ruined piano; "Under Rookwood" for double bass; "Labyrinth Tango" for accordion; and "Piano Dreaming" for ruined pianola. "That Time (Simulplay II)" is for a duo of prepared piano and double bass. Of course, with Ross, this thumbnail description tells not much of the story. So we'll let Ross say a few words. Step on down.
"During the drought that never ended at Nallan Sheep Stat…
1939
This release reissues Robert Rutman's Pogus Lp (P201-1) and includes an additional track. Rutman (b. 1930) has been building and performing on his homemade metallic instruments for many years. This recording features his buzz chime, steel cello, and bow chime, along with tabla, Tibetan horn, and Rutman's vocal chants. Rutman caresses the metal, drawing out eerie drones and overtones that buzz and trumpet. The music in turn can be as fragile as glass or reach the depths of resonance, as if one ha…
No mo
"In the summer of 1966 I worked in the classical Electronic Music Studio at the University of Toronto for six weeks. The system I used to create No Mo and Something Else consisted of Layfette tone generators, noise source and tape delay. In the Fall of 1966 I was the newly appointed director of the Mills Tape Music Center formerly the San Francisco Tape Music Center and now the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. Bog Road was created at the Mills Tape Music Center in the Summer of 19…
Alien Bog / Beautiful Soop
Pauline Oliveros completed Beautiful Soop (1966) and Alien Bog (1967) utilizing the original Buchla Box 100 series created for the Tape Music Center by Don Buchla and her tape delay system. "I was deeply impressed by the sounds from the frog pond outside the studio window at Mills. I loved the accompaniment as I worked on my pieces. Though I never recorded the frogs I was of course influenced by their music."
Vertebra
Former WFMU dj, denizen of New York’s A Mica Bunker scene, former Krackhouse (not head) member, and ARP whiz – now living in The Netherlands, having studied elektronische musik in Utrecht. At last, his long overdue first cd. Matt says: “My music runs without stopping, and at a vertiginous speed. The architecture is simultaneity. …Not to perceive noise as music, but music as noise. This is a recording of a live performance: one member of a set of possible solutions. Vertebra is a computer program…
Electro-acoustic
This CD is pure aural pleasure. The Santur sounds (something) like a Chinese chen (or perhaps a Korean Kay-a-gum), but it has (a bit) more body. Kupper composes with high merit, leading the listener on a trek that won't soon be forgotten. You must be focussed on LISTENING, or you'll religate it (incorrectly) to the "background" stack...Leo Kupper was born in Belgium in 1935. He worked with He…
Tape play
The Ten Tape Compositions: Fat Millie's Lament, The Wasting of Lucrecetzia, For Harry, Lemon Drops, Dante's Joynte, Rerun, Mouthpiece II, Hiss, Few (in collaboration with Henri Chopin), and Kyrie. "Over his career, Kenneth Gaburo (1926-1993) produced a lot of electronic music. However, works for tape alone are fairly rare in his output. Over about a thirty-year period, ten works for solo tape were produced. Of the ten tape pieces, five were created in the mid-1960s at the University of Illinois,…
Savage songs
Jorge Antunes (b. 1942, Rio de Janeiro) studied violin, composition and conducting at the University of Rio de Janeiro, as well as studying physics at the same institution. He further studied composition with Alberto Ginastera and Luis de Pablo. From 1970-71 he attended the University of Utrecht (Gotfried M. Koenig). From 1972-73 he worked with Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris. In 1962 he began his research in electronic music thus becoming a pioneer in the development of this field in Br…
I, Angelica
Sounding like an archaic echo, If, Bwana could be the title of a Bob Hope-Bing Crosby vehicle that never got made. A little investigation reveals it as the oddly worded cover for Al Margolis, who is perhaps better known as a tireless activist in the 1980s American cassette underground and, later, as the co-founder of experimental music label Pogus Productions. Derived from an acronym for It's Funny, But We Are Not Amused, the name sticks out like a cartoon-swollen sore thumb alongside such artis…
Minimum: Maximum / Orient: Occident
Perhaps best known for his piano work Book of Sounds these two works by German composer Hans Otte were composed in the 1970s. In that decade his aesthetic creed became increasingly clear: "the search for the character and individuality of sound as such, which must be rediscovered and re-experienced independent of superimposed structures. The composer understands the dialogue with sounds as the discovery of their nature." (Ute Schalz-Laurenze)While Hans Otte was an enthusiastic, one might say vis…