Airwaves. A legendary document of 1970s American performance and sound art. Released in 1977 on One Ten Records (OT 001/2), this groundbreaking double LP compilation captures the radical intersection of visual art, performance, and experimental sound. Edited by Bob George, Airwaves: Two Record Anthology of Artists' Aural Work & Music features Vito Acconci, Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, Dennis Oppenheim, Terry Fox, Connie Beckley, Diego Cortez, Jacki Apple, Julia Heyward, Leandro Katz, Richard Nonas, and Jim Burton—artists working at the furthest edges of creative practice.
Acconci's Ten Packed Minutes layers voice and appropriated music into dense narrative collage, incorporating snippets from Leon Redbone, Cow Cow Davenport, Eric Dolphy, Karl Berger, and Ornette Coleman. Terry Fox's The Labyrinth Scored for the Purrs of 11 Different Cats transforms feline sounds into sacred geometry, following the exact path of the Chartres Cathedral labyrinth through 11 concentric rings and 34 turns. Laurie Anderson contributes early tape bow violin experiments that would define her groundbreaking practice, including Two Songs for Tape Bow Violin and Is Anybody Home from her Holly Solomon Gallery show. Meredith Monk's vocal compositions—Rally for 25 voices and Procession from her opera Quarry—reveal her singular approach to voice as instrument. Dennis Oppenheim's Broken Record Blues loops a single revolution of vintage blues into hypnotic meditation, originally part of a complex installation at Boymans Museum, Rotterdam.
As Bob George writes in the liner notes: "This record is not an art object. All the people on this record are artists." These are artists who present themselves in gallery situations—live in performance, electronically through installations—yet none consider themselves actors. There is no proscenium. It is a floorshow. Most of the work is musical, predominantly vocal. The artists combine the bravura and risk of the musician with the intellect and risk of the composer. Technology becomes a tool, a verb—sometimes used to make things legible, sometimes avoided because it imposes a system. The concerns here are not the concerns of painting. Structure is often the subject matter. Memory becomes material. As in opera, what we hear is influenced by what we see, how much of the story we know, and if we understand the language. You had to be there. Often what is done is not repeated. This is a record.
The gatefold cover features extensive liner notes with each artist's statement and image. This is not simply a compilation—it is a manifesto of conceptual sound, performance documentation, and artistic reinvention.
