Earlier this year, Deutsche Grammophon announced and delivered one of the most exciting initiatives in recent memory: a brand-new audiophile vinyl reissue series dedicated to crucial avant-garde and experimental works from its own extensive catalog. Beginning with Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien No.1 / Société II (1970), Mauricio Kagel's Acustica (1972), and Tōru Takemitsu's Quatrain / A Flock Descends Into The Pentagonal Garden (1980), these deluxe limited editions completely blew us away, returning our ears to some of the most groundbreaking efforts within the canon of 20th Century avant-garde composition. Now, as we ease into the summer months, they return with the latest installment from the initiative, which may just be better than the last, delivering deluxe, audiophile, first-ever vinyl reissues of Mauricio Kagel's Exotica (1972), The Scratch Orchestra's The Great Learning (1971), and Roland Kayn and Luigi Nono's Cybernetics III / Contrappunto Dialettico Alla Mente (1970). Collectively amounting to some of the most culturally and creatively important music of the early 1970s - changing everything in their wakes - it is impossible to recommend them enough.

Within the slim catalog of recordings produced between the early 1950s and late 1970s, attending to avant-garde chamber, orchestral, and electroacoustic music, few are as historically significant and influential as Deutsche Grammophon's Avant-Garde series. Collectively comprising 24 LPs, issued in four suites of six between 1968 and 1971, it contains some of the most radical and groundbreaking musical gestures of its time, created by many of the most important voices of the post-war period: Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Gruppe Nuova Consonanza, Mauricio Kagel, John Cage, Cornelius Cardew & The Scratch Orchestra, György Ligeti, Earle Brown, Luc Ferrari, Franco Evangelisti, Krzysztof Penderecki, and numerous others. For generations following in the series' wake, it represented a crucial and deeply inspiring means through which to begin to reconstruct and access the very origins of experimental music at large, becoming hotly collected and pursued.

This bundle gathers all three titles from the initiative's second installment. Each has been fully remastered and recut from the original 1/2 inch analog tapes by Rainer Maillard and Sidney Claire Meyer at Emil Berliner Studios, and comes housed in a deluxe sleeve perfectly reproducing the original cover and liner notes, complemented by a stunningly produced die-cut slipcover containing extensive, newly commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey, that illuminate important historical context and dimensions of these seminal works and composers afforded by the passage of time. Unquestionably among the most exciting reissues that will appear in 2026, it's impossible to express how essential all of these are.