Dubravko Detoni

Featuring: Acezantez

condition (records/cover): NM / EX- (minimal sticker removal residue on front)

The first LP: 1976, Jugoton, Zagreb. Dubravko Detoni (b. 1937) had studied piano in Zagreb, with Cortot in Siena, composition with Šulek at the Zagreb Academy, and had been at the Polish Radio Experimental Studio in Warsaw in 1966-67 working alongside Grażyna Bacewicz and Witold Lutosławski, then at Darmstadt with Stockhausen and Ligeti. He returned to Zagreb and founded ACEZANTEZ - the Ensemble of the Center for New Tendencies - which became the primary vehicle for his work and the most unusual chamber ensemble in Yugoslavia. What makes Detoni's position distinctive, even among the most radical composers of his generation, is a refusal of both academic seriousness and commercial accessibility: the music occupies a terrain between composed structure and group improvisation, between musique concrète manipulation and what the Paradigm Discs reissue later called "breathtakingly idiosyncratic sonic inventions."

The three pieces on this LP - Grafika VI (Graphic VI, 1973), Gimnastika Za Grupu (Group Gymnastics, 1974), and the monumental twenty-minute De Musica (1973) - represent the range of that terrain. De Musica is the centerpiece: an all-embracing sound environment that includes Detoni at the piano producing Cage-like chords, the Acezantez members in semi-aleatoric instrumental outbursts, electroacoustic interjections, excerpts from classical music LPs, conversations, bird sounds, silence, and throughout the exquisite voice of Veronika Kovačić threading the whole into something that defies category. It was not included on the 2000 Paradigm Discs compilation - the only previous Western European reappearance of this music - making this LP its primary document. Original 1976 pressing.