Ricardo Mandolini

condition (record/cover): M / M

Catalogue number one. When the critic and curator Robert Zank founded Edition RZ in Berlin in 1982 to document the Inventionen festival, his first release was four tape works by Ricardo Mandolini, born in Buenos Aires in 1950 and living in Berlin at the time. The label later published Luigi Nono, David Tudor and Iannis Xenakis, but it started with a 32-year-old Argentine and a single LP.

The pieces were written between 1979 and 1981: Estallido breve, Juego de marionetas, El cuaderno del alquimista and Canción de madera y agua. The Spanish titles suggest small fables, and the music is sparse and precise, built from short gestures and sudden flare-ups that do justice to the "brief explosion" of the opening title. Its roots are in musique concrète and in the acousmatic practice the GRM was codifying in Paris in those same years, though Mandolini's touch is lighter and more theatrical. This is an original 1982 pressing with its inner sleeve.