Subtitled "50 years of electronic and electroacoustic music at the Ghent University" this beautiful box commemorate IPEM’s 50th anniversary, with a lavishly illustrated 88 page book (all text in Dutch and English) with two CDs featuring Lucien Goethals, Didier Gazelle, Louis De Meester, David Van de Woestijne, Stefan Beyst, Helmut Lachenmann, Boudewijn Buckinx, Karel Goeyvaerts, Emmanuel Van Weerst, Peter Beyls, Raoul De Smet, Frank Nuyts, Ricardo Mandolini, Peter Schuback, Stephen Montague and Yves Knockaert. All tracks were recorded at the IPEM studio and mastered from the original tapes. Most tracks are previously unreleased.
"Belgium's Metaphon label - responsible for that amazing Ranta / Lewis / Plank album few years back - present a fascinating and in-depth book commemorating 50 years of the Institute for Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music based at Ghent University, accompanied by two CDs of haunting experimental recordings.
The book affords an engrossing insight to the development and contributions of Belgium's national electronic music institute - a lesser known counterpart to the esteemed GRM in France, Cologne's Studio für elektronische Musik, or Italy's Studio di Fonologia Musicale - through in-depth history and essays by alumnus and professors. The two CDs give clear, and often shocking evidence of what they were up to: 18 tracks from the likes of Louis De Meester, Raoul De Smet and Boudewijn Buckinx, among others, spanning unearthly electro-acoustic, drone and concrète compositions recorded between 1963-1999 and distinguished by a certain gothic or dark mittel European sensibility that's really pushing our buttons." Boomkat
IPEM was founded in 1963, as a joint venture between the Belgian Radio and Television broadcasting company (BRT) and Ghent University. The idea was to combine audio engineering with music production, thus building a bridge between scientific research and artistic research. Music production at IPEM was lead by the composers L. De Meester, K. Goeyvaerts and L. Goethals, all employed by the BRT. They realized many compositions and radio transmissions related to contemporary music. Since 1968, research results at IPEM were published in yearbooks. In collaboration with Sonology (then at Utrecht), this resulted in 1972 in an international journal, called Interface - Journal of New Music Research.
Edition of 700 copies