condition (record/cover): NM / EX-

Opus One, the American independent label founded and run by Max Schubel, was one of the most tenacious documentary operations in American new music - issuing small-run LPs of contemporary chamber music throughout the 1970s and 80s at a moment when the institutional structures for this kind of work were thin and unreliable. This LP gathers three composers whose trajectories converge in the American university avant-garde while remaining rooted in Latin American formation: Orlando Jacinto Garcia, born in Havana in 1954, who emigrated to the United States in 1961 and studied composition with Morton Feldman at the University of Miami - a lineage that left a clear mark on his work, described by those close to it as "time suspended, haunting sonic explorations"; Luis Jorge González; and Aurelio De La Vega, the older and more established figure of the three, who had left Cuba in 1959 and built a three-decade career at California State University Northridge, directing its electronic music studio, moving successively through free atonality, serialism, electronics, open form, and aleatory procedures in a manner that placed him among the most formally restless of his generation. A document of composers negotiating multiple cultural inheritances simultaneously, their music shaped equally by the American experimental scene and by everything that preceded and surrounded it.