Edition of 120 copies. The missing chapter, at last. Two of the most elusive records in the Alga Marghen catalog - one-sided LPs pressed in editions of 80 and 29 copies, available only inside long since vanished boxsets - are finally united on a single LP. Oeuvres sonores completes the series of records issued in relation to alga marghen's presentation of the work of Charlotte Moorman at the Centre Pompidou between 2008 and 2013, and appears in a final edition of 120 copies only. Moorman remains one of the most charismatic and influential figures to emerge from the avant-garde of the early 1960s - the cellist who became a living sculpture, the organizer of fifteen editions of the New York Avant Garde Festival, the performer whose interpretative gesture Giuseppe Chiari recognized as that of an authentic author. Her collaborations with Nam June Paik made her an icon; the icon, in turn, obscured the individuality these recordings restore.
Side A gathers rare recordings left out of the original Cello Anthology boxset. John Cage's 26'1.1499" for a String Player. Moorman and Terry Jennings performing Piece for Cello and Saxophone, recorded at Judson Hall during the 2nd Annual New York Festival of the Avant-Garde on August 30, 1964 - among the finest recordings in the entire Moorman archive. Three takes of Paik's TV Cello: an excerpt from the legendary 1984 broadcast Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, linking WNET in New York with the Centre Pompidou in Paris; a 1976 performance at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney; and a third from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, 1982. Between the tracks, recordings from Moorman's answering machine - casual, mundane, the debris of a performing life - trace her everyday connections to Cage, Paik, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Jean Dupuy, and a constellation of Fluxus artists, gallerists, and friends.
Side B is devoted to the famous TV Cello - conceived by Paik for Moorman as a living sculpture - in an in situ recording realized during the three days inaugurating the Paik retrospective at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, September 11, 12 and 14, 1982. The Concerto for TV Cello and Videotapes is largely improvised, and includes a tape collage prepared for Charlotte by Ornette Coleman.
This final edition is limited to 120 copies and includes 16 posters and concert programs, in color and black and white - the full documentation of Moorman's Avant Garde Festival of New York. The record comes in a 4-color sleeve bearing an image from the Oeuvres sonores series. After decades in which these recordings circulated among only a handful of listeners, this is the last call.