condition (disc/cover): M/M (still sealed) One of the holy grails of Italian electronic music! Vittorio Gelmetti (1926-2005) was a self-taught maverick who remained fiercely independent from the official avant-garde establishment while creating some of the most radical electroacoustic works of the 1960s and 70s. This exceedingly rare LP—essentially a private pressing on Premier, a label otherwise devoted to "liscio" dance music—documents three landmark pieces that defined his vision of "music made from music."
Side A opens with Organum Quadruplum - questo è il gatto con gli stivali (1967), commissioned for a new music concert at St. Paul's American Church in Rome. A wild collision of choir, organ, tape, concrete sounds, and outrageous quotations—"La Montanara," "Va Pensiero," "Salt Peanuts"(!), radio interference—all melting into an explosive meditation on collage, citation, and stylistic "declassement." Ipotesi A (1974), a study for the opera Non Otterrete Risposta, follows with hunter's whistle, piano gestures paying homage to Messiaen, and ritualistic percussion.
Side B presents L'Opera Abbandonata Tace e Volge la Cavità Verso l'Esterno (1969)—a sprawling 23-minute tape collage realized at Warsaw's Studio Eksperymentalne with Bohdan Mazurek. Layers of radio static, plundered broadcasts, transformed quotations from Beethoven (Op. 110), Stravinsky (Symphony of Psalms), and Wagner's Tristan chord, all underpinned by rigorous electronic structures. The title quotes Adorno on Beethoven's late sonatas. This is Gelmetti at his most ambitious—decades ahead of sampling culture, creating dense, intelligent, and subversive sound worlds.
Original liner notes translated by Alvin Curran, Gelmetti's friend and colleague in Rome's experimental underground. While scoring Antonioni's Red Desert (with Giovanni Fusco) and working extensively in Italian television, Gelmetti pursued his own uncompromising path, exploring collage and heterogeneous materials when Europe's academies were still pursuing serialist purity.
The historical importance and extreme rarity of this album is underscored by its inclusion within the legendary Creel Pone CDr series—the cult archival label dedicated to rescuing the most obscure and essential electronic and experimental music from oblivion.
