Reissues
Requiem für meine Frau Beate. Musik der 56. Aktion
Alga Marghen proudly present the documentation of Requiem für meine Frau Beate, which took place in the Chiesa di Santa Lucia in Bologna, Italy, in 1977 shortly after Beate Nitsch's death. This was not only one of the strongest and most powerful aktionen by Hermann Nitsch but also a crucial point in the development of his art. Beginning in 1977, Beate Nitsch was travelling in Schwarzwald. She has been inaugurating a nursery-school and wanted to meet some relatives in Stuttgart when, near Ulm, sh…
Musik der 66. aktion
Alga Marghen proudly present the documentation of Requiem fur meine Frau Beate, which took place in the Chiesa di Santa Lucia in Bologna, Italy, in 1977 shortly after Beate Nitsch's death. This was not only one of the strongest and most powerful aktionen by Hermann Nitsch but also a crucial point in the development of his art. Begining 1977, Beate Nitsch was travelling in Schwarzwald. She has been inaugurating a nursery-school and wanted to meet some relatives in Stuttgart when, near Ulm, she h…
New American Ethnic Music Volume 4 : Ascent to the sun
The final release in the New American Ethnic Music series (but not the last Henry Flynt on Recorded) is Ascent to the Sun, a brilliant, sparkling hillbilly raga in the family of You Are My Everlovin' but with a unique double violin approach and a mind-bending structure all its own. The piece covers incredible ground in terms of specificity of mood and sentiment, and is deeply listenable and experimental at once. It is a new creation by Flynt circa 2004, engineered by Tim Barnes
New American Ethnic Music Volume 3 : Hillbilly tape music
Third volume in the New Americam Ethnic Music series, following: You Are My Everlovin' & Spindizzy. Featuring recordings from 1971 through 1978, this focuses on shorter tracks that explore the third-ear mania of looped violin playing as well as could be imagined. Breathtaking stuff and essential for all followers of the Tony Conrad/post-minimalism timeline. "This is an amazing document of the nihilist father of concept art and inventor of electronic Hillbilly music. The record shows more t…
New American Ethnic Music Volume 2 : Spindizzy
second release in this series documenting the archival recordings of this previously obscure, genius musician. Volume one received broad critical acclaim, including a top ten critics pick for 2001 in THE WIRE and numerous other reviews and articles. Volume 3 in the series, Hillbilly Tape Music, will follow shortly. Before the publication of his music, Flynt was most often known as an (often distorted) footnote in art history, as the man who invented Concept Art, Flynt's name in the early sixties…
New American Ethnic Music Volume 1
The classic double CD release that really renewed the interest in Henry's Flynt's idiosyncratic music (linked to Conceptual art and minimalism) -- at least 10 other CDs have followed since the release of this one. It is listed as #6 on Alan Lichts' "Minimal Top Ten" list, which says a lot. First volume in the series subtitled: New American Ethnic Music. "Recorded in '80 and '81, two mind-blowing disks delivering flowing, trance-inducing violin solos of extreme beauty and seriousness. In these in…
Purified by the fire
a drone masterpiece, The psychedelic sounds of musical pioneer Henry Flynt's drone works with collaborator C.C. Hennix are quietly becoming the stuff of legend. Over some 40 plus minutes, we are treated to a true tour de force that's part Hindustani inflected musical miasma and part warped hillbilly vibrational swing that sways in and out of auditory focus. This is vertiginous music for the third ear. Line Up: Henry Flynt (Violin); C.C. Hennix (Pandit Pran Nath Tamboura)
Raga electric
This album is another chapter in the life of avant-hillbilly Henry Flynt, this time documenting his more experimental recordings. The centrepiece of the record is a slightly unnerving collection of howls, judders and raspberries unnervingly titled ‘Central Park Transverse Vocal #1-4’ – luckily there is more on the cd than this though, I can’t say the squealing does a lot for me other than irritate. However, ‘Raga Electric’ is clearly the standout track and does pretty much exactly what it says o…
Paysages Planétaires
In 2000, Henri Pousseur was asked by Philippe Samyn, a Brussels-based architect who liked to work in collaboration with other artforms, to lend his support to the plan for the construction of a business complex by one of the most important building enterprises in the country. There were four low buildings arranged like different parts of a medieval castle-village, grouped around a kind of large open central court. Leaning on the suggested image, Pousseur immediately suggested that the fir…
Enclosure 7
Harry Partch (like his friend Anaïs Nin) considered his life's work to be a letter to the world. His last act was going to be to add the enclosures. He never got around to it. After 20 years of working on the Partch archives, Philip Blackburn has now completed the seven-part 'Enclosures' series as it were on his behalf. Enclosure 7, the culminating DVD of this multimedia series, is a monumental tribute to the most significant works of this American original and iconoclast. It includes n…
Enclosure 2
This massive 4CD set is the second "enclosure" in the series. It is sub-titled "Historic Speech-Music Recordings from the Harry Partch archives," and includes "archival recordings, including works from the 30s & 40s, a lecture on just intonation, excerpts from the 1935 hobo journal Bitter Music, and a sound documentary featuring Partch at the piano
Unfolding
No Obi. Awesome CD release documenting the 'magic' world of Harry Bertoia sound scuptures. This reissues two of this American genius's many self-released LPs as a great public service. His "sounding sculptures" consist of "ranks of tall slender rods, placed either upright or at special slants in rectangular formations. These metallic faces are not rigid, but 'give' when stroked -- at the same time releasing lingering musical chords of a weirdly haunting nature."
Minimum: Maximum / Orient: Occident
Perhaps best known for his piano work Book of Sounds these two works by German composer Hans Otte were composed in the 1970s. In that decade his aesthetic creed became increasingly clear: "the search for the character and individuality of sound as such, which must be rediscovered and re-experienced independent of superimposed structures. The composer understands the dialogue with sounds as the discovery of their nature." (Ute Schalz-Laurenze)While Hans Otte was an enthusiastic, one might say vis…
Chœurs imaginaires
This piece develops a preoccupation already begun in “Naissance du verbe” (Birth of the Word), the result of research on language and phonemes undertaken by Bernard Ucla. The idea behind this research is that the sign in language is not arbitrary, but that the choice of phonemes at the origin of languages obeys a long elaboration, and that between the meaning of words and the phonemes that express them, mysterious relationships exist: the phoneme is not a neutral acoustic substance but carries s…
Granulations-Sillages — Franges Du Signe — Signal Sur Bruit
Granulations-Sillages develops an idea glimpsed at in Franges du Signe: the existence of extreme times, at the edge of our faculties of perception, which only the electroacoustic music tools allow us to realise. Two natures of phenomena, opposed in all respects (the Granulations-Trails and the Tutti), alternate through seven movements that constitute the piece. The work is designed for six channels diffused in concert on a main stereo system facing the public and two auxiliary stereos (group of…
Oriental suite. The complete orchestral music 1923-1924
Between 13 and 25 December 1923 the Gurdjieff Institute gave a series of eight public demonstrations of the Sacred Gymnastics and Movements at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris. The music, composed by Gurdjieff to accompany these dances, was orchestrated by Thomas de Hartmann and performed by an orchestra of thirty-five musicians.In January 1924, Gurdjieff and his pupils sailed to America for a series of public demonstrations in New York, Boston, and Chicago. At Gurdjieff`s request, de Har…
Improvisations
This unique collection comes with an attractive and profusely illustrated 144-page book with many previously unpublished photographs of Gurdjieff and recollections of people who were present when these recordings were made. It further contains several chapters by Gert-Jan Blom about the process of selecting and sequencing the tracks, audio restoration of the recordings, the history of Gurdjieff’s harmonium music, transcriptions of Gurdjieff’s stories and an extensive track notes-section. The boo…
One
Comes with 8 page booklet. Originally released in 1973 as a private press LP, 'One' is the first document of GAEB, a mysterious sextet of Californian improvisors. Formed in the late 60's by artist Richard Waters and jazz drummer Lee Charlton, the group made music using Waters's kinetic sculptures. His most important creation was the waterphone, a sort of acoustic synthesizer which used water in its resonators to produce warbling, tone bending vibrations similar to th edeep sea harmonies of humpb…
Gottfried Michael Koenig
Restocked, reduced price: beautifully prepared overview of Gottfried Michael Koenig's work (including early 60s WDR electronic classics), produced in conjunction by the Instituut of Sonologie and NEAR/Donemus w/ Edition RZ. During the early '60s, Koenig began writing a program -- named simply 'Project 1,' or PR1 -- designed to compose and generate music via the computer; when in 1964 he accepted the position of creative director with the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht, Holland, he took the so…
Electronic music of theatre and public activity
Gordon Mumma (born 1935) has played a pioneering role in the development and evolution of 'live-electronic' music. 'Live-electronics' as a concept and practice appears to have originated in the United States in the late 1950s, outside the few institutional electronic studios and often in the context of innovative theatre activity. From its inception, it frequently involved two processes: (1) live performance with accompanying or interacting sound materials on magnetic tape; and (2) the use of el…