Avant-Garde / Contemporary

Ltd. 300 copies, remastered edition, audiophile pressing. Perfect replica of the original packaging, newly remastered for optimal sound. ** The first-ever reissue of Gianni Marchetti's 1978 LP "Solstitium", released as part of RCA's venerable "Original Cast" series in a handful of promo copies only, sits among the most rare and enigmatic artifacts of Italian library music, it is heralded by collectors as one of the greatest free-standing gestures in the entire genre.

Long coveted by diggers, samplers, and beat makers, Library Music has, over the decades, remained one of the great, unheralded treasure troves within the history of recorded music. A relic of the golden age of the record industry, this body of recordings was almost entirely commissioned and owned by record labels, to be licensed for use within television programs, radio, and film - stock or background music. Despite the obvious limitations of the context, particularly in Italy, many composers found a way to write, produce, and record albums which, while heard by few for what they were, ranked among the most interesting and ambitious works of their era. Within these, there is arguably no better example than Gianni Marchetti's astounding "Solstitium".

The output of RCA's Original Cast stands apart in the history of modern Italian music, as it produced one of the most collectible and varied catalogs of instrumental music of its time. The purpose of the creation of this label was to present a catalogue mostly related to film soundtracks, original music and theme songs presented in television broadcasts or documentaries. During the late '60s until the early '80s the imprint released some of the best film scores and library music by legendary figures such as Bruno Nicolai, Ennio Morricone, Piero Piccioni, Mario Migliardi, Franco Micalizzi, Mario Molino, Gianni Oddi, and of course Gianni Marchetti.

If ever there was an LP to expand the notions of Library music’s vast potential and scope, Gianni Marchetti’s Solstitium has to be it. Nearly 50 years on, it feels as fresh and forward thinking as anything that has come since.

Ltd. 300 copies, remastered edition, audiophile pressing. Perfect replica of the original packaging, newly remastered for optimal sound. ** "Equinox", Gianni Marchetti's 1977 twin album of "Solstitium", released in a handful of promo copies by RCA in their renowned "Original Cast" series, takes us on a journey through the author's groovier and wilder temperament, feeling as fresh and surprising today as the day it was made, offering immediate understanding of the reasons why it has remained one of his most sought after - and virtually impossible to find - titles over the decades.

Long coveted by diggers, samplers, and beat makers, Library Music has, over the decades, remained one of the great, unheralded treasure troves within the history of recorded music. A relic of the golden age of the record industry, this body of recordings was almost entirely commissioned and owned by record labels, to be licensed for use within television programs, radio, and film - stock or background music. Despite the obvious limitations of the context, particularly in Italy, many composers found a way to write, produce, and record albums which, while heard by few for what they were, ranked among the most interesting and ambitious works of their era. Within these, there is arguably no better example than Gianni Marchetti's astounding "Equinox".

The output of RCA's Original Cast stands apart in the history of modern Italian music, as it produced one of the most collectible and varied catalogs of instrumental music of its time. The purpose of the creation of this label was to present a catalogue mostly related to film soundtracks, original music and theme songs presented in television broadcasts or documentaries. During the late '60s until the early '80s the imprint released some of the best film scores and library music by legendary figures such as Bruno Nicolai, Ennio Morricone, Piero Piccioni, Mario Migliardi, Franco Micalizzi, Mario Molino, Gianni Oddi - and of course Gianni Marchetti.

Flirting with the cinematic through its depth of emotiveness and scale, dynamics ding behind an aural shroud, is a stunning and ambitious, freestanding work which, had it been made in another context, would likely have been celebrated for decades, far and wide. Absolutely engrossing and creatively challenging at every turn.

“I did this piano/Rhodes recording, played live, without overdubs. I believe your approach to sound could match very well these tracks….”

That’s how Giovanni Di Domenico’s collaboration with Rutger Zuydervelt started, though the first seeds were planted when the duo did a short live improv together in 2019, and Giovanni joining Hydra Ensemble on stage in 2022.

Painting a Picture / Picture a painting is -as the title suggest- an album of two long-form pieces, swapping the working method for each - one takes Giovanni’s recordings and has Rutger processing and adding to it, while the other one started with Rutger creating its foundation (with manipulated sounds of the first piece), and Giovanni building upon it. This resulted in two meandering tracks that are clearly linked, like two sides of the same coin.

The cover, a painting of an empty canvas, is made by Christiaan Kuitwaard. A beautiful and ultimately fitting visual addition to this mysterious release.

Derek Bailey’s incredible debut solo showcase is given a necessary, expanded reissue as part of Honest Jon’s reissue series of important releases on Bailey and Evan Parker’s Incus Records. The original LP of finger-flaying improvisations and Bailey’s takes on works by Gavin Bryars and Misha Mengelberg is now augmented by an extra disc of farther improvs, including a solo show at York University in 1972. The late, great guitar pioneer’s Solo Guitar remains pivotal testament to his endeavours in dismantling modern instrumental music and freeing it to more curious routes of expression, much in key - so to speak - with the US free jazz and improvised music which it evolved from. Love it or not, this record remains a totem of late 20th centre musical exploration. “Recorded in 1971, Solo Guitar Volume 1 was Bailey’s first solo album. Its cover is an iconic montage of photos taken in the guitar shop where he worked. He and the photographer piled up the instruments whilst the proprietor was at lunch, with Bailey promptly sacked on his return. The LP was issued in two versions over the years — Incus 2 and 2R — with different groupings of free improvisations paired with Bailey’s performances of notated pieces by his friends Misha Mengelberg, Gavin Bryars and Willem Breuker. All this music is here, plus a superb solo performance at York University in 1972; a welcome shock at the end of an evening of notated music. It’s a striking demonstration of the way Bailey rewrote the language of the guitar with endless inventiveness, intelligence and wit.”

Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuire’s Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europe’s angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock serialism’s warped geometries onto an evenly spaced grid, perfectly preserving serial music’s multi-dimensionality while smoothing its wildest disjunctures and sharpest angles. If serialism is Montreal’s Habitat 67 modular housing complex, McGuire’s Pulse Music compositions are the primary-colored grids of Le Corbusier’s L’Habitation apartment complex — an exuberant expression of the same materials and principles. Every layer of pulses is made distinct through its timbre, register, and tempo. We hear them as a plurality, organized like stars in the sky. Every so often the sky rotates and the stars appear in a different arrangement. Our ear naturally starts to draw connections and, as it sweeps between one layer and another, what was discrete becomes continuous. Pulses become flows; quantitative reality becomes qualitative experience. McGuire’s pulse pieces were realized electronically, in the newly built Studio for Electronic Music at the State University of Cologne and WDR, but Pulse Music II adapted his ideas to an orchestral canvas. Commissioned retrospectively by the composer and radio producer Hans Otte for his Pro Musica Nova festival at Radio Bremen. Alongside the Bremen orchestra, conducted by Klaus Bernbacher, were four pianists—Christoph Delz, Herbert Henck, Deborah Richards, Doris Thomsen—and McGuire himself playing a series of twelve drone-like chords on the organ. The techniques of the electronic Pulse Music pieces required a speed and precision too great for live musicians, so for Pulse Music II McGuire adapted his method to an expanding progression of durations; this had the advantage of being much slower and requiring none of the carefully calibrated tempo changes of Pulse Music I or III. It was still based, says the composer, “on what seemed to me an interesting foray into a completely different kind of time structure. Complex time structures had, by 1975, become a condition for me in two senses: a compositional requirement and maybe an illness.” The present recording was made by Radio Bremen at the work’s first and only performance, and has been held in their archive until now. “108 Pulses” – originally composed a proof-of-concept piece and realized as a single, repeating loop in a 20 minute tableau – is also presented here for the first time.

From its earliest utterances, experimental music has been particularly disposed to transnational and cross-cultural collaboration. Seeking the answer for a fundamental problem - how to transcend the boundaries of difference, distance, and time - it presents a means to find common ground and communicate through the elemental form of sound. Over the last 5 years, this precisely what the duo of Félicia Atkinson & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has achieved, intertwining sublime sonorities across the geographic expanses between their respective homes in France and the United States. Their third album for Shelter Press, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ (‘A winter in the middle of summer’) - the first to have been largely recorded by Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma together in the same space - distills a mesmerizing pallet of acoustic and electronic sources into an open discourse of radically poetic forms, offering glimpses of warmth and intimacy waiting in the post-covid world to come. Both veteran experimentalists with celebrated bodies of solo work behind them - each traversing the challenges of electroacoustic practice in their own singular ways - prior to their first recorded outing in 2016, Félicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma had only crossed paths in person once, initially meeting in San Fransisco during 2009. The mutual bond formed during that brief encounter flowered into their first LP, ‘Comme Un Seul Narcisse’, followed two years later by 2018’s ‘Limpid As The Solitudes’. Both recorded remotely - sending files back and forth, fortified by conversations on a vast range of subjects - these two albums were guided by impassioned conceptual nods to Guy Debord, Baudelaire, Brion Gysin and Sylvia Plath, while seeking resolutions for the challenges and unique possibilities that working at a distance provoked. Where the triumphs of its predecessors rose from the bridging of disparate moments and divergent spaces, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ culminates as a celebration of closeness, a result of Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma working together in the studio, responsively in real time, for the first time. Recorded in Brooklyn during August of 2019 - a handful of months before the pandemic would impose chasmic distances across the globe - its six discrete works, carefully crafted and finalized over the ensuing year, evolve seamlessly across the album’s two sides, weaving a sprawling tapestry of sonority, within which both artists retaining their own voices and visions, while drawing each other towards uncharted ground. Atkinson likens the recording of ‘Un hiver en plein été’ to have been akin to “a playground”, each artist “hungry for each sound, a bit like the rush in the Louvre in Godard’s Bande à part”, to which Cantu-Ledesma adds that the process seemed to have had “a mind of its own”, with both “along for the ride”. This organic sense of entropy and enthusiasm - a joyous exploration of the unknown - guides the momentum of the album’s evolving arc, as unfolding chasms of ambient space ripple with humanity, life, and fleeting glimpses of the actions that led to its material core. Crafted from deconstructed melodic elements and drifting long-tones - laden with subtle nods to Indian classical ragas and free jazz - searching patterns of speech, textural elements captured within the studio and the outside world, and searching tonal and percussive interventions, ‘Un hiver en plein été’ coheres as a multi-faceted series of electroacoustic dialogues; nesting conversations between two artists working at the juncture of abstraction and narration, field recording and harmony, and the philosophical and phenomenological, in search for the meaning of friendship, and its manifestation in pure sound.

The latest release from Blank Forms, a curatorial platform and non-profit organization dedicated to the presentation and preservation of experimental performance, and one of the most respected reissues of works by Catherine Christer Hennix and Masayuki Takayanagi, is a collection of archival recordings from the 1970s. Catherine Christer Hennix is a Swedish musician, philosopher, poet, mathematician and visual artist who has already released three works from her archives in the 70's. She pursued the minimalist path after meeting La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath, and later collaborated with Henry Flynt. Recorded in February 1974, this is the third in an ongoing series of recordings of unreleased music by Catherine Christer Hennix, a female composer, philosopher, poet, mathematician, and visual artist known for her collaborations with Henry Flynt. Recorded in February 1974, Catherine Christer Hennix (recitation, percussion, electronics) and Hans Isgren (bowed gong) performed "Unbegrenzt" (German for "unlimited") from Aus den Sieben Tagen, a collection of fifteen texts written in Paris in May 1968, one of Stockhausen's most famous works. (German for "unlimited") from Aus den Sieben Tagen, a collection of 15 texts written in Paris in May 1968. A sophisticated, minimalist take on Stockhausen's compositional technique of "moment forming"!

This is a lovely and surprising treat indeed. Composer and multi-instrumentalist Tim Hodgkinson (Henry Cow and much more) partners with vocalist Atsuko Kamura (Mizutama Shobodan aka Polka Dot Fire Brigade and Frank Chickens) to present 37 compositions, expanding the usual sub-10-second acoustic life of classic haiku into a varied suite of compositions which place the gem-like poems, spoken and sung in both English and Japanese by Hodgkinson and Kamura, into gorgeous musical frames composed by Hodgkinson. "Haiku In The Wide World" lovingly embraces texts spanning the 17th to 20th centuries, revered examples of a long-established Japanese literary form, bringing these brief poems into the realms of musical art, setting them in an extended network of sonic inter-relationships. The instrumental textures, paradoxically sparse yet rich, crystalline yet warm, are provided by Hodgkinson’s own clarinet and other sound sources, as well as beautifully played and crisply recorded french horn, viola, violin, cello and acoustic guitar. The voices and instrumental sounds fuse with the poetic images, each throwing light and casting shadows on each, revealing hidden significances and building resonances across the arc of the release. The Japanese and English voicings of the haiku also provide further layers of significance, resonance and communication. The English translations, by poet Harry Gilonis, sparked Hodgkinson to initiate this project, a dancing, shifting terrain of life moving through the seasons and the comings and goings of the moon and sun. This project is a unique world, distinctly different from what either Hodgkinson and Kamura have previously accomplished. "Haiku In The Wide World" is a co-release, with ReR launching a UK CD version; EM Records provides both CD and 2LP versions. The tracks and sequence are the same for both labels, but the cover art is different — perhaps you should buy each version; "Haiku In The Wide World" is certainly worthy.

This is a lovely and surprising treat indeed. Composer and multi-instrumentalist Tim Hodgkinson (Henry Cow and much more) partners with vocalist Atsuko Kamura (Mizutama Shobodan aka Polka Dot Fire Brigade and Frank Chickens) to present 37 compositions, expanding the usual sub-10-second acoustic life of classic haiku into a varied suite of compositions which place the gem-like poems, spoken and sung in both English and Japanese by Hodgkinson and Kamura, into gorgeous musical frames composed by Hodgkinson. "Haiku In The Wide World" lovingly embraces texts spanning the 17th to 20th centuries, revered examples of a long-established Japanese literary form, bringing these brief poems into the realms of musical art, setting them in an extended network of sonic inter-relationships. The instrumental textures, paradoxically sparse yet rich, crystalline yet warm, are provided by Hodgkinson’s own clarinet and other sound sources, as well as beautifully played and crisply recorded french horn, viola, violin, cello and acoustic guitar. The voices and instrumental sounds fuse with the poetic images, each throwing light and casting shadows on each, revealing hidden significances and building resonances across the arc of the release. The Japanese and English voicings of the haiku also provide further layers of significance, resonance and communication. The English translations, by poet Harry Gilonis, sparked Hodgkinson to initiate this project, a dancing, shifting terrain of life moving through the seasons and the comings and goings of the moon and sun. This project is a unique world, distinctly different from what either Hodgkinson and Kamura have previously accomplished. "Haiku In The Wide World" is a co-release, with ReR launching a UK CD version; EM Records provides both CD and 2LP versions. The tracks and sequence are the same for both labels, but the cover art is different — perhaps you should buy each version; "Haiku In The Wide World" is certainly worthy.

Beatrice Dillon mints her new label with her first entirely acoustic work, performed by Explore Ensemble and commissioned by Mark Fell. Stunning, major work, RIYL CC Hennix, John Cage, Pascale Criton, Helmut Lachenmann, Morton Feldman. The naturally open-ended navigation of themes in Seven Reorganisations is exemplary of an artist whose thoughtfully considered catalogue is hailed among the most notable in modern experimental music. Beatrice Dillon’s first entirely acoustic composition allows her ideas on fundamentals of space and light, structure and tone, to unfold in beguiling, inspirational new directions unveiling whole new facets of a musical vision that continues to reveal itself with each new release. Derived from a Mark Fell commission, the album features a version recorded in a London studio setting, and another taken as a live recording made at ZKM Karlsruhe in 2023. The same compositions are here articulated by the same performers, distinguished by subtle alterations of atmosphere and dynamics on each side. The studio parts remain tethered to Beatrice’s practice with the use of discrete edits of drily close-mic’d parts judiciously rearranged across the stereo field with a near-hallucinatory minimalism. In exquisite juxtaposition, the live iteration relinquishes that control to Explore Ensemble’s sextet of players cycling the piece’s musical cells in a reverberant room. The recordings encourage listeners to revel in psychoacoustic frissons of overtones and microtonal, timbral intricacy, whilst also highlighting the way her score appears to prompt the performers to stop, breathe, listen and look around them, before deciding where to go next. The schisms of fixedness and ephemerality to Seven Reorganisations are surely in keeping with Dillon’s enduring obsessions with structure and motion in organised sound, but can also be attributed to an ever expanding grasp of interrelated artforms. Extramusical cues from W.R. Bion’s psychoanalytic assertion “Inability to tolerate empty space limits the amount of space available”, and the deconstructionist philosophy of S. Korea’s Byung Chul-Han’s statement, “Leaving things out, to better hear what’s kept in”, are guiding principles as much as the misty depth perception found in Hasegawa Tohaku’s C.16th Japanese folding screens, or the shifting focal points of Terri Weifenbach’s photography (as featured on this album’s cover). Perfect metaphors for the way the composition and mixing seduces you into its filigree detail and use of negative space - the listener activating its latent detail. Comparable to Cage’s ‘In a Landscape’ in its etheric, harmonious beauty, or Pascale Criton’s ‘INFRA’ in how the music feels out the spaces in-between, Beatrice’s clean diversion from club music exposes a related, but whole other, architecture of sound that propels the imagination, embodied in reverie. Close listening rewards with passages of frankly astonishing iridescent beauty in the arp flutters of ‘Seven Reorganisations I’ and sublime tension of its lulled lacunæ in ‘Seven Reorganisations II’, with an absence of repeating melody that makes return journeys feel like revisiting a perpetually unresolved, waking dreamscape.

Artist: Flower Travellin' Band, 50 motorcycles and others
Album title: Beam Penetration and Mad Computer, plus the Minimal Sound of Motorcycles

=Special Edition=
Format: 10-inch LP & CD + CD-R
Catalog #: EMC-023SP/OP-0018SP

Expo 70, held in Osaka, was a pivotal event for the Japanese people and their relationship with the rest of the world, demonstrating both the nation’s ongoing economic recovery from World War Two and the creative spirit of Japanese society and its artists. The event gained international acclaim for its adventurous architectural design, visual art and electronic music. Some of Japan’s most renowned composers were involved, but also present were the now-legendary rockers, the Flower Travellin' Band. A series of performances, billed as “Night Events” were held at the Expo; the most radical of these was "Beam Penetration and Mad Computer, plus the Minimal Sound of Motorcycles”, but its anti-establishment feel and general madness took the Expo organizers by surprise and it was cancelled after only one night, despite being scheduled for a longer run. An air of myth developed around the event, but a recording of the event has been discovered and this release is the result. And what an event it was: a night-time sound-bomb with a fabled band, electronic sound and 50 motorcycles with horns blaring, spotlights, electronic billboards and a robot ― all flashing, roaring and howling at the night sky. This release comprises a CD, a 10-inch record with fold-out sleeve and large obi, plus fascinating notes in Japanese and English by Kenichi Yasuda, an expert on Japanese rock music, and Koji Kawasaki, a renowned researcher of Japanese electronic music, as well as rare photos. No download code/ticket available.

Special Edition includes a CD-R of a interview program with the producers of "Beam Penetration" in 1970. At the end of the program, the Flower Travellin' Band appeared with motorcycles and performed in the studio. Also includes insert with English translation of the interview.

TRACKS:
CD “Beam Penetration” (full-length) [45:49]

10-inch (excerpts)
Side A “Beam Penetration” [14:52]
Side B “Beam Penetration” [15:15]

CD-R (Special Editon only extra disc)
"Beam Penetration" Interview & Performance on TV shop on July 13, 1970 

Artist: Flower Travellin' Band, 50 motorcycles and others
Album title: Beam Penetration and Mad Computer, plus the Minimal Sound of Motorcycles

=Regular Edition=
Format: 10-inch LP & CD
Catalog #: EMC-023/OP-0018

Expo 70, held in Osaka, was a pivotal event for the Japanese people and their relationship with the rest of the world, demonstrating both the nation’s ongoing economic recovery from World War Two and the creative spirit of Japanese society and its artists. The event gained international acclaim for its adventurous architectural design, visual art and electronic music. Some of Japan’s most renowned composers were involved, but also present were the now-legendary rockers, the Flower Travellin' Band. A series of performances, billed as “Night Events” were held at the Expo; the most radical of these was "Beam Penetration and Mad Computer, plus the Minimal Sound of Motorcycles”, but its anti-establishment feel and general madness took the Expo organizers by surprise and it was cancelled after only one night, despite being scheduled for a longer run. An air of myth developed around the event, but a recording of the event has been discovered and this release is the result. And what an event it was: a night-time sound-bomb with a fabled band, electronic sound and 50 motorcycles with horns blaring, spotlights, electronic billboards and a robot ― all flashing, roaring and howling at the night sky. This release comprises a CD, a 10-inch record with fold-out sleeve and large obi, plus fascinating notes in Japanese and English by Kenichi Yasuda, an expert on Japanese rock music, and Koji Kawasaki, a renowned researcher of Japanese electronic music, as well as rare photos. No download code/ticket available.

TRACKS:
CD “Beam Penetration” (full-length) [45:49]

10-inch (excerpts)
Side A “Beam Penetration” [14:52]
Side B “Beam Penetration” [15:15] 

Ever unpredictable, Drumm this time takes the fellow time-traveller through what sounds like an electronic field recording, a journey through an electronic soundscape of luminescent textures that invites immersive listening.

ルーマニア出身、フランスを拠点を拠点に活動した前衛的作曲家／音楽学者であり、〈Cramps Records〉の名シリーズ〈Nova Musicha〉にも傑作を残すCostin Miereanu。現在のミニマル～ニューエイジ再評価文脈においても密かに注目されるべき存在である同氏が自身のレーベルである〈Poly-Art〉に76年から82年にかけて残した幻の作品群が6枚組CDボックスセットとして〈Metaphon〉から奇跡の再登場！ジャーマン・エレクトロニクスを想起させるような外宇宙的憧憬を、現代音楽やミニマル・ミュージックの文脈でより親密かつ天上的に独自解釈した、幽玄なコズミック・ミニマル・アンビエントが満載。本当に素晴らしい逸品です。名匠Stephan Mathieuによるオリジナル・テープからリマスタリング仕様。28ページに及ぶブックレットが付属。この機会を絶対にお見逃し無く！

How do I know if my cat likes me? is the first offering from organists Ellen Arkbro and Hampus Lindwall with visual artist Hanne Lippard, an existential meditation on the empty expanses of our automated everyday. First developed during Arkbro and Lippard’s 2023 residency at La Becque in La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, the album satirizes, in prim deadpan, the stultifying aesthetics of corporate life, from hold music to online banking. How do I know if my cat likes me? extends the lineage of Roberts Ashley and Barry’s droll concept poetry, hammering at the sounds of language until they dislodge all signifieds through pleasurably numbing repetition. Listening to the record is like doing a Captcha over and over until all the characters fuzz to hieroglyphs, or finding yourself mired in a tautological customer-service argument—except that, after you dead-end at nonsense, you stumble into an unexpectedly transcendent beauty, where language flips from pure function to pure aesthetic, shimmering with possibility.

Even subtle ruptures in lyrical or musical patterns can trigger a fundamental shift in the world of the song. Throughout the record, strict formalism and minimalism beget narrative. “The long goodbye” imagines an excruciating dialogue between acquaintances who can’t politely disengage: “It’s my pleasure!” deadpans Lippard, who replies to herself, “Pleasure is all mine! / See you soon! / See you next time! / See you then!” Though the lines recycle the same few parting words, a mysterious causality accumulates in the minute variations, creating a narrative arc less for the characters of the song than for the listener, who might confront despair, nihilistic humor, or profound gratitude at the capacity of art to encompass any of this—not necessarily in that order. Elsewhere, as “Modern Spanking” free-associates its way from the phrase “online banking” toward “breathing down your neck banking” and “sexy but bankrupt banking,” a whole world of perfunctory pleasures comes into focus. While minimalist movements in music and visual art foster a certain situatedness of the view, “Modern Spanking” evokes the slick, frictionless minimalism of an upscale mall: a crowd of desultory passersby drifting between sex and money, fantasy and reality, scattered attention and intense distraction. In a world like this, the distinction between banking and spanking becomes negligible.

RIYL: Jacqueline Humbert and David Rosenboom, Robert Ashley, Robert Wyatt.

The first release to document the solo cello work of musician and composer Lucy Railton, the 40-minute composition Blue Veil recorded at Église du Saint-Esprit in Paris invites listeners into the realm of precision-tuned states of resonance: states made manifest through Railton’s careful traversal of her cello's most subtle acoustic characteristics as they harmonically interlock with mind’s embodied modalities of attention and imagination.
Blue Veil arises out of, is sustained in and finally dissolves back into Railton’s momentary presence with her intimate connection to the cello, a way of hearing that allows for a deeper engagement with harmonic resonance, one that opens a space for immediate encounters of mind and sound.
Railton’s exploratory practice of harmonic perception emerges from a focus on the physical qualities of intervallic and chordal sounds, their textural qualities, degrees of friction, and inner pulsations. Composing in the moment guided by resonances within the cello’s body, her own, and their shared vibrational space, Railton moves through Blue Veil by giving sounds what they ask for: sounds of pure texture manifesting as a move through temporal transparency, sounds of rough texture marking regions of dimensionally dense space.
Railton’s creative and highly refined use of just intonation harmony deforms sound's inner movements in ways that suggest a mode of listening that actively supplies imagery of sounds implied or completely absent rather than merely savouring those fully present. This active mode of “listening-with”, playfully and semi-metaphorically referred to by Railton as “sing-along music”, allows listening to reflexively participate in the music’s movement as it gradually passes through richly saturated domains of harmonic imagination. And just as the precision-tuned tones of Blue Veil lose their individuality when fusing multifaceted uniformity, listening’s structures of reference and recognition dissolve into nameless waves of intensity, continuously unfolding themselves upon and merging with the listener.
Blue Veil is the result of a deep exploration of the inner worlds of tuning, an undertaking in turn informed by and emerging out of Railton’s realisations of the music of Catherine Lamb and Ellen Arkbro, her collaborative work with Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley as well as her interpretive practice in performing the work of Maryanne Amacher, Morton Feldman and others. 

Aunes is a rare solo album from peripatetic Australian cellist-composer-performer Judith Hamann, presenting six pieces recorded across several years and countries. Developing the collage techniques and expanded sound palettes heard on their previous releases, Aunes makes use of synthesizers, organ, voice and location recordings alongside the dazzlingly pure, enveloping tones of Hamann’s cello. The record takes its name from an old French unit of measurement for fabric, varying around the country and from material to material. Unlike the platinum metre bar deposited in the National Archives after the Revolution as an immovable standard, an aune of silk differed from an aune of linen: the measure could not be separated from the material. In much the same way, in these six pieces—which Hamann thinks of as ‘songs’—formal aspects such as tuning, pacing, melodic shape and timbre are not abstractions applied universally to musical material but are inextricable from the instruments and sounds used, even from the places and communities in which the music was made.

Audible location sound embeds the music in its place of making, as in the delicate duet for church organ and wordless singing ‘schloss, night’, where shuffles and cluttering in the reverberant church space form a phantom accompaniment, gradually displaced by a uneasy shimmer of wavering tones from half-opened organ stops. ‘Casa Di Riposo, Gesu’ Redentore’ documents a walk up a hill to an outdoor mass in Chiusure, layering voices near and far with footsteps, insects and other incidental sounds. Like in the work of Moniek Darge or Luc Ferrari, location recordings are folded on themselves in space and time, their documentary function dislocated to dreamlike effect. On other pieces, it is the emphatic presence of the performing body that grounds the music, whether in the intimate fragility of Hamann’s softly sung and hummed vocal tones or the clothing that rustles across a microphone on the opening ‘by the line’. The idea of a music inextricable from its material conditions is perhaps most strikingly communicated on the album’s briefest piece ‘bruststärke (lung song)’, composed from layered whistling recorded while Hamann suffered through an asthma flare up, the results halfway between field recordings of an imaginary aviary and the audiopoems of Henri Chopin.

More than any of Hamann’s previous solo works, a strong melodic sensibility runs through Aunes, even when, like on ‘seventeen fabrics of measure’, the music hangs together by the merest thread. At other points, Hamann’s love of pop music is more obvious: the rich synth harmonies of ‘by the line’ could almost be a melting fragment of a backing track from Hounds of Love. The expansive closing piece ‘neither from nor toward’ exemplifies the highly personal musical language that Hamann has developed in recent years through constant solo performance (and a rigorous discipline of instrumental practice), pairing two overdubbed voices with the boundless depth and harmonic richness of just-intoned cello notes, calling up Ockegham or Linda Caitlin Smith in its elegiac slow motion arcs. Hamann’s most personal work yet, Aunes arrives in a striking sleeve reproducing a section of a painting made from sewn pieces of dyed wool by Wilder Alison, a friend and fellow resident at Akademie Schloss Solitude, one of the temporary homes where much of this music was recorded. <iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 340px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1362798960/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://shelterpress.bandcamp.com/album/aunes">Aunes by Judith Hamann</a></iframe>

Recorded in 1970 during the same period of "Overground", UNDERGROUND was recorded into 2 volumes (RT 104 and RT 16), both released in the same year in may and june at Dirmaphon studios, Roma. Together with Overground these records are really fascinating instrumental Free Jazzy/Psych Library, released with the auxiliary of historical Rai session musicians like guitarist Silvano Chimenti and organist Giorgio Carnini. This record collects all Underground' tracks in 1 LP. Established Jazz composer, Sandro Brugnolini written some among the greatest Italian soundtracks and Library music ever.

Yowzers is a new album by Chicago composer, improvisor, instrumentalist and musical folklorist Ben LaMar Gay. The twelve track collection is a leap forward in the lexicon of Gay’s recorded output, and a veritable masterwork of ancient inner-body rhythms and intuitive melodic storytelling.

It’s worth mentioning that a leap forward for Gay is no small feat. The musical ground he has covered in the last decade, both as a bandleader and collaborator, is immense. His de facto debut album—the 2018 compilation Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun—properly introduced the world to Gay by placing fifteen stylistically diverse tracks from seven then-unreleased albums next to one another, letting the populace outside of Cook County in on an unintentionally best-kept-secret that Chicagoans had already been marveling at for quite some time. That secret has become even more open in the years since, with the full unveiling of those seven previously-unreleased albums, the release of his critically-acclaimed 2021 song cycle Open Arms To Open Us, and the explosive free sonics of 2022’s Certain Reveries.

In addition to being featured on a staggering number of International Anthem releases (including albums by Makaya McCraven, jaimie branch, Damon Locks, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly), Gay is one of the most prolific collaborators in creative music today. He makes active contributions to Mike Reed’s Separatist Party, Joshua Abrams’s Natural Information Society, Theaster Gates’s Black Monks, and many more. He is also a long-time participant in Chicago’s legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Suffice to say, his credentials are astonishing and the scope of his interests and abilities is seemingly limitless, with Yowzers representing the latest redrawing of that ever-expanding creative borderline.

Much of the music on Yowzers features his working quartet with Tommaso Moretti (drums, percussion, voice), Matthew Davis (tuba, piano, bells, voice), and Will Faber (guitar, ngoni, bells, voice). But the unlisted feature here is Gay’s own ability to summon and unleash the unique strengths of his collaborators. The quartet material leans into a vocabulary that the group has developed over the course of several years together on the road; and the repertoire delivers an arresting cocktail of pulsing and free rhythms that somehow swing alongside a gathering of melodic phrases that sweep the outer-reaches of harmony with nostalgic echoes of family songs from the living room.

“Building a language, or taking a while to build a language—it’s like every other thing,” says Gay. “These stories are passed around through melody. You write a story and you share the story with individuals, and then you allow their individuality to embellish the story and take it on in another way. That person is a whole universe. It’s about trusting these people—trusting the people you leave something with, just like people trust their kids and their grandkids to carry a thing on. To not give it all away. To keep it in this tightly-knit body and to just keep it going.”

It’s not a new concept for Gay. One uniting factor in his deep, multi-faceted discography is a never-ending commitment to taking the stories of the past and pushing them outward, filtered through a sense of self, to keep that information moving.

Information moves through Yowzers via the intuitive physicality of Gay’s creative polyrhythmic constructions as he covertly delivers familiar folk tunes and tales. “It’s the most natural thing,” says Gay. “That’s how the world is. There are overlapping rhythms all around us, and so it reminds you of the reality of the world when you hear them. It’s a loop and the loop is always changing.”

Yowzers is ripe with the fine mash of that loop’s changes and diffusions, recalling the high-minded freedom of Liberation Music Orchestra, the abstract boom-bap balladry of Georgia Anne Muldrow, the unbridled rhythms and sandpaper bellows of Bukka White, the harmolodic cartoon glory of Arthur Blythe’s Illusions, or the oft-copped but rarely distilled patterns of Naná Vasconcelos. More amalgam than pendulum swing; a fresh thought made up of old ideas, like some imaginary Sacred Heart Ensemble led by Elvin Jones and Rashid Ali. It’s all there, filtered through an improvisational approach and a lifetime of stories and secrets embodied. For a man who has inhabited and traveled these continents so extensively, it’s safe to call this work true Americana, despite what that word might mean to the average white person in the United States.

“A big part of the language this quartet has developed is spatial,” says Gay. “It’s seeing and hearing it live.” Translating that language to a studio situation is a tough task, even for a seasoned crew. “You’re dealing with a thing that is older than the industry that sells it, and if you’ve never experienced those bodies in a room there can be a disconnect.” Striving to document the magic of those live moments, to great end, Gay chose to track the quartet pieces (“the glorification of small victories,” “there, inside the morning glory,” “I am (bells),” and “cumulus”) for Yowzers live, in real time, seated with his bandmates in a small circle at Palisade Studios in Chicago.

The spectrum of the album is widened by a batch of music created via Gay’s highly successful approach to composing in-studio, augmented with contributions from his bandmates, instrumentalist Rob Frye, and a mini-choir comprising vocalists Ayanna Woods, Tramaine Parker, and Ugochi Nwaogwugwu. This straying from the quartet material throughout the course of the record acts as an expansion of detail rather than an interruption of continuity.

All together, the pacing and flow of Yowzers is proof-positive of Gay’s practiced grasp on how the album format can traverse such a breadth of atmospheres. The titular album opener “yowzers” is a simple, soulful, three-chord piano and vocal repetition nestled in the hypnotically swelling effect of the Woods/Parker/Nwaogwugwu choir. The undecorated lyrics leave ample room for a listener to comprehend references to the binding existential crises of our times. It’s a Blues that everyone in the world should feel in their bones:

Ain’t gon snow no more x4

Rain gon pour and pour x4

Fire don’t stop no more x4

“for Breezy”, a could-be New Orleans dirge, straddles the deep sigh of a heavy sadness and the sweet lift of a fond look back, echoing the most contemplative moments of Duke Ellington’s small group arrangements. Gay’s clustered synth chording sets the scene while Frye’s breathy flute and Moretti’s delicate brushwork are positioned front-and-center along with a synthetic static—the nagging question of darkness even as beauty blooms. Gay’s flugelhorn enters at the 1:35 mark, maneuvering slowly around Frye and locking the vibe into place. It’s a gorgeous and fitting tribute to an old comrade.

“John, John Henry” begins with doomy oscillations and click-clack electronic rhythm loops hovering atop a contextually disjointed swing beat from Moretti. Enter Gay and his choir, digging into a take on the dusty-yet-timeless tale of man versus machine, an update we didn’t know we needed and an entrance we didn’t know we wanted. The way the group’s vocal rhythms hit here is a classic example of the Gay conundrum: an idea that reads as challenging on paper but sounds simple to the ear and feels intuitive to the body. With spectacles underfoot and charts out the window, the listener sings along, unencumbered by know-how. It’s all in service of Gay’s ongoing exploration and expansion of folklore in his work—arguably the one concept that bridges the gap between all of the disparate elements of his oeuvre.

This bottomless bag of tricks never induces fatigue, instead allowing for breaths and bites as needed—the quick-vibe banana peel windup of “rollerskates”; the endlessly psychedelic metallic rhythm chant of the album’s centerpiece “I am (bells)”; and the triumphant free-folk shouts of “the glorification of small victories,” which is a drastic and collaborative quartet rework of a composition originally recorded for Gay’s album Grapes that serves as further evidence of his steady crew’s interpretive powers.

How, though, does Gay end a collection that covers so much ground? The sweetest sendoff is often the one that sounds like a beginning. The album closer “leave some for you”—a balladeer’s kiss as the sun comes up—pairs a deeply disintegrated series of rhythmic loops with a diddley bow shuffle, ushered by the sturdy-yet-understated swing of Moretti’s kit. Gay’s sweetly intoned low-register lilt is front and center with an affirmation delivered as an earworm. The simple melody carries it home:

You look brand new today

Not cause you need it

Just cause you want it

New

This compilation introduces the sound pieces created by the Latin American experimental filmmakers and

is curated by the film artist Tetsuya Maruyama.

Tetsuya Maruyama

Born in 1983 in Yokohama, Japan and currently based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Graduated from the University at Buffalo's School of Architecture in 2007 and from the Visual Language Department of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's School of Fine Arts in 2024. His work spans film, text, performance, sound, ideas, and installation, without prioritizing any particular medium.

Maruyama’s practice is rooted in re-contextualizing ordinary elements and textures, presenting them as ephemeral records of everyday observations. As an independent programmer and researcher, he has curated screenings of Brazilian experimental cinema across the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, and Canada. He is also the founder of Megalab, an artist-run film lab based in Rio de Janeiro. His works are distributed by Light Cone, a nonprofit organization dedicated to experimental cinema in Paris.

Artist bio:

Ж

Ж (São Paulo, 198-) film-designer, programmer, educator & editor

Has a non-specialised and situated practice that explores the energetic, material,economic, political, and emotional cycles of (semio)capitalism. His work uses various strategies, materials, and media to reveal how these forces shape perception,memory, and subjectivity, especially in the context of our current ecological crisis.

His artistic propositions have taken the form of films, video installations, counter-spaces, writings, performances, and public space interventions, all aimed at reintegrating artistic practice into specific social and political contexts.

John Melo:

Visual artist, designer, and teacher of audiovisual arts. Graduated from the MAE (Master's in Technology and Aesthetics of Electronic Arts) at the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), Argentina. Interested in the relationship between arts, technology, ancestry, and transdisciplinary and experimental work. Studies non-linearity in artistic creation processes, poetic thinking, magical thinking, spirituality, and political and social actions, with a deep interest in pedagogy. Their work combines creative languages such as installation, sculpture, illustration, writing, sound, and video primarily. Previously a tutor in the training program for self-taught artists at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá (MAMBO PFA)

In 2022, founded SEPAE (Seminar of Editing and Experimental Audiovisual Thinking). Also involved in"Colectivo Tal Cosa," a transdisciplinary project combining biology, sound

exploration, intuition, and non-linear thinking in creative processes. A member of "2 horas de diferencia coletivo," a space connecting Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia for projects that conceptually link the three territories. Part of the art collective "Blanco Conejo" in Bogotá, aiming to share, promote, and experiment with contemporary

modes of creation.

Rodrigo Faustini:

Rodrigo Faustini is a Brazilian artist and researcher, based in São Paulo/ Campinas. His practice focuses on mediation, materiality and noise in audiovisual forms. His work has been exhibited at Centro Cultural Kirchner, Images Festival, Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Annecy international animation festival, Vienna Shorts, Festival de Cine de la Habana, and others.

Francisco Álvarez Ríos:

Francisco Álvarez Ríos (1991 - Ecuador) is a filmmaker, curator, archivist, and visual and sound artist. He currently serves as the director and curator of the Festival Internacional de Cine Contemporáneo Cámara Lúcida

As a filmmaker, he explores reality and its escapes, focusing on the demystification of the image beyond the literal recording of the real. His current practice delves into moving images, sound interpretation, film installation, and performance film—practices that coexist and interact within the less-defined territory of the contemporary expanded cinema.

Martín Baus:

Multimedia artist, filmmaker, musician, researcher and teacher. My artistic practice investigates the relationships between history, materialism and perception, converging my interest in the political dimensions of listening, the reappropriation of archives, and the procedures of translation between materialities such as celluloid,sound and text. I’m a member of CEIS8, a collective for experimentation with film formats and photochemical processes based in Santiago de Chile, and co-director along with Andrés Baus, of the independent record label Radio Fome, which releases improvisation-based music and sound pieces. I’m interested in aurality as a tool for a radical pedagogy from Latin America, as well as methodology for artistic and practice-based research.

I enjoy engaging with the sonic realm from non-audible or non-sonorous approaches, therefore, I’ve done poetry books related to listening and wording, text installations that engage with opaque language translation procedures, publications around the links between salsa rhythms, migration and working-class struggles, and fictional writings that speculate on the future of sound archives and digital archeology.

Lucía Malandro:

Lucía Malandro is a renowned Uruguayan filmmaker dedicated to the preservation and restoration of cinematic and photographic heritage.

A graduate of the Escuela de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, with a specialization in Documentary Directing, she continued her studies with a master’s degree at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. As the founder of the Archivistas Salvajes collective, Malandro has taken initiative to rescue a little-known legacy: Cuba’s underground cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, a clandestine movement that emerged on Havana’s rooftops in response to official restrictions.

Since 2019, she has directed several short films focused on the reuse and revaluation of cinematic and photographic archives, earning recognition at prestigious international festivals. Additionally, she has contributed as a film critic to various publications, including the official newspaper of the San Sebastián Film Festival in 2023.

Malandro has worked on the restoration of archives at the Cinemateca Portuguesa and has contributed to research and archival projects such as Piezas Cinéticas and Vanguardia Scópica, collaborating with institutions like Gordailua, the Basque Film

Ivonne Sheen Mogollón:

My projects are developed as experimental audiovisual, photographic and sound works, publications, texts, curatorial work and organization of cultural initiatives. From a personal and critical voice, I explore questions and reinterpretations about my surroundings, structures, archive images, my family history and the hegemonic learning that we assimilate. I am interested in self-management and the collective creation of spaces and experiences. I currently live in between Cologne, Germany, and Lima, Peru. My film Animal Within co-directed with Rebeca Alvan has been showcased in different platforms and festivals in Latin America, Europe and the USA. I am co founder of Taller Helios and associate collaborator of Isole_islas.

Javier Plano:

Javier Plano is an artist and university professor that works and lives in Buenos Aires. He has a college degree in Electronic Arts from UNTREF, where since 2014 he has been teaching courses about time based media and audiovisual performance arts. He’s currently doing a master’s degree in Sound Art at UNTREF. In 2007, he begins to produce video works and installations, participating in various festivals and exhibitions organized by institutions locally and abroad. He has received numerous distinctions for his works, among others an honorable mention in the MAMbA / Fundación Telefónica Award for Arts and New Technologies, the 3rd prize in the UNTREF award to the Electronics Arts, and three different honorable mentions at the National Salon of Visual Arts. On 2016, he has his first solo exhibition, titled "Test Patterns", in the MACLA (La Plata, Argentina). That same year he attends an artistic residence program on Signal Culture (NY, USA), with a scholarship granted by the Department of Cultural Affairs of Argentina. In 2019, he does his first solo exhibition in Buenos Aires at the Eduardo Sívori Museum, and wins a Scholarship of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes to develop a new project.

Pablo Mazzolo:

Pablo Mazzolo (Argentina) is a filmmaker and educator born in Buenos Aires in 1976. He works exclusively in analogue film formats exploring the optical and chemical properties of the medium, with a particular focus on human and natural landscapes. His work has tackled themes such as indigenous sovereignty, the spectre of military dictatorship, extinction and environmental catastrophe.

He received an MFA from the University of Buenos Aires (2001). His films, including Diego La Silla (2000), Oaxaca Tohoku (2011), El Quilpo sueña cataratas (2012), Fotooxidación (2013), and Ceniza Verde (2019), have been widely exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Melbourne International Film Festival, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Block Museum of Art, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Brooklyn Museum, The Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, TIFF Wavelength, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Punto de Vista Festival, Frontera Sur International Non-Fiction Festival, Museo Tamayo, Valdivia International Film Festival, FAMU International, The Latin American Museum of Art Buenos Aires, Chicago Underground Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, The Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film, (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico, and Cinemateca Madrid, among many others.

His film Conjectures (2013) won Grand Prize, Media City Film Festival (2013); Fish Point (2015) was awarded the Kodak Cinematic Vision Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival (2016); and Cineza Verda (2019) was awarded Grand Prize, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (2019). Mazzolo is Professor at the National University of Quilmes, works as a freelance documentary film editor, and teaches workshops on visual perception and image creation to young people living with autism. He lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Rosana Cacciotore:

Experimental filmmaker, documentary filmmaker, photographer, teacher, and

audiovisual researcher. Graduated in social communication with a master's and a PhD degree (thesis defense) in literary theory from UFSC/BR. She has taught film and visual poetics courses, had films screened in national and international festivals, and participated as a debater, curator, judge, and reviewer in festivals, shows, and film notices. She has a book and articles published.

In experimental work, I usually make the sound myself; I think it is part of the creation process. About sound in these works, I assume sound is an image that produces meaning (or sensation) as a sign independent of the image.

This is the third volume of the Space Program's Space Elements series. In this series, each volume features guests and is focused on a compositional function. The Space Program is a long-term project launched in 2004, for performing music with a post-free jazz mind-set but using strange sounds from electronic instruments. Playing physically, the body is involved in making decisions. The Space Program is about articulating silence and sound, structuring musical flow on experimental instruments with a simple and clear sonic identity.

All these instruments are different but have a few things in common. The first is that they don't have a conventional interface, which means that for all of them i have to find out what they do and develop technique to play them. The second is that none of them respond accurately to performing action. So there's always a live tension between an accurate decision and its somewhat unpredictable outcome. I meant to play music technically free from any school and teachings, but beyond that i also wanted the music somehow to escape my own self, playing instruments with a sort of life of their own, never allowing complete control and making any repetition virtually impossible. Space Elements Vol. III by Rafael Toral

破壊と創造的対話。孤独と絶望を経た魂の歌声。1967年から69年にかけて、アヴァンギャルド・ジャズの革新者Albert Aylerは名門〈Impulse! Records〉に一連のアルバムを録音。1967年にリリースされたこのアルバム『In Greenwich Village』は、アイラーにとって同レーベルからの最初のLPとなった作品であり、間違いなくこのレーベルでのベストと言える内容に仕上げられています。

On composing Tom Phillips' Irma
In February and March of 1977, for Brian Eno’s Obscure Records, I made a version of Irma. The following notes on the piece arise out of that involvement and try to show how the piece can be made into a performance state.
Irma is a curious score – it is printed on a single sheet 50cms x 50cms. The notation consists of fragments from Tom’s continuing treatment of the victorian novel by W. H. Mallock, which he calls A Humument, and utilises those short verbal fragments that refer to either ‘‘libretto’’, ‘‘decor and mise-en-scène’’ or ‘‘sounds’’. These 3 categories are arranged in separate sections on the square sheet with, at the bottom, a line of stave notation. At first sight it looks like a piece of indeterminate music – clearly there has to be some preparatory work done before it is performable and no-one would venture to perform directly from the score - but if it is approached in this spirit, like realising a piece by John Cage or Morton Feldman written during the 1950’s, the sounding results are either largely of a documentary
interest, or rely entirely on the gifted performer to make into a coherent sounding whole. True, one could say the same thing for a piece by Cage, such as Variations I, but there the
performer is given a number of precise parameters of sound within which he should work, whereas Irma needs to be re-composed rather than realised.
If the distinction between ‘‘composing’’ and ‘‘realising’’ is overlooked, and if only the materials present in the notation are used, then the result is likely to be impoverished and it is clear that, looked at in isolation as a self-contained work, the score is notationally very thin. So one either produces an impoverished piece of sounding music, or one takes the responsibility to look further. Tom does not say explicitly that one must go beyond Irma into the rest of his work, but he does say that one has to go outside the piece. On the score he writes: ‘‘Perhaps to treat the indications here given as if they were the only surviving fragments of an ancient opera, or fragments of eye and ear witnesses’ accounts of such, and given no knowledge of performance tradition of the time, to reconstruct a hypothetical whole which would accommodate them economically, would be an appropriate basis of approach to a production.’’ So, try to put it back together and try to fill in all the gaps between these fragments. This approach, which, incidentally coincides with an interest in such procedures within my own work, seems to be the most suitable. If the ‘‘composer’’ uses the sorts of methods that Tom evidently uses in producing pictures, in making A Humument (of which Irma is a part), and if he uses the notations of Irma as clues to lead him into whatever area seems likely to yield rich results, then a much more satisfactory outcome is likely – satisfactory both in terms of the quality of the sounding material and in terms of consistency with the rest of Tom’s oeuvre.
There are clearly many ways in which the various fragments of verbal notation can be used. One fruitful way was to take each of the fragments as the notes of, say, a critic at the only performance of the work (in a hypothetical past), perhaps jotted down on the back of an envelope (then torn into fragments in a rage, or through frustration at some element in the piece? Make the piece inadequate in some way?!). These elements, then, would have been memorable for some reason or other, or used as an aide-memoire to recall something else (even something outside the work). The elements could have occurred at evenly-spaced intervals throughout the performance, they may have all been featured in some way (loudly, as solos), they may have been the worst parts (being retained to damn the piece in a subsequent review, since lost or never written – the composer got wind of the review and murdered the critic, retaining the fragments as the only link with the crime. . .). On the other hand they could be used as discrete musical units quite separate from the main body of the work, which has to be looked for elsewhere. Whatever solution, or combination of solutions, is found it is evident that the composer and librettist are more or less obliged to move outside the work itself i.e. outside the printed score. (One of the original ideas I had, which was not very practical, was to see if I could use another opera called Irma. A possibility was one written by H. J. Banawitz first performed in 1885, which would have had the right period in terms of the connection with the W. H. Mallock original. This seems to have had few performances, perhaps only one, and seems to have disappeared. I thought of looking for the manuscript, treating it in the same way as Tom had treated the Mallock novel, and making a sort of ‘‘musical Humument’’ out of it. While that seemed to have some intellectual sympathy with Tom's work, it might not have sounded anything like an opera, and it did seem to me that one of the notions of Irma is that it is conventional to some degree. Indeed, while much of Tom’s musical work lies within the field of experimental music and graphic notation, his musical taste is conservative, and the greater part of the musical references in the main body of his work are to past, and historically respectable, composers like Brahms, Mozart, Fux, Scarlatti and so on.)
The sources that were used, then, in making the piece apart from the score itself involved the following. I obtained the volumes of A Humument and noted all connection with music, with the role of Irma, and with the possible narrative; I looked at all the prints of Ein Deutsches Requiem after Brahms, which use elements from the Humument and refer directly to a musical work; I went through the catalogue of Tom’s work (Works. Texts to 1974); I went through Trailer, which uses the Humument, in fact a spin off from the main work; I went through all the other pieces of music that he has written to see if they could be used in any way; and I checked as many paintings/prints that I could which had a direct or indirect connection with either A Humument, Irma or with music. The painting The Quest for Irma (1973) which shows her in back view looking out to sea gave much information. It is the only portrait of her and she appears even here as anonymous, or rather, faceless. It gives a marine setting for the work (though since at least two pieces of music that I have written deal, to some degree, with marine incidents it might be argued that I might have been better off avoiding such a reference, but it is very blatant). She is looking out to sea from the Dorset coast and this attitude seems to be characteristic of her behaviour: ‘‘I tell you. . . that’s Irma herself. . . watching the waves fall. . . repeating certain sorts of verse. . .’’ So here we have an elusive heroine, obsessively watching the sea off the Dorset coast, given to repetition. Further checks within the Humument revealed a spate of marine references: ‘‘boat of dreams. . . lost on rocks’’; ‘‘the sad horizon of sea, hours she spent with her sadness on the beach’’; ‘‘see, see, the things. . . the things from the changed sea’’; ‘‘a cruise in an opium clipper’’; ‘‘marine engines and boilers’’; ‘‘ten years’ travel and sport in foreign lands’’; ‘‘a certain light flashed. . . among the eastern clouds’’; ‘‘sinking lights. . .’’ and so on. On the other hand, she is not in mourning since she wears a bright red dress.
One page of A Humument is almost a summary of the feeling of Irma and is certainly one that I tried to emulate. ‘‘. . . The whole history of it is so vague. . . eagerly, gradually the words that I heard I put aside as an opera, an insufficient one; still organ for what – me, me. . . I can’t quite tell. hardly books. . . it was the libretto of the music, of the music – I can’t tell. . . I can’t tell - but all was for the same thing to capture in drawing, and to express in music, thought and study. . . the loss. . . the least important. . . moon I myself am myself in search of an object for love? way? Yes and no – enter myself. . . associating me and me. It made me within me some mystery. . .’’
Other pages give more precise information about particular sounds, rhythms, timbres and so on. The instrumentation was, to a large extent, governed by the references to musical instruments that I found in all these sources. ‘‘Tube’’ suggested tuba. The piano is mentioned
many times, especially in connection with John Tilbury. The gong is specified – ‘‘suddenly a gong in series’’ – which also gave me the whole of a short percussion interlude between the second and third sections of the work. Strings were suggested by a phrase ‘‘the history viola’’ occurring in A Humument and this gave me a reason to feature the viola in some way, in fact using it in unison with the female voice, identifying the viola with the title of the opera. The fact of having strings is such a convention of normal orchestral scoring that it would really have needed a positive clue to the contrary to have excluded them, bearing in mind the relationship of the piece to musical convention.
I used the tuned percussion, and especially metallic instruments, from certain onomatopaeic syllables, like ‘‘ting’’, ‘‘ping’’, ‘‘ding’’ which I had originally considered using as a chorus of instrumental imitations, but decided ultimately to use the instruments themselves.
Two of the prints from Ein Deutsches Requiem after Brahms gave me a great deal of material for the second section of the opera, a slow duet between the two main characters. Print number 5 shows a number of parasols, both closed and open, and has the legend ‘‘. . . a sound was given up’’ taken from A Humument. That particular picture suggested itself since there is, within both the score of Irma and within the published Humument a fragment which reads ‘‘the first parasol sound’’, with the addition, in Irma, of ‘‘f, f’’ indicating loud. From the text of the Requiem printed on the picture, I could find the precise section of music in the
Brahms original which consists of a solo for trombone (in the score I use baritone horn for its greater flexibility and ease of pitching, but it uses the same range, and has the added advantage of resembling the French Horn, an instrument more closely associated with noble operatic melodies.). The ‘‘parasol sound’’, then, indicated that I should use that particular instrument. What it plays came from another source, from the score of Irma. which gives ‘‘quiet, high, intonation divine. . .’’ and ‘‘. . . drops the tone . . . various phrases. . .’’ all of which enabled me to have that particular instrument playing, with "divine intonation’’, a long melodic line consisting of a descending stepwise chromatic scale from top E down an octave, but very elongated. The other use of the Requiem was for the other half of the slow section, and used the following print, number 6, which refers to a sequence of rather chromatic chords in the original which I used as fragments, like the Irma score, inserting chords of my own between groups of those by Brahms to make a new sequence. So the whole of the second section uses references to the Brahms Requiem – in the first half to the harmonic content (vertical), in the second half to the melodic line (horizontal).
The last section of the piece, a chorus ‘‘Love is help, mate’’ uses a page of A Humument that is dedicated to Morton Feldman, though the actual results bear no relation to Feldman's music as such. What I did with that page was to look through some of Feldman's music to see if there was anything in it that was consistent with the way that I was approaching the score of Irma. It occurred to me to use a vocal piece for something that would be vocal within Irma and since Tom had dedicated another page to Christian Wolff – in fact a page of Trailer – and since Wolff and Feldman were close associates with Cage in the 1950’s, I used a piece called Christian Wolff in Cambridge (in spite of the fact that Tom had attended Oxford, and the Cambridge here refers to Harvard). This is a wordless choral piece which is hummed – and I used a lot of humming in the score, often as a means of separating discrete images – and consists of mildly dissonant chords. There were, however, one or two more consonant ones and I omitted those which sounded like ‘‘modern music’’, and so was left with one or two chords that I used, along with others interjected to produce a smooth flow, as the accompaniment to the melody of ‘‘Love is help mate’’. The addition of other chords was necessary because of the static quality of Feldman’s piece in which each chord is an isolated entity, and this mirrored what I was doing, on a larger scale, with the whole of Irma; taking isolated fragments and finding ways of reassembling them into a continuous whole. It could be said that I was doing to Feldman what Tom had done to Mallock since each of us extracted from a body of material what was needed for a particular circumstance, though my extraction was a good deal more cursory.
The melody that this accompanies comes from a number of sources. One of these is the stave notation and references to specific notes on Irma itself – about 60% of the notes in the melody – the rest being added by myself. One of the ideas for this came from Eric Sams’ researches into the ciphers in Schumann's music, and in particular from the fact that he originally found a clue to the cipher by finding 5-note melodic phrases in which the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes were C-A-A (Schumann’s wife was called CLARA) and this gave the possibility of finding what L and R became in the musical code, and thence other possible letters. Using this notion, using the notes given by Irma, and inserting between them other notes, the melodic lines are composed by myself but taking as a starting point the notation of Irma. The stave notation at the bottom of the score I found more usable in this way, and also as bass-lines, in transposition, rather than as originally given.
There are, obviously, some very direct references in the score, and it is the presence of these that ensure a very eclectic result: references like ‘‘the Ring’’, ‘‘the Emperor’’, ‘‘the International’’. The first of these, allied to a notation that refers to many ‘‘s’s’’ (German for E flat) suggested the opening of the Rheingold. The second, ‘‘Emperor’’, could have been a number of references – the ‘‘Emperor’’ Waltz (Strauss), the ‘‘Emperor’’ Concerto (Beethoven), the ‘‘Emperor’’ Quartet (Haydn) and so on. In the event I used the last two, and toyed with the idea of using the source for Haydn’s ‘‘Emperor’’ Quartet viz. his ‘‘Emperor Hymn’’ which became the Austrian national anthem, and which was, in its turn taken from a Croatian folk tune. I considered omitting all the musical references and only using the words of this latter ‘‘Vjutro rano se ja stanem Mal pred zorom’’ – and relished the fact that I would have been injecting something with precise semantic value, though one which I did not understand, but in the end omitted it for reasons of pronunciation difficulty. With ‘‘the International’’, I was delighted that it was misspelt (Internationale) and this made of it a lipogram (like the Ellery Queen story that omits the letter ‘‘t’’) and so I quoted the music leaving out the note ‘‘e’’. I had also considered the idea of the lipogram in another context. The original of A Humument is the Victorian novel A Human Document which leaves behind the letters AN DOC, and this gives a lipogrammatic anagram of NO ADC, that is, to avoid the notes A D and C in the piece as a whole. This seemed to be excessive, however, since it would have effectively ruled out one of the two vowels available in musical cryptography, and they are not easy to come by.

THE COMPOSERS NOTES ON THE WORKS

The Machines, which date from the period 1967-1972 represent a departure from the more traditionally “narrative” nature of the rest of my pieces. I use the word Machine to define a consistent process governing a series of musical actions within a particular sound world and, by extension, the listener’s perception thereof. One might thus regard the Welsh Rarebit as a Machine in which a process is applied to the conditioning and perception of the world of bread and cheese.

Autumn Countdown Machine presents the guaranteed dis-simultaneity of six pairs of bass melody instruments, each conducted by a percussionist playing in time with, and making minor adjustments to the setting of a bell-metronome.

Son of Gothic Chord presents four keyboard players’ mobilisation of a sequential chord progression rising through the span of an octave.

Jews Harp Machine presents various permutations of the articulations “Ging, Gang, Gong,Gung, Ho!”

Drinking and Hooting Machine presents some observations on the world of bottles and their non-percussive musical potential. The effect of this piece has been compared to that of a large aviary full of owls all practising very slow descending scales.

John White, March 1976

THE SQUIRREL AND THE RICKETTY RACKETTY BRIDGE

The piece, for one player of two guitars, was written at the request of Derek Bailey, the jazz guitarist, in 1971. I had worked closely with Bailey from 1963-6 in and around Sheffield as a member of a group which included Tony Oxley on drums and myself on double-bass. Since that time, I have lost all interest in jazz, and in improvisation, and since Bailey was involved in both I wrote a piece which uses a technique which Bailey would be unlikely to have evolved in his playing. The two guitars are played simultaneously, each one lying flat on its back, and they are arranged side by side so that the two fingerboards can be played with the fingers hammering down on them, like two keyboards. In addition, the score contains a number of ironic references to jazz and to its critical literature - short texts added to the ‘musical’ notations, somewhat in the spirit of Erik Satie, involving the performer in a hypothetical dialogue with the composer using fragments culled from particularly banal pieces of jazz criticism e.g. “ ‘there is an area up here’, holding his hand above his head, palm down,’ where musical categories do not exist.’ ”. The left hand of the player moves at an even pulse, like the walking jazz bass, at a tempo “between Lady is a Tramp” as a medium bounce, and Cherokee as an embarrassment to lesser, and more intrepid, musicians”, while the right hand punctuates this with short notes, like a highly selective, or extremely lazy, trumpet soloist. The title involves an oblique pun to do with the nut of the guitar, the guitar’s bridge, the faint noise of the music in between – that each attack gives two pitches rather than one – and an English children’s song about Billy Goat Gruff.
Derek Bailey recorded the piece on Incus Records in 1971, and this new version is a multiple one, four players on eight guitars, in which each player uses a pair of guitars which are characteristically different from those used by the others.

Gavin Bryars (1971)