Avant-Garde / Contemporary
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Included here are a variety of pipe organ-style instruments, large-scale self-made instruments that combine huge metal plates and junk materials, in addition to installations that vibrate and be beaten under computer control. It is a live performance that announces the opening of the exhibition of works in which the artist participated. This is a very different content from the installation that was open to the public, and it is a one-time performance on November 8, 1987, which was handed down only by the invited guests who experienced this performance at that time and was half legendary.
Bagpipes by Yoshi Wada and other improvisational field artists, percussionist Michael Pagres, who co-starred with David Tudor and others at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performance, and computer programs were created. At the same time, David Reina assisted the electronic sound in the performance of La Monte Young.
The contact between electronic sound and live instrumental sound, and the contact of the moment 'now'.
Contacte means contact. It is the contact between the electronic sound and the live player (instrumental sound), and also the contact of each moment of what Stockhausen calls the 'instant form'.
Regarding the 'momentary form,' Stockhausen said in a late-night music program on West German Radio in Cologne on January 12, 1961: "In recent years, a lot of music has been composed that is far from a form with a dramatic finale. There are no climaxes, no signs of climaxes, and no stages of development in these works. Rather, they suddenly and violently build up and try to maintain the 'peak' until the end of the work. It is always at a maximum or minimum, and the listener cannot predict how the piece will progress. It is not a moment that is part of a passage, nor is it a part of a constant duration. The concentration on the 'now' creates a vertical line that breaks the horizontal concept of time and leads us to the timeless..."
As the listener listens to the booming sounds coming from various directions, dark noises, percussion instruments, piano sounds, etc., the listener is freed from this world dominated by time flowing inexorably, and has a very dense and mysterious musical experience.
There are two versions of "Contacte": one for electronic sounds only, and the other for electronic instruments, piano, and percussion.
One of the most striking documents of Italy’s Minimalist movement, Giusto Pio’s "Motore Immobile" is a masterwork with few equivalents. Produced by Franco Battiato in 1979, at the outset of a long and fruitful period of collaboration between the two composers, and issued by the legendary Cramps Records, its triumphs were met by silence, before falling from view.
Emerging on vinyl for the first time since it’s original pressing, "Motore Immobile" now sits within a reappraisal of a large neglected body of efforts made by the Italian avant-garde during the second half of the 1970’s and early 80’s. It is singular, but not alone. It resonates within a collective world of shimmering sound, one familiar to fans of Battiato, Lino Capra Vaccina, Luciano Cilio, Roberto Cacciapaglia, Francesco Messina and Raul Lovisoni.
An exercise in elegant restraint - note and resonance held to the most implicit need. Where everything between root and embellishment has been stripped away. A sublime organ drone, against interventions of deceptively simple structural complexity - executed by Piano, Violin, and Voice. A sonic sculpture reaching heights which few have touched. A thing of beauty and an album as perfect as they come. The reemergence of Motore Immobile heralds what is unquestionably one of the most important reissues of the year.
Side A: Motore immobile 16:59
Organ: Danilo Lorenzini, Michele Fedrigotti
Violin: Giusto Pio
Voice: Martin Kleist
Side B: Ananta 13:58
Organ: Danilo Lorenzini
Piano: Michele Fedrigotti
From Scratch is a development of a performance group organized by Phil Dudson, who learned from the far-left musician Cornelius Cardew, as the New Zealand branch of the Scratch Orchestra in the 1970s. They are known around the world for their combative custom instruments, and Ryuichi Sakamoto became a percussion instrument unit at a glance, and he visited Japan twice.
The work that can be said to be their true value is this difficult song "Gung Ho 1,2,3D", which features hocking in which the performers beat different beats individually, and the ultimate polyrhythm with accurate repetitive rhythm is a masterpiece. The sound is mechanical and inorganic in terms of characters, but the overtone-covered mundane sounds generated from the vinyl chloride tube and the slight error caused by human performance become organic components and create a mysterious ecstasy.
In this work, the original recording of 1981, which was performed in the most complicated 8,9,10 and 9,10,11 time signatures of "Gung Ho 1,2,3D", is the first, and the current three artists in Japan and abroad: Goat (M2) led by YPY Koshiro Hino / Don't DJ (M3), a German genius / Utena Kobayashi (M4), who is currently active in DAN, Tokumaru Shugo, etc. Contains a total of 4 works. All the performances are based on the score, but the interpretations of the four are completely different, and despite the fairly advanced performance, it has a pop appearance due to the repetitive rhythm.
+ CD version: Japanese / English commentary / normal jewel case / booklet included
From Scratch is a development of a performance group organized by Phil Dudson, who learned from the far-left musician Cornelius Cardew, as the New Zealand branch of the Scratch Orchestra in the 1970s. They are known around the world for their combative custom instruments, and Ryuichi Sakamoto became a percussion instrument unit at a glance, and he visited Japan twice.
The work that can be said to be their true value is this difficult song "Gung Ho 1,2,3D", which features hocking in which the performers beat different beats individually, and the ultimate polyrhythm with accurate repetitive rhythm is a masterpiece. The sound is mechanical and inorganic in terms of characters, but the overtone-covered mundane sounds generated from the vinyl chloride tube and the slight error caused by human performance become organic components and create a mysterious ecstasy.
In this work, the original recording of 1981, which was performed in the most complicated 8,9,10 and 9,10,11 time signatures of "Gung Ho 1,2,3D", is the first, and the current three artists in Japan and abroad: Goat (M2) led by YPY Koshiro Hino / Don't DJ (M3), a German genius / Utena Kobayashi (M4), who is currently active in DAN, Tokumaru Shugo, etc. Contains a total of 4 works. All the performances are based on the score, but the interpretations of the four are completely different, and despite the fairly advanced performance, it has a pop appearance due to the repetitive rhythm.
+ CD version: Japanese / English commentary / normal jewel case / booklet included
The title nods to a 16th-century study of magnetism, and it is magnetism that is at the heart of this release, with Takuji Naka's cassette decks and Tim Olive's magnetic pickups, across five untitled tracks, initiating a dream-logic-imbued semi-narrative flow, in which "out of date" low-tech sound sources are at the service of an ears-forward compositional sensibility.
The use of pliable metals, analog electronics and a battered spring reverb unit, along with the inherent instability of cassettes, results in an atmosphere of subdued unease, over-the-horizon mystery and a burnished, melancholy beauty. Perhaps it is a bit of a stretch to link Naka's career as a temple gardener in Kyoto and Olive's relatively recent involvement in film with the music's austerely organic and eerily cinematic aspects, but there you have it. Recorded in the mountains in the north of Kyoto in 2013, the CD has a strong sense of place, but as befitting magnetism's play of opposites, that sense of place shifts and flickers; time ebbs and returns; the light grows dim.
CD digipak release, with liner notes in Japanese and English by musicologist/writer/composer Wakao Yu.
In October 1962 John Cage and his great interpreter/co-visionary David Tudor visited Japan, performing seven concerts and exposing listeners to new musical worlds. This legendary "John Cage Shock", as it was dubbed by the critic Hidekazu Yoshida, is the source of this series of releases, three CDs and a "best hits" double LP compilation. Recorded primarily at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo on October 24, 1962 (with two performances from October 17 at Mido-Kaikan in Osaka), all recordings in this series are previously unreleased. A major historical trove, unearthed. The performances on this tour featured Cage and Tudor with some noteworthy Japanese musicians playing pieces by Cage and a number of other composers. Volume 1 begins with Toru Takemitsu's Corona for Pianists (1962), played by Tudor and Yuji Takahashi, an indeterminate piece scored using transparencies, a sign of Cage's influence on younger Japanese composers of the era. Following this is Duo for Violinist and Pianist (1961) by Christian Wolff, written specifically for David Tudor and violinist Kenji Kobayashi. The final piece, a near-twenty-minute realization of Variations II (1961), is a rare example of the rougher side of Cage, work that presaged much of the live electronic music and noise of the following decades, an aspect of his oeuvre which is woefully under-represented on CD. Cage and Tudor, using well-amplified contact microphones on a piano, deliver an electrifying performance, alternating distorted stretches of harsh 60s reality with bountiful silences. Volume 2 lifts off with a fiery example of Tudor's piano virtuosity, his mastery of dynamics well evident in a performance of Klavierstück X (1961) by Karlheinz Stockhausen. The titular shock of this series is delivered even more forcefully with the next piece, Cage's 26'55.988" for 2 Pianists and a String Player (1961), which was first performed the year before in Darmstadt by Tudor and Kobayashi, a combination of two of Cage's solo pieces. The performance here, from Osaka, has a slightly altered title and the composition becomes a seismic quartet with the addition of Toshi Ichiyanagi and Yoko Ono, with the four performers providing acutely-angled blasts of sound. The final CD of the series features Cage's 0'00" (1962), also referred to as 4'33" No.2, performed by the composer, with daily activities such as writing and drinking coffee amplified by contact microphones into sonic abstraction, following the score's directions: "with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action". Next is Composition II for 2 Pianos (1960/61) by Michael von Biel, lovely and sparse, performed by Tudor and Ichiyanagi. The disc closes with Ichiyanagi's Piano Music #7 (1961), performed also by Tudor and Ichiyanagi, beds of silence disrupted by pianistic stabs, music box madness, traffic recordings, percussive thumps, tape manipulations and more. The "John Cage Shock" series features truly historical recordings, all previously unreleased, of compositions by an amazing roster of international composers. The intensity of these performances by Cage, Tudor, Ichiyanagi, Kobayashi, Ono and Takahashi has remained hidden and unheard for half a century, but remains undiminished. These three CDs, as well as the special double LP (including a vinyl only bonus track), feature rare photos plus Japanese and English liner notes.