MUSIC

Morning Trip & Yoga Records are proud to finally reveal one of the ultimate lost masterworks of new age music: Alice Damon’s Windsong. Gently propelled by Damon's haunting breath-of-life vocal winds reminiscent of Joan La Barbara underscored by field recordings and Damon's fretless bass sound calling to mind mid-70 Joni Mitchell, Windsong is traveling music, for the roads or for the skies. Instantly moving, it conjures vistas both romantically familiar and cosmically mysterious — waterfalls and wind, the voice of the earth, as heard through heavenly prisms. Damon attended college in Massachusetts, where she formed and fronted the all-female garage band called The Moppets in the late 60s. The band began to garner national attention, but Damon moved instead to the wilds of northern Vermont to homestead and raise a family. In 1981 or thereabouts she was able to gain use of an early Sony digital home recorder, and created her masterwork, Windsong. But Damon waited until 1990 to release a packaged version of this album, now titled "Windsong II", and sent samples to regional distributors like Vermont’s fabled Silo-Alcazar, where a copy of the album was first discovered, but little evidence exists of a proper commercial release. Alice Damon passed on in 2011 and remained essentially unknown until the landmark I Am The Center: Private Issue New Age In America 1950-1990 first revealed her genius to a wider audience two years later. Now, just in time for the recording's 40th anniversary, Alice Damon's Windsong may at last be heard as one of the most singular, moving and profound examples of new age music's psychedelic essence. Morning Trip & Yoga Records proudly present Windsong.

Rudra is Shiva, the Absolute Truth. It is truly music for meditation. Heir to one of the most important musical lineages in the North Indian classical=Hindustani musical tradition, the great man who contributed to the revival of Rudra Veena as a solo concert instrument, more widely known by its release than the Ideologic Organ sponsored by Stephen O'Malley His latest studio recording, made on January 6, 2020 at Studio Swarkul in Mumbai, India, is the latest in a long line of works by Mohi Bahauddin Dagar, the son of Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, who has unearthed much of the Italian avant-garde music of recent years. Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Maurice Mogard.

The NetCast improvisation with Reynols (Miguel Tomasin, drums; guitarist Robeto Conlazo, guitarist Anla Courtis) Monique Buzzarté - trombone and Kevin McCoy-computer processing is my first International collaboration in this form. So far I have been involved in several multi-site improvisation NetCasts in the USA only. Through Pauline Oliveros Foundation I am interested in helping in the evolution of the INTERNET as an international venue where diverse collaborators can engage with one another. I met Reynols as a group in Buenos Aires a few years ago when I was leading a Deep Listening Workshop. I was impressed with this group when they played a serenade for me on my departure. All were playing brass instruments that they had never played before. It was clear that they understood and negotiated the element of risk in the kind of improvisation that I value. Reynols also has communicated with me since the workshop in many ways. I love the feedback and connection. My solo concert given at the National Library in Buenos Aires is remixed and released as the limited edition CD with hand painted covers Pauline Oliveros in the Arms of Reynols. How wonderful it is to be embraced by young people of South America.

“Gyropedie,” Anne Guthrie’s third record for Students of Decay, takes us further into their hermetic practice, wherein expertly captured field recordings, French horn, and electronics are woven into potent and richly imagined electroacoustic environments. In Guthrie’s own words, “Quite literally a record of pilgrimage from East to West. Remnants of Midwest and East Coast soundmarks, instruments sold to lighten the travel load, sketched out and then buried under the new. Winter birds and crunching snow, frozen playgrounds, broken synths - I spent a year decoupaging over this, but of course it's still there. A second moon appears occasionally in the daytime, and there are frequent, murky transmissions. California has something alien about it I'm still trying to grasp. Primarily vintage, unabashed, corny, I find myself becoming an impressionist.”

Anne Guthrie is an acoustician, composer, and French horn player. They studied music composition and english at the University of Iowa and architectural acoustics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where they completed their Ph.D in 2014. Their music combines their knowledge of acoustics and contemporary composition/improvisation. Her electronic music has focused on exploiting the natural acoustic phenomena of unique architectural spaces through minimal processing of field recordings. Their composition has focused on the orchestration of non-musical sounds, speech in particular. Their French horn playing has focused on electronic processing and extended techniques used in improvisatory settings, as a soloist and with Fraufraulein and Delicate Sen, among others. Their acoustics research has focused on the use of ambisonics for stage acoustics.

Mekonium is Michael Anklin’s solo debut. He is a drummer, electronic musician and producer living in Switzerland. To expand his sound spectrum, he uses field recordings, analog synthesizer, tape machines, as well as self-constructed instruments and sound objects. His sound is characterized by prepared acoustic drums, various objects and sound manipulations. Anklin collaborates with artists such as Dim Grimm, Kilchhofer, Janiv Oron and Wordcolour. He is one of the founding members of the open structured band «UFO» and the science-fiction ritual band «Liebeslied». He produces music for theater, dance and sound installations. Inspired by the pureness of ritual and traditional music, Mekonium sounds like a documentation of a fictional ceremony. Topics such as temporal consciousness, minimalism and anti-virtuosity as well as sounds barely perceptible by our auditory system influenced the production process Drones, soundscapes and slowly morphing repetitive patterns establish a state of time. To represent the concept of reduction, each track starts off with a single instrument or sounding object on which the composition slowly started to grow. Like grapes fermented into wine, acoustic sounds developed into different sound manipulations, still preserving the „taste“ of the original sound sources. The Tracks „Exon“ and „Zymosis“ contain a musical deconstruction of Lucas Rössner’s bassoon. Sounds from the Instrument were dissected with different types of microphones and rejoined into a collage. Hagneck, a hydroelectric powerplant next to Lake Biel was stocked with a number of contact microphones resulting in a huge powerful drone which built the fundament of the track. Mekonium deals with the feeling, condition and dilation of time. Musical fragments are played simultaneously at different speed, acoustic sounds were frozen, deformed, stretched and rearranged.

Af Ursin, a project of Timo Van Luijk, who also works with Andrew Chalk in the units Elodie and Mirror, and organizer of La Scie Dorée, released this work in 2017. The work is a masterpiece in which his worldview is deployed without regret, with improvisations that gradually build up heat with an unobtrusive yet drone-like energy, and sound works that have the feel of In Camera/Mirror. The natural analog soundtrack further enhances the perfection of the piece.

Three introspective instrumental compositions for English horn, flute, percussion, double bass, Hammond organ. Performed, recorded and mixed by Timo van Luijk at Kulta Saha, 2010-2012. Remastered May 2020.

Pauline Oliveros's The Wanderer is available on LP for the first time since it was originally released in 1984. Cut at Golden and pressed at RTI for maximum fidelity. An utterly essential document of early American minimalism from Pauline Oliveros. The Wanderer is the sister record to Accordion & Voice (IMPREC 140LP). "The Wanderer" is based on a single modal scale (B C# D D# E F# G#) and rhythmic modes based on a meter consisting of ¾ and ⅜. Part I, "Song", is intended to explore the unique resonant qualities of accordion reeds through long sounds. Subtle variations come about from differences in tuning and air pressure. Part II, "Dance", demonstrates the sharp accenting power of the accordion bellows in a mixture of cross-rhythms characteristic of jigs, reels, batucadas, Bulgars, klezmer forms, Cajun dances, and music of other diverse cultures. The Wanderer was composed in November, 1982 especially for the Springfield Accordion Orchestra, directed by Sam Falcetti. This recording documents The Wanderer's world premiere, as it was performed January 27, 1983 at Marymount Manhattan Theatre. The orchestra consists of twenty accordions, two bass accordions, and five percussionists, with Pauline Oliveros as soloist, Sam Falcetti conducting. "Horse Sings From Cloud", written in 1975, is one of Oliveros' best known works. Like most of her Sonic Meditations, it can be performed vocally and/or instrumentally, solo or in collaboration. A solo version of "Horse Sings From Cloud" has been recorded on Accordion & Voice. An early version of the score reads, "Sustain a tone or sound until any desire to change it disappears. When there is no longer any desire to change the tone or sound, then change it." This time, "Horse Sings From Cloud" is performed in ensemble. Joining Pauline Oliveros on bandoneon are Heloise Gold on Harmonium, Julia Haines on accordion, and Linda Montano on concertina. This quartet version incorporates the microtonal differences in tuning of the selected instruments, creating shimmering reed sounds somewhat similar to the shimmering of a Balinese gamelan.

Pauline Oliveros' Accordion & Voice is available on LP for the first time since it was originally released in 1982. Cut at Golden and pressed at RTI for maximum fidelity. Pauline Oliveros was an electronic music pioneer, accordionist, composer and educator who resided in Kingston, New York. Her instrument was tuned in Just Intonation and she often included it in her meditative improvisational music. Her music is not meditative in the sense that it is intended for listening to while meditating, rather each piece is a form of meditation, such as her aptly titled Sonic Meditations. A central figure in post-war electronic art music, Oliveros is one of the original members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (along with Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Terry Riley, and Anthony Martin), which was the resource on the US West coast for electronic music during the 1960s. The Center later moved to Mills College, where she was its first director, and is now called the Center for Contemporary Music. Oliveros often improvises with the Expanded Instrument System, an electronic signal processing system she designed, in her performances and recordings.

"Accordion & Voice was the first of my recordings as a soloist. I was living in an A-frame house in a meadow just below Mount Tremper at Zen Mountain Center. I had a wonderful view of the graceful saddle mountain top. When away on a performance trip I would imagine the mountain as I played 'Rattlesnake Mountain'. I followed the feelings and sensations of my many experiences of the mountain -- the changing colors of the season, the breezes and winds blowing through the grasses and trees. 'Horse Sings From Cloud' taught me to listen to the depth of a tone and to have patience. Rather than initiating musical impulses of motion, melody and harmony I wanted to hear the subtlety of a tone taking space and time to develop. The tones linger and resonate in the body, mind, instrument and performance space. My thanks to Important Records for bringing these pieces to be heard again." --Pauline Oliveros, 2007

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Deep Listening, Important Records offer a definitive double-LP combining the classic, complete original 1989 release with selected tracks from the Deep Listening Band's 1991 album, The Ready Made Boomerang. Recorded in a cistern, this double-LP reverberates with brilliant sonic clarity and masterfully improvised performances combining live electronics, vocals, trombone. and accordion. Deep Listening is a classic in the fields of improvisation, minimalism, ambient/drone, and modern classical. Listen with attentiveness, listen while lying down, listen with headphones -- as recording engineer Al Swanson entices the listener to become a virtual performer in selecting the many different ways to perceive these phenomenal tracks. Whatever you do, listen deeply. Packaged in a gatefold sleeve with original and updated recollections from the performers, the engineer, and a mesostic from John Cage, to whom these recordings are inextricably linked.

This work "The Apointed Cloud" was developed in 1987 as a large-scale sound installation, and despite being positioned as a representative work of Yoshi Wada, his activities are , It has never been reported to Japan.
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.