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Anton Bruhin - Rotomotor / InOut (LP)Anton Bruhin - Rotomotor / InOut (LP)
Anton Bruhin - Rotomotor / InOut (LP)Alga Marghen
¥3,162
InOut, a masterpiece for tuning whistle, mouthharps, flutes, toy and party gag instruments, percussion, bells, electric razor, model ship engine with propeller, birdcall whistles, CH-Phon, feedback speaker-microphone, siren, double shawm, falling down spoon, jew’s harp (only two short notes), tearing scotch tape from the spool, ocarina, hair dryer and other noise makers plus occasionally radio tuner was recorded in Zurich between May 17th and May 22nd, 1981, on a Sanyo M7300L stereo radio cassette recorder with both integrated and external microphone. The recorder is in the recording standby position, both RECORD and PAUSE buttons are pushed. Then Bruhin sings or plays a tone into the microphone. During this tone he releases the PAUSE button by pushing it. Subsequently he presses the PAUSE button again within a fraction of a second. Now the first short note is recorded. In InOut thousands of very short notes were added this way, like a patchwork, like an acoustic quilt with geometric irregularities and varied patterns. Rotomotor, subtitled “ein motorische Idiotikon”, is a 28 minutes long reading representing one of Bruhin's major works. Written in Zurich between 1976 and 1977, then recorded in August 1978 at Etienne Conod’s Sunrise Studio. Rotomotor is a poetic Idiotikon of the swiss-german dialect where, instead of the straight alphabetical order, the words are organized according to the similarities of their letters (each word differ from the previous one by just one letter). For this reading a delay equipment which repeated the signal after 0.6 seconds was used and each word is superimposed to the echo of the preceding one. On one hand this echo generates the rhythm of the performance, on the other it supports the acoustic metamorphosis of the words. Again, a very simple concept perfectly accomplished.
Walter Marchetti - Antibarbarus (2LP)
Walter Marchetti - Antibarbarus (2LP)Alga Marghen
¥4,796

A reissue of Antibarbarus, issued as a compact disc in 1998, was the first edition Walter Marchetti released on Alga Marghen. The Antibarbarus cycle of five pieces makes use of original tapes coming from the same recording sessions that originated some of Marchetti's major musical works realized in the '80s, collected in his two CDs: 1989's Vandalia (NMN 076-4CD/NMN 083-5LP) and 1984's Per La Sete Dell'orecchio (NMN 083-3LP). This former series of works presented some homogeneous and untouched sound sources in the "concrete" status of their inner - and necessarily chaotic - level of entropy. Nevertheless this operative and only in appearance "neutral" premise introduces an implicit mimetic transposition. This link between the "iconic" threshold of the acoustical material and its transposition literally deconstructs the prerogatives and the ideological categories of music composition. In Antibarbarus, the temporal continuum restores the mimesis of the phenomenal regression of musical time, crystallized in a framed-length which gets estranged from subjective domain. But the transfiguration of sound sources now deliberately intends to de-signify the analytical prerogatives of hearing. The sensorial perception is in such a way inhibited from an immediate comprehension of the acoustic reality so reproduced: canis reversus ad vomitum suum. In the late 1950s, Marchetti was able both to formalize a more critical aim towards the established lingua franca and absolutist ideology of musical avant-gardism and to expand the sense of artistic praxis, in line with an ethical and subtly political evaluation of aesthetic experience. Marchetti was inspired by Cage's poetics of indeterminacy and subsequently created, through a close and indissoluble association with Juan Hidalgo and José Luis Castillejo, an original and de-ritualized form of action-music which led in 1964 to the birth of ZAJ group. Marchetti's work relays, in its procedural level, upon a resolute de-functioning of the musical codes and impose this act as a reversed mimesis of the methodological statute of music composing. Namely, not a "degré zero de l'écriture", but its "reversal"; not a "denial of style", but "style of denial". In this perspective, Walter Marchetti's oeuvre condenses one of the rare examples of aesthetic radicalism consciously extended to music poetics. Comes in full color gatefold sleeve; Includes printed inner sleeves (with photos of "Musica da camera n. 182", London, Raven Row, 1989/2011 and "Music in secca", Milano, Fondazione Mudima, 2003); Liner notes by Gabriele Bonomo in English and Italian.

Manuel Calvo - El Artilugio (LP)Manuel Calvo - El Artilugio (LP)
Manuel Calvo - El Artilugio (LP)Alga Marghen
¥4,375
Building upon a standing commitment to the work of artists who worked in international obscurity under the shadow of 1960s and '70s fascist Spain, Alga Marghen returns with "El Artilugio”, a never before issued body of work by Manuel Calvo. Bridging the contexts of installation, sound art, sound poetry, and experimental music / noise, its stunning two sides - issued in a limited edition of 200 copies on vinyl, housed in a gatefold sleeve with an accompanying large format 8-page booklet with in-depth liner notes by musicologist Gabriele Bonomo - open a visionary creative universe, too long hidden by the history's weight. Edition of 200 in gatefold sleeve, also includes a large format 8-page booklet. ** Over their decades of activity, the Italian imprint, Alga Marghen, has illuminated a near countless number of historical artefacts at the juncture of visual art, experimental music and avant-garde deployments of language, helping to radically reshape our understanding of 20th Century creative practice. Embedded within their ever-growing discography lies a small window, via releases by Zaj members Walter Marchetti, José Luis Castillejo and Juan Hidalgo, into the avant-garde happening occurring in Spain during the '60s and '70s, while the country lay under the final decades of fascist rule. Now, Alga opens access to this radical world with El Artilugio, a stunning LP of previously unavailable sonic art by multidisciplinary artist, Manuel Calvo, created in 1966. Creatively thrilling and existing outside the larger historical vision of experimental practice occourring in Europe during that decade, its stunning sounds are issued on vinyl in a gatefold sleeve, accompanied by a large format 8-page booklet with in-depth liner notes by musicologist Gabriele Bonomo, in an edition of 200 copies. As important as world-premiere releases come. Born in 1934, during the 1950s and '60s Manuel Calvo emerged as a forerunner and a protagonist of geometric abstract painting in Spain, working against the odds attempting freely expression within the context of fascist rule in Spain that had taken hold during the early years of his life. During his early career, he was closely aligned with groups like Equipo 57 and Grupo Parpallo, artists who were active around Valencia and held strong connections to the rest of Europe, developing the principles of an analytical art in opposition to the main currents of informal art and lyrical abstraction. This restless questioning increased to more radical tendencies in his work, a period spent in Paris and then Brazil, before returning to Spain in 1966 where he fell into contact with artists like Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti, who had founded the Zaj group in Madrid in 1964, and begun creating some of the most subversive means of aesthetic communication encountered during that period. Calvo’s new phase of radicalism, embarked upon between 1966 and 1967, centered around the transformation of his studio into a laboratory where he could hold a permanent exhibition of his works, opening it to the public with no temporal limits, in the hope to reverse the standing perceptions of what an exhibition was. Within this space, Calvo created El artilugio, a participatory installation where the effects of light variations were randomly activated through simple buttons by the audience, opening the potential for open structures of unlimited possibilities for random variation. In addition to this, through a process similar to that applied to the light, Calvo introduced a reel-to-reel recording machine and a pre-recorded magnetic tape as a sonic element, recording the parasitic noises of an old electric engine that were then introduced into the installation via the reel-to-reel. It is this sound component of the installation that makes up Alga Marghen’s incredible LP, El artilugio, opening long overdue access to this singular creative world. El artilugio comprise two side long tracks. The first encounters the brilliant, randomized sonic universe that accompanied the installation of the same name, appearing somewhere between sound collage - split and juxtaposed by the participant’s push-button activated manipulation - and a microscopic journey across the surface and generative possibilities of the machine whose sounds it captures, rattling, clicking, scratching, droning, and buzzing as it goes, before fading out in a glissando after nearly half an hour. As a fascinating juxtaposition, the second side of El artilugio features the performance of an Austrian soprano singer reading out phonems, alliterations of single words, tongue twisters, and texts in different languages, repeated obsessively into states of abstraction that offers a stunning counterpoint to other forms of sound poetry being created during this period across the globe. Issued in a vinyl edition of 200 copies, in a gatefold sleeve that also includes a large format 8-page booklet, with El artilugio Alga Marghen has offered yet another triumphant window into the incredible world of singular artists working against the odds within fascist Spain, expanding their long-standing commitment to illuminating under-celebrated artefacts from the 20th Century, and changing history as they go. Absolutely incredible, and a must for any fan of sound art, sound poetry, and experimental music at large.
Milan Knizak - Aktual Univerzita Feat Opening Performance Orchestra (CD)
Milan Knizak - Aktual Univerzita Feat Opening Performance Orchestra (CD)Sub Rosa
¥2,587
Milan Knízak canonical text Aktual University, dating from 1967, contains ten short lectures outlining the university's character -- On Conflict, On Dreams, On Revolutions, On Love, On Belief, On Art, etc. These lectures were to serve as inspirational schemes for lectures, seminars and discussions held at an ideal university. In the first piece, Aktual University, Milan Knízak reads his own text, with Opening Performance Orchestra providing the musical accompaniment. It was performed live in October 2019 at the Movement-Sound-Space festival in Opava, where this recording was made. The second track, titled "Broken Suite", is a studio remix, in which Opening Performance Orchestra used fragments and quotations from Milan Knizák's compositions, conceived over the past fifty years, applying the "broken" method. The majority of them are made public for the very first time in the newly created "Broken Suite". The booklet features English translations of ten Aktual University lectures, as well as Milan Knizak's contemporary initiation text. Includes 12-page booklet.
Denis Dufour - Complete Acousmatic Works, Vol. 1 (16CD BOX)
Denis Dufour - Complete Acousmatic Works, Vol. 1 (16CD BOX)Kairos
¥7,966
A first box set containing 16 CDs, presenting more than 40 works and 18 hours of listening, including never released before music by Denis Dufour and texts in a detailed booklet (Fr/Eng/Ger). With his morphological and expressive approach to sound, Denis Dufour works on pieces in a constant state of renewal and on ideas that are specific to each piece. This results to a work looking like a large fresco in which no theme sounds alike, containing varied and breathtaking soundscapes and a patchwork of sounds, thoughts and colors that enable us to appreciate the sheer imagination as well as the consistence of his style. By deliberately but effortlessly opening his music to all sounds, Denis Dufour works with liberty, independence, rigor, and craftsmanship so refined that makes one forget oneself. Every second of sound is wrapped by a conscious ear so that so that his work contains no trace of automatic tools. Composer, teacher, researcher, director of label and festival, Denis Dufour, has greatly contributed to the development of acousmatic art in the world during forty years. First volume of the integral of his acousmatic work, this boxset regroups 44 works of Denis Dufour, composed between 1977 and 2020. Each one of the 16 discs is conceived as a listening program, which provides to listeners an immense landscape. The second volume is expected in 2022, and his instrumental work is under publication as well.
Tony Conrad - Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain (2LP)
Tony Conrad - Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain (2LP)Superior Viaduct
¥3,634
Pitchfork gave it a "9.0" and called it "Best New Reissue"! Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain is the quintessential work of artist / filmmaker / composer Tony Conrad. Comprised of both film installation and minimalist score for amplified strings, Ten Years leaps across genre and medium to connect his revolutionary structural filmmaking with the experiments in long-duration sound that Conrad had begun in the 1960s as part of the Theatre of Eternal Music. "Ten Years began with image before sound," writes Andrew Lampert, "a row of quadruple projections arranged side-by-side, all the shuffling stripes cascading into each other. Over the next two hours the music throbbed and the projectors incrementally shifted inwards, their beams gradually uniting to form one pulsating, overlapping picture." For its 1972 premiere at New York's The Kitchen, Ten Years included Conrad on violin as well as Rhys Chatham and Laurie Spiegel performing on instruments of the composer's own making. Chatham played the Long String Drone – a 6-foot long strip of wood with bass strings, electric pickup, tuning keys, tape, rubber band and metal hardware – while Spiegel carried out an arrhythmic bass pulse throughout. Superior Viaduct is honored to present this previously unreleased recording of Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain's breathtaking premier performance. As Chatham recounts in the liner notes, "When I first listened to this recording after not hearing it for over 40 years, it transported me back to the early Kitchen and the heyday of early minimalism, played outside the Dream Syndicate."

Chris Watson & Georgia Rodgers - Notes From The Forest Floor/Line Of Parts (LP)
Chris Watson & Georgia Rodgers - Notes From The Forest Floor/Line Of Parts (LP)SN Variations
¥2,853

A split sided album on clear vinyl with Chris Watson and Georgia Rodgers, pairing two artists whose works here show different but complementary new forms in the use of field recording in composition. Both were originally multi-channel installations before the release of these stereo versions.

Notes From The Forest Floor was originally premiered in a different form in July 2015 at the ICA as part of an evenings event dedicated to the work of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi. It was recorded in La Selva tropical rain forest reserve in Costa Rica.

Line Of Parts was originally premiered at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2019 as part of the Huddersfield Professional Development Programme for Female Composers of Electronic Music project. It was recorded in the Cairngorms and North London.
artwork by Chris Bigg
photography by Chris Watson/Georgia Rodgers

Roland Kayn - Scanning (10CD BOX)Roland Kayn - Scanning (10CD BOX)
Roland Kayn - Scanning (10CD BOX)Reiger Records Reeks
¥12,327

A hitherto-unreleased electronic masterpiece from Roland Kayn, singular pioneer of cybernetic music.

Over a period spanning the late 70s through the early 80s, Kayn (1933–2011) issued a quintet of extended works that quietly but definitively redrew the map of electronic music. Informed by cybernetics and a desire to actualise analogue circuitry as an agency in the compositional process, this music adopted a form that can only be described as oceanic, as side after side of vinyl allowed a wholly new vocabulary of electronic sound to find its shape.

In the decades that followed, these multi-LP boxed-set releases became hallowed documents of contemporary music (as well as highly prized collectors’ items). Kayn’s initially subtle influence belied a gradual shift towards the widespread adoption of his ideas and practices in the 21st century, incorporating both the rise in popularity of modular synthesis as a music-making tool, and the huge advancements in machine learning and AI.

Following the recent reissue of ‘Simultan’ (1977) and the first-time release of late work ‘A Little Electronic Milky Way of Sound’ (2009), it was clear that a new generation of listeners and musicians were eager to discover Kayn’s vision in all its vastness.

Kayn's own label, Reiger Records Reeks, has been reawakened by his daughter Ilse, and her long-cherished dream of releasing this music is now finally a reality. Across 10 CDs of immersive audio, expertly remastered by Kayn aficionado Jim O’Rourke, listeners are now finally able to digest Kayn's little-known masterpiece, and to inhabit sonic territory that has waited unspoilt for decades.
 

Jurg Frey - Circles And Landscapes (CD)
Jurg Frey - Circles And Landscapes (CD)Another Timbre
¥1,978

“Jürg Frey is inextricably tied to the group of Wandelweiser composers and musicians, and like that group, his music continues to elude easy categorization. The last year has been a particularly fruitful one, revealing extensions to his compositional approach. There was the release of the two-disc set Grizzana and other pieces 2009-2014 for small ensemble on the Another Timbre label as well as his residency at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, featuring multiple performances of his pieces. Two other releases, Circles and Landscapes and String Quartet No. 3 / Unhörbare Zeit deserve special focus as each represents the continued development of Frey’s compositional sensibilities.

Circles and Landscapes features a program of solo piano pieces performed by Philip Thomas, one of the preeminent interpreters of contemporary piano compositions as well as an accomplished improviser. Pitch relationships have always been central to Frey’s compositions, and in these pieces, composed over the last five years (with the exception of the opening “In Memorium Cornelius Cardew” from 1993) the harmonic underpinnings are even more pivotal to the structural foundations. In an interview on the Another Timbre site, Frey states, “I'm looking to find a confidence in chords, dyads and single notes, and I hope that accordingly they will resonate with confidence. This applies to every material, whether stones or a piano, but with the piano it seems to be more challenging because of the clarity of the material and how the instrument itself suggests it should be used.” The opening “In Memorium Cornelius Cardew” moves with slow assurance back and forth between low register intervals and a resonant chord, pausing midway to progress to a deliberately paced, falling phrase which pools in darkly voiced chords. Three pieces from the “Circular Music” series, composed a decade later, distill that concentration on intervals and resonance with poised consideration. Here, the notes and harmonies are allowed to sit. It is not about motion or development, but rather about simply letting the sounds unfold across the duration of the piece.

Frey has stated about his music, “A sequence of notes is most composers' starting point. And it's where I stop. Not that I cease to do anything at all; sometimes it takes a bit more, sometimes a bit less. There are so many traps, so many ways of destroying the sequence, because people think it needs a little compositional help ... More important is the relation of the material to elapsing time.” Listen to the half-hour reading of “Pianist, Alone (2),” and one hears these elemental building blocks accrue with a steadfast forbearance. Thomas places each phrase and chord-set evenly across the duration of the piece and the music advances with an unwavering beauty bereft of any standard notion of melody or harmonic progression. “Extended Circular Music No. 9,” composed over 2014 and 2015 layers in even more brooding consonance over its half-hour course. Yet even here, the music proceeds with notes and chords sounding alone with a sense of succession rather than melodic or harmonic progression.

Frey’s string quartets, particularly “Striechquartett II,” are some of his most absorbing pieces, particularly as performed by Montreal-based Quatuor Bozzini. In these pieces, the composer makes potent use of the microtonal nuances of the string instruments to elicit fragile, almost vocalized voicings of his poised harmonic structures. Where his second string quartet created a diaphanous scrim of sound, on “String Quartet No. 3,” he opens things up, introducing a spaciousness to the deft voicings. The members of the quartet are completely synched in to Frey’s strategies, fully embodying the tonal structures into a singular sound. Frey writes about this piece, “Elemental materials and constructions are thereby perceived as a sensation, and mindfulness consists in hanging these sensations in balance before they have arrived at the limitations of expressiveness.” And it is the way that the quartet hangs at the edges of expressiveness, letting the sensations of the notes and harmonies play out without investing them with dramatic expression. It is this equanimity and stability that allows the piece to play out in a totally absorbing way.

“Unhörbare Zeit” (inaudible times) adds two percussionists to the mx and here the structure opens up even more. The durations of silence are as central to the piece as the sounds of strings and the low rumbles of percussion. Frey states that he is working with “audible and inaudible durations that appear partly simultaneously and partly consecutively. They give the piece lucidity and transparency, as well as materiality and solidity.” While silence as a structural element has been fully absorbed into the vocabulary of contemporary composition, it is the way that Frey gives the silences weight and dimension within this piece that really stands out. The balance of the timbre of strings, low register percussion, the rustle of room sounds and the mercurial pacing of sound and silence is fully entrancing.”
–Michael Rosenstein, Point of Departure

“A few months ago I noticed the change in Jürg Frey’s music in recent years, when discussing two contrasting but very fine albums of his earlier and later music. A similar impression was made by the concert of his 2nd and 3rd string quartets by the Quatuor Bozzini in Huddersfield last November: that Frey is moving away from ideas and towards music. Frey has long been associated with the Wandelweiser collective, but his recent music has been compromising the “purity” Wandelweiser’s reverence for silence. With this supposed loss of aesthetic purity, Frey has embraced a purity of sound.

After releasing the quietly beautiful Grizzana album, Another Timbre released a CD of Philip Thomas playing Frey’s recent piano music at the end of last year. I previously wrote of his third string quartet that Frey was joining Morton Feldman as a fellow master of non-functional harmony, adapting some of the more rhetorical elements of classical and romantic music, but piecemeal, on his own terms and his own ends. In this piano music, most of it composed between 2010 and 2014, there is a similar sense of exploration, without any perceived goal, to that found in Feldman’s “middle period” before he discovered the tenuous equilibrium found in repeating patterns.

At that time, Feldman was also moving away from abstraction and responding to the need to create melodies (“big Puccini-like melodies”). An interview on the Another Timbre website shows Frey seeking a common solace in a material understanding of music, and in negotiating the paradoxes that arise when wanting to compose without disturbing the music’s material.

When composing for the piano, the notion of harmony is more prominent – although we know all the (lovely) extended techniques that have been developed for the piano, to make it sound unlike a piano. But yes, the piano remains the instrument to represent harmony…. When I write for piano, I shouldn’t rely on the piano itself, but on the composition. The piano gives single notes, dyads and chords too easily. Also, if I write consonant dyads, it could suddenly sound wrong, ironic, like a quotation rather than the real sound. In this context to compose means to build a basic confidence in the clear and restricted material that you are working with.

The shorter pieces have a meditative quality, alternating between pedal tones and chords. The longer pieces take on a resemblance to a journey through a succession of musical terrains. Sometimes progress is slow, tentative, with long periods stranded in one particular harmony or register, before unexpectedly moving on. It becomes clear that the journey is its own destination. If there is a structure underneath it all, Frey does his best to conceal or disrupt it or render it irrelevant to the listener.

The album begins with a much older piece, the brief In Memoriam Cornelius Cardew from 1993, with a tonal palette that anticipates the later works. Has Frey allowed a space for emotional expression in his new music, however abstracted? It’s interesting that when philosophy is raised in the interview, he demurs but admits that he feels “a closeness” to Deleuze and Spinoza, two Western thinkers who tried to reason without a dichotomy between mind and body.

The piano is close-miked on this CD, focussing on the grain of the instrument’s sounds. Thomas’ playing is softly-spoken but full-voiced – well suited to the quiet but indomitable character marking out a trail through an empty expanse, as in the longest piece on the album. It’s titled Pianist, Alone (2); a title which seems nakedly descriptive at first but takes on a narrative aspect after hearing it. This time, the protagonist is a little more experienced.”
Ben Harper, Boring Like a Drill

Jurg Frey - Collection Gustave Roud (2CD)
Jurg Frey - Collection Gustave Roud (2CD)Another Timbre
¥2,987

A double CD with five beautiful pieces that engage with the work of the extraordinary French-Swiss poet Gustave Roud. Performers include Dante Boon, Stefan Thut, Andrew McIntosh and Jürg Frey himself.
“I think my process of work is similar to Roud’s: roaming with my sketchbook, taking a movement here, adding some notes there, following an impression, writing a little melody or a rhythmic constellation, deepening a feeling, extending a pitch, waiting and letting it happen…”
Interview with Jürg Frey

Disc One:
1 Paysage pour Gustave Roud (2007 / 2008) 14:25
Jürg Frey clarinet, Stefan Thut cello, Dante Boon piano
2 Haut-Jorat (2009) 7:51
Andrew McIntosh violin, Jürg Frey clarinet, Dante Boon piano
3 La présence, les silences (2013-2016) 41:07 Dante Boon piano

Disc Two:
1 Farblose Wolken, Glück, Wind (2009-2011) 48:10
Regula Konrad soprano, Stephen Altoft trumpet, Stefan Thut cello, Lee Ferguson percussion
2 Ombre si fragile (2007 / 2008 /2010) 15:09
Andrew McIntosh violin, Stefan Thut cello, Dante Boon piano

A double CD with five beautiful pieces that engage with the work of the extraordinary French-Swiss poet Gustave Roud. Performers include Dante Boon, Stefan Thut, Andrew McIntosh and Jürg Frey himself. “I think my process of work is similar to Roud’s: roaming with my sketchbook, taking a movement here, adding some notes there, following an impression, writing a little melody or a rhythmic constellation, deepening a feeling, extending a pitch, waiting and letting it happen…” Interview with Jürg Frey Disc One: 1 Paysage pour Gustave Roud (2007 / 2008) 14:25 Jürg Frey clarinet, Stefan Thut cello, Dante Boon piano 2 Haut-Jorat (2009) 7:51 Andrew McIntosh violin, Jürg Frey clarinet, Dante Boon piano 3 La présence, les silences (2013-2016) 41:07 Dante Boon piano Disc Two: 1 Farblose Wolken, Glück, Wind (2009-2011) 48:10 Regula Konrad soprano, Stephen Altoft trumpet, Stefan Thut cello, Lee Ferguson percussion 2 Ombre si fragile (2007 / 2008 /2010) 15:09 Andrew McIntosh violin, Stefan Thut cello, Dante Boon piano
Marcel Duchamp - The Entire Musical Work Of Marcel Duchamp (LP)
Marcel Duchamp - The Entire Musical Work Of Marcel Duchamp (LP)Song Cycle Records
¥2,156

Another legendary album which was issued on LP by Multhipla label, "The Entire Musical Work of " Marcel Duchamp realized by Petr Kotik and S.E.M Ensemble. Work planned and composed in 1913, based on chance operation. Recorded 7 May, 1976. B2 is a track for player piano, recorded in Buffalo, New York on a Steinway player piano.
In the turbulent years from 1912 to 1915, Marcel Duchamp worked with musical ideas. He composed two works of music and a conceptual piece -- a note suggesting a musical happening. Of the two compositions, one is for three voices and the other combines a piece for a mechanical instrument with a description of the compositional system.
Although Marcel Duchamp's musical oeuvre is sparse, these pieces represent a radical departure from anything done up until that time. Duchamp anticipated with his music something that then became apparent in the visual arts, especially in the Dada Movement: the arts are here for all to create, not just for skilled professionals. Duchamp's lack of musical training could have only enhanced his exploration in compositions. His pieces are completely independent of the prevailing musical scene around 1913
"Song Cycle Records present a reissue of The Entire Musical Work Of Marcel Duchamp, originally released by Multhipla Records in 1976. The Entire Musical Work Of Marcel Duchamp is a collection of experimental pieces composed in 1913 by the legendary artist, and executed by Petr Kotik and the S.E.M. Ensemble in 1976. Employing chance operations and non-musical sounds, Marcel Duchamp's musical oeuvre predated some radical concepts developed forty years later by John Cage. Presented here on 180 gram vinyl." label press

David Rosenboom - Brainwave Music = 脳波の音楽 (2LP)David Rosenboom - Brainwave Music = 脳波の音楽 (2LP)
David Rosenboom - Brainwave Music = 脳波の音楽 (2LP)Black Truffle
¥3,697

Black Truffle is honoured to announce the first ever vinyl reissue of David Rosenboom’s legendary Brainwave Music, originally released on A.R.C. Records in 1975 and here expanded to a double LP with the addition of over 40 minutes of contemporaneous material. Pioneer of live electronics, innovator in music education, collaborator with artists as diverse as Jon Hassell, Jacqueline Humbert, Terry Riley and Anthony Braxton, Rosenboom is renowned for his ground-breaking experiments with the use of brain biofeedback to control live electronic systems. Each of the three pieces that make up the original Brainwave Music LP integrates biofeedback with musical technology in different ways. In the side-long opening piece “Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones”, four performers have electrodes and monitoring devices attached to their bodies to receive information about brainwaves, temperature, and galvanic skin response. This information is analysed and fed into a complex set of frequency dividers and filters, manned by Rosenboom, but essentially played by each of the performers through their psychophysiological responses to the situation. The result is a slowly unfolding web of filtered electronic tones over a tanpura-esque fundamental, possessing the unhurried, stately grandeur of an electronic raga. In “Chilean Drought”, three different variations of a text about a drought in Chile, each read by a different voice in a different style, are associated with the Beta, Alpha, and Theta brainwave bands. Alongside an insistent piano accompaniment, we hear a constantly shifting combination of the three vocal recordings controlled by the relative preponderance of each of the brainwave bands in the soloist whose brainwaves are being monitored. “Piano Etude I (Alpha)”, the earliest piece included here, is based on research into the link between Alpha brain wave production and the execution of repetitive motor tasks. As Rosenboom plays a very rapid, incessantly repeated pattern in both hands – deliberately designed to be difficult to execute without being in an alert, non-thinking state similar to that associated with strong Alpha brainwave production – two filters controlled by monitoring his brainwaves process the piano sound, moving gradually higher in frequency as the average Alpha amplitude increases, resulting in a hypnotic, constantly shifting blur of repeated notes reflected through the shimmering, watery lights of the filters. For this reissue, the original LP is supplemented with an additional LP containing an unreleased 1977 live recording of Rosenboom’s “On Being Invisible”, in which the composer himself performs on an array of electronics that are fed information from his brainwaves. Stretching out over 40 minutes, the piece begins in similar territory to “Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones” but eventually becomes far wilder, building up to pointillistic bleeps and dense layers of electronic fizz that unexpectedly cut to near-silence. As Rosenboom explains, the piece creates a situation in which the ‘performer’s active imaginative listening became one of the ways to play their instrument, as well as an active agent in how self-organizing musical forms might emerge.’ Enriched with archival images and new notes from the composer, this expanded reissue of Brainwave Music is essential listening for anyone interested in the history of live electronic music and alive to the possibilities it might still contain.

Iannis Xenakis - GRM Works 1957-1962 (LP+DL)
Iannis Xenakis - GRM Works 1957-1962 (LP+DL)Recollection GRM
¥2,824
Architecture, music, mathematics. From the series Recollection GRM, which reissues the INA-GRM works, the history of Greek-French people who controlled a large amount of uncontrollable sounds by architecture and mathematical methodologies and transformed them into music with unparalleled strength. Introducing contemporary music composer Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001).

Constructed the Philips Pavilion at the Brussels World's Fair (1958). Also included is'Concret PH', which was performed using 400 speakers, along with Edgard Varese's blockbuster electronic music "Poem Electronique" at the Philips Hall. You can't taste this tingling sensation that is ejected from a very esoteric and incomprehensible range that incorporates mathematics into music. Others, such as the chaotic concrète'Bohor'dedicated to Pierre Schaeffer, are a number of sound images that make you feel as if you are looking at a complete building in front of you.
Eleh - Harmonic Twins (LP)
Eleh - Harmonic Twins (LP)Important Records
¥3,185
ELEH's Harmonic Twins is slow moving monophony tuned to the overtone vocalizations generated by a particularly beautiful sound sculpture made by Harry Bertoia. These two pieces are inspired by early music, choral masses, motets, the cathedral reverberations of sacred geometry and deep bass. Harmonic Twins was originally debuted by ELEH at Unsound, Krakow in 2017. An optimal listening environment is recommended in order to experience the low frequencies of Harmonic Twins.
Eliane Radigue - Triptych (CD)
Eliane Radigue - Triptych (CD)Important Records
¥2,149
Originally released in 2009. "Back to music after three years of silence... On the suggestion of Robert Ashley, Douglas Dunn commissioned this piece from Éliane Radigue for choreography. Only the first part of Triptych was staged at the premiere at the Dancehall/Theatre of Nancy on February 27 1978. Recorded in the composer's studio in Paris. After the premiere of Adnos I (IMPREC 028CD) in San Francisco in 1974, a group of French students introduced Éliane Radigue to Tibetan Buddhism. When she returned to Paris, she began to explore this spirituality in depth, which slowed her musical production up until 1978. Triptych marks her return to composition, and draws its inspiration from 'the spirit of the fundamental elements,' water, air, fire, earth... Éliane Radigue likes to add that this has often been useful to her in her moments of research and transitions. This three-part composition, with its great humility and contemplative simplicity, heralded a new period of work and was the first in a series of masterpieces inspired by Tibetan Buddhism: Adnos II (1980); Adnos III (1981) [both included on IMPREC 028CD]; Songs of Milarepa (1983), with the voices of Lama Kunga Rinpoche and Robert Ashley; Jetsun Mila (1986); as well as the Triologie de la Mort (XI 119CD): Kyema (1988), Kailasha (1991), and Koumé (1993). Archival images included in the accompanying booklet." --Manu Holterbach
Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis - Deep Listening (CD)
Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis - Deep Listening (CD)Important Records
¥1,978
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 CD 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.
Yoshi Wada - The Appointed Cloud (CD)
Yoshi Wada - The Appointed Cloud (CD)Em Records
¥2,530
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.
Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kontakte (CD)
Karlheinz Stockhausen - Kontakte (CD)Wergo
¥1,965

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.

Richard Lerman - Music of Richard Lerman 1964-1987 (2CD)
Richard Lerman - Music of Richard Lerman 1964-1987 (2CD)Em Records
¥3,630
The original was released on Folkways in 1983, and the phantom board, which was highly acclaimed by the world's experimental music enthusiasts, has recurred from M! A Fluxus-like work that "plays" a bicycle by attaching a voltage-type self-made pickup microphone developed with advice from David Tudor to the bicycle to generate a gamelan-like sound. Disc 1 contains the contents of the original record and the performance scenery as extras. Disc 2 contains works by Richard Rahman from 1964 to 1986. Both are the world's first CDs. It ’s a historic achievement.

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