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Cauldron is the legendary psychedelic jazzy rock & electronic album by Californian band Fifty Foot Hose. First-time official vinyl reissue since its release in 1967 on the Limelight label.
Fifty Foot Hose formed in San Francisco in 1967. Like few other acts of their time they consciously tried to combine the contemporary sounds of rock with electronic instruments and avant-garde compositional ideas. They were one of the most radical groups of the psychedelic era, and their experimentalism still has the power to shock and surprise even now.
What set them apart were the pioneering experiments in electronic music, like the band they are often compared to, The United States of America. Incorporating theremin, siren, audio generators, and other various electronic effects as Cork Marcheschi, the band's original bass player had developed an acute interest in the dadaist/futurist experiments of composers like John Cage and Edgar Varese. David and Nancy Blossom brought both psychedelic and jazz influences to the band. Cauldron, their only album, was released in December 1967, including "Fantasy”, “Red the Sign Post” and “God Bless the Child”, a Billie Holiday cover. An intriguing mix of jazzy psychedelic rock tunes with fierce and advanced electronic sound effects. These sound experiments differentiated them from their contemporaries and most audiences didn't quite know what to make of them.
The Morton Feldman Piano box set is the most extensive survey of Feldman’s piano music to date. Released exactly 20 years after John Tilbury’s long unavailable 4-CD set, the new box includes several pieces which weren’t included there, and has three works which have never been released on disc before.
Philip Thomas has been playing Feldman’s music for 25 years and is one of the foremost interpreters of his work with an extraordinary gentle touch. He and John Tilbury combined forces to produce the highly acclaimed Two Pianos double CD, which featured Feldman’s music for multiple pianos. The Feldman Piano box set is the culmination of decades of study, and is accompanied by a 52-page booklet in which Philip Thomas writes about Feldman’s music from a pianist’s point of view:
“Playing Feldman’s music inevitably changes aspects of one’s technique. The orientation is towards the vertical aspects of piano playing - the attack - rather than the horizontal - the line. Yet Feldman made much of his desire for instrumental sound devoid of attack, which is hard for the piano, whose action is fundamentally percussive. Yet knowing this affects how one treats the instrument: pressing the keys serves to release the sound, setting strings in motion.”
The box set also contains artworks by the English painter David Ainley
Transamorem - Transmortem (1973)
ARP Synthesizer
“Before the greatest achievement
Before the greatest detachment.
At the limit of the frontier space of the unconscious - tuned waves - "consonant things vibrate together".
Where does the change happen? In the inner field of perception or the exterior reality of moving things in the course of becoming.
"And time is no longer an obstacle, but the means by which the possible is achieved".
Eliane Radigue - June 20, 1973
"Transamorem - Transmortem" was premiered on March 9, 1974 at The Kitchen in NYC, where the music programmer at the time was Rhys Chatham - this was right before his guitar phase. During this period, "Transamorem - Transmortem" was presented along with other compositions by Eliane Radigue in a linear mode of listening, although the piece had originally been conceived, during its composition, as a sound installation. Of course, both modes of listening are possible, and each works marvelously in its own way.
In their original form, Eliane Radigue's works are magnetic tapes. After being played a few times in public, the tape disappears to its case until a release proposal makes it available again through a disc.
During this period Eliane Radigue's compositions became fairly long, some lasting over an hour. Because the tracks could not be edited for some obvious reasons, a vinyl release was unthinkable. It was only in the 90's, with the advent of the CD format, that the long compositions of Eliane Radigue were made available (with the exception of the "Song of Milarepa" LP on Lovely Music, a work already divided into multiple movements and thus able to be fit onto two sides of an LP). For these reasons, the work of Eliane Radigue remained virtually unknown for twenty years - from the 70's to the 90's.
It was in 2004, when she accepted my aid in digitizing her archives, along with Lionel Marchetti, that I discovered "Transamoren - Transmortem." Immediately, I was awed by the majestic grace of this very long tangle of frequencies, this set of seemingly unchanging tones, whose variations are of a delicate subtlety. "Transamoren - Transmorten" is recognizable as one of the most radical of Radigue's compositions, comparable to the first "Adnos," the work that follows "Transamoren - Transmortem" chronologically. Very few transformations, an apparent formal aridity that is then contradicted by the physical play of the frequencies as the listener turns her head gently from right to left, or better yet as the listener moves slowly throughout the music space. Moving through zones of specific frequencies, the listener's body experiences localized zones of low, medium and treble frequencies which vary according to the acoustic properties of the space. As Radigue wrote of "Adnos": "to displace stones in the bed of a river does not affect the course of water, but rather modifies the way the water flows." Here, we find the same meditative tension proposing a peaceful movement through the spaces created by the different frequencies that compose "Transamoren - Transmortem."
Very well-organized, Eliane Radigue's archives are a pleasure to explore, and "Transamorem - Transmortem"'s case contained a mine of information. What excited me most was the short text entitled "Inner Space", which described the ideal conditions under which "Transamorem - Transmortem" should be presented. That is to say as a sound installation.
"Inner Space -
This monophonic tape should be played on 4 speakers placed in the four corners of an empty room. Carpet on the floor. The impression of different points of origin of the sound is produced by the localization of the various zones of frequencies, and by the displacements produced by simple movements of the head within the acoustic space of the room. A low point of light on the ceiling, in the center of the room, produced by indirect lighting. Several white light projectors of very weak intensity whose rays, coming from different angles, meet at a single point".
Eliane Radigue - 1973
I immediately felt that it was necessary to make "Transamoren-Transmorten" available once again, and this time in its ideal form, in trying to follow Radigue's recommendations word for word. It was with this idea in mind that the Cumulus collective (also responsible for the contemporary music festival Why Note) organized the Continuum festival in Dijon along with the art space Le Consortium (one of the founders of which had persuaded the goup Circle X to record their first, mythic EP in Dijon in 1979 - but that's another story!).
The goal was to correctly present some of Eliane Radigue's sound installations, an aspect of her work now completely forgotten. And yet, between 1967 and 1971 her work was often exhibited in galleries of contemporary art, mostly in Paris (Lara Vincy, Yvon Lambert ... ), a reflection of the fact that French people have had a harder time than Americans placing the work of Radigue. She herself hesitated for quite a while to use the word "music" to describe her work, a complex that is familiar to this very generation of musicians, and which is now no longer really a problem. Who would claim that the work of Eliane Radigue is not musical? That would be strange ...
The 2006 Continuum festival in Dijon saved four sound installations from the dust (an expression that Radigue uses to describe her archives): "S=a=b=a+b" (1969), "Omnht" (1970), "Labyrinthe Sonore" (1970) and "Transamorem - Transmortem" (1973). The first two installations are composed with feedbacks, the two others with the sounds of the ARP 2500 synthesizer. Each one is based on a strategy of specific spatial presentation, but that's also another story ...
Now it's your turn to enjoy this enveloping electronic space ...
Eliane Radigue; feedback on magnetic tape Includes archival photographs and liner notes.
"1970 was an important year in Eliane Radigue's musical life since it was the year just before she acquired her ARP 2500 synthesizer. Since 1967, she had been using the feedback as a material; feedback from two tape recorders reworked through intensive studio techniques: slowing down, alteration, superimposition, montage.
"In 1970, the last year she dedicated to feedback, several milestone pieces saw the light of day: Omnht, a wonderful sound installation for three out-of-phase tape loops and wall-mounted loudspeakers; the theoretical setting of Labyrinthe Sonore (eventually premiered at Mills College in 1998 in collaboration with Pauline Oliveros, Maggie Payne and William Winant, among others); Opus 17, one of her first compositions in fixed duration (according to Rhys Chatham, a decisive piece that would change his own compositional career); and Vice-Versa, etc…, which appears to be her very last feedback loop composition.
"Vice-Versa, etc… was conceived as a sound installation setting similar to S=a=b=a+b. A single magnetic tape can be played at any speed, a stereo tape of which allows three playings: left channel alone, right channel alone, left and right channels together. These different channels can be overlapped/crossed over as much as possible, at any speed. Thus the piece reveals itself in its whole dimension, its infinite grace.
"In its content, the piece is the most minimal that Eliane Radigue has ever composed. Feedback is horizontally sustained, time is suspended, vibrating with organic and subtle pulsations. The fastest playthrough, in just 2:42, weaves a graceful continuum of uncanny depth, somewhere between the sonority of feedback and a glass harmonica. Played slowly, at 13:41, it takes us into an universe of low frequency vibrations felt as much by the guts, the ribcage and the whole body as by the eardrum: the signature sound of Eliane Radigue. Between these two extremes, many delicate shadings/variations appear simply through speed modulation. What is striking about this work, which may arguably be one of Radigue's most important compositions, is the extraordinary quality of the tones obtained from such a rudimentary material. It is hard to believe that the composer was yet to begin working on her ARP, since the sonorities heard on Vice-Versa, etc… are surprisingly similar to those she would go on to produce with her synthesizer.
"Vice-Versa, etc… is a minimal work which possesses an infinity of possible variations, a secret object containing the seeds of the oeuvre to come, and a discreet turning point linking the composer's two important working phases, an extremely subtle cross-fade between her feedback loop period to her ARP period.
"Originally, only ten signed and numbered copies of this little boxset containing a magnetic tape and a handwritten note were released - needless to say this is a work that has been nearly forgotten! We have decided to reissue this object as a double CD, with the tape played respectively forwards and backwards, at four different speeds, corresponding to the standards of the tape recorders of the time. This will allow dedicated listeners to experiment with simultaneous playback of the work's different versions, recreating the conditions of the original installation. For lazier listeners, a simple play through provides complete satisfaction, a listening experience that loses itself in the ineffable and discreet beauty of these four variations." ~ Manu Holterbach (translated by Maxime Guitton)
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Else Marie Pade's Electronic Works 1958-1995 is a heavy duty three LP set which was restored, mastered and cut at Dubplates in Berlin under the watchful ears of curator Jacob Kirkegaard. These monumental works are presented, for the first time, pressed on audiophile grade heavy duty vinyl where they belong. Audiophile grade 3LP is pressed in an edition of 500 copies.
"The sounds outside became concrete music, and in the evening I could imagine that the stars and the moon and the sky uttered sounds and those turned into electronic music." Else Marie Pade
Else Marie Pade (born 1924 in Aarhus, Denmark; currently living in Copenhagen) is a precious golden gem in the world of contemporary electro-acoustic music. She is a true pioneer of Musique Concrete and electronic music recorded on tape. She is Denmarks first lady of electronic music and her piece Syc Cirkler (Seven Circles) became Denmark's first electronic piece to be performed on the radio.
EMP's search for sound began in early childhood when she was isolated in her bed for long periods of time due to illness. There she would lie and listen to the sounds around her just as she did years later when she was imprisoned for spying on Nazi compounds in Arhus. Once released from prison she became a piano student at the Royal Danish Conservatory in Copenhagen but chose to instead pursue the nuances of her inner sound world after hearing Pierre Schaeffer in 1952. She began studying with him not too soon thereafter. Her first electronic composition premiered in 1955.
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.
The second album by the legendary Swiss artist and composer, based in Brazil, Walter Smetak, opened a new field of exploration within his own musical horizon. With the publication of “Smetak” (1974), a musical universe had been defined where Afro-Brazilian ritual traditions, studies of microtonality and open processes of collective improvisation converged, always under the influence of theosophy, which allowed him to generate a personal mythology, a religious-esoteric worldview that served as a framework for the creation of a musical symbolic universe embodied in the construction of more than 150 instruments of his own invention that he called plásticas sonoras.
In “Interregno” (1980), Smetak will radicalize some of these processes. Produced by Carlos Pita, this album features microtonal guitars, performed collectively –another step in the use of unconventional tunings that Smetak had been exploring–, in permanent dialogue with a Yamaha electric organ that assured him the possibility of prolonged sounds. Walter Smetak was a crucial figure in the Brazilian avant-garde and a key part of the cultural climate that made the rise of tropicália possible. Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and Tom Zé were his enthusiastic followers.
The author of one of the most important studies on Smetak, Marco Scarassatti, has written on the work of the Swiss-Brazilian artist: “His original and metaphysical work goes beyond any mysticism created around his figure. He investigated the relationship between sound and light, space and form, microtonality, collective improvisation, as a sound alchemist, a multimedia and unplugged prophet-visionary. While transforming matter, Smetak transformed himself and many of those around him.”
This reissue reproduces the much sought after 1980 edition published by Discos Marcus Pereira. It includes the catalog of instruments used and presents the remastered audio. Limited edition of 500 copies.
This project is part of Incidências Sonoras: COINCIDENCIA experimental music & sound art platform, by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.