From 1968 to 1976, Michael Nyman worked as a music critic for various magazines (Studio International, Time Out, Tempo, The New Stateman or The Spectator). He studied 16th and 17th c. baroque music in the mid-1960s, composing only a handful of musical pieces prior to the present 'Decay Music' in 1976, the real starting point of his carreer as a composer. '1-100' is an auto-generative composition for piano that feeds itself along the way while remaining fairly minimal throughout. The kind of music that makes sense at low listening level
This is David Moss' first solo LP after he took part to a few collective albums and a duo during the 1970s, all involving guitarist Baird Hersey. 'Terrain' was released on Cornpride, an artist-run label where the Meltable Snaps It (Moss+Cartwright+Lytle) first LPs would appear in 1979 and 1981 (see massive discography here). It seems at this early stage, Moss (born 1949) considered himself a mutli-instrumentist, not only a virtuoso singer. And indeed this record is evidence of a great skill for sound textures, specifically on cymbals and steel drums, which he parallels with beautiful vocal tapestries. Moss is playing a large assortment of percussion instruments of all kind, including many chinese gongs and even some Bertoia sound sculpture at some point (recognizable on tr.#1, 7 & 9), favoring long resonant sounds and contrasting them with short, unusually pitched drumming. To give you an idea, you would think some of the percussion parts on side A comes from Morton Feldman's 'The King Of Denmark' score. Similarly, some vocals (syllables only) sound like exotic birds out of a botanical garden. For a percussionist (Moss studied percussion in the 1960s), there are remarkably few endeavours in rhythm and square beats on this LP and the percussion assortment is sometimes used merely as a tone generator providing pitch for the voice. Playing and singing is mostly sparse, if not minimal, each track using only one or two percussion instruments at the same time. Moss uses multi-track recording to create complex, intertwined glossolalias a mysterious, non-western web of voices. I think the cover sums it all: exotic color, minimalism and a bird in the drawing. On a side note, this album works remarkably well in conjunction with Michael Snow's The Last LP, that I'm re-listening to these days. 2 highly original composers of idiosyncratic sound worlds.
David Moss was born January 21, 1949 in New York City. Between 1963 and 1968 he studied percussion at Hartt College of Music and Hartford Symphony with Joe Porcaro, Al Lepak, Richard Lepore. In the following years he took percussion with Tanjore Ranganathan at Wesleyan University and composition with Bill Dixon at Bennington College. From 1971-73 he played percussion for the Bill Dixon Ensemble. Since his education has finished, he performed in many cities worldwide; in 1991 and 1992 he received Guggenheim and DAAD fellowships in Berlin. He has collaborated with artists like Heiner Goebbels, John Zorn, Tom Cora, Uri Caine, Bill Laswell, Olga Neuwirth, Andrea Molino, Luciano Berio, Maya Dunietz, Sir Simon Rattle, Smak and many others.
The first track of Un Peu de Neige Salie, UNTITLED I/92, is the only work using synthesized sounds I have ever released. UNTITLED I/92is actually a 'glitch' piece in the literal sense: I used a Prophet 2000 key- board's sequencer to overload the MIDI input of a Yamaha TX816 (a rack unit consisting of eight modules, each representing the original Yamaha DX7 FM-synth; four modules were used playing two sounds I had programmed). Very dense chords played using fingers, hands, and forearms (being arpeggiated by the Prophet keyboard's built-in arpeggiator) quickly surpassed the modules' capacity of 16 notes, resulting in clicks when notes broke off. I recorded my playing with the Cubase sequencer, and so became able to edit and compose the density and frequency content of the sound, as well as the glitches, to which I added a new element by inserting an 'all notes off' MIDI command at strategic points, resulting in a strange resonating sound beginning with a loud pop coming from the TX816. I still like this piece very much, and frequently use it as the opening piece for my concerts.
UNTITLED IV/92 is based on a five second sample of a person taking a deep breath during a voice per formance; this is the only material used, treated and modified to provide all the sounds you hear in the piece, giving the piece a somewhat 'organic' sound world. Its formal structure is rather perculiar, as the piece has two beginnings, starting twice, at different pitches (listening to the beginning I was not really that satisfied, had it start again, but somehow had the inspiration to keep the original beginning), and a long drawn-out ending questioning the very idea of an end before softly disappearing.
UNTITLED I/93 is a quite particular work for me, a work of very intimate character and atmosphere, trans parent and fragile I made in an almost unconscious way. I sometimes refer to it as 'the realm of hungry ghosts' (one of the Buddhist versions of hell in which the lost souls wander) in my mind because of its other-worldly feel. I don't associate it with hell, though, and asking myself how I could describe its mood, I came up with 'comfortable loneliness'.
-Bernhard Günter
- A bit in the same vein as some of the more extreme electronic minimalists such as Ryoji Ikeda and Alva Noto.
"In 1963-64 I used to play records both too slowly and too fast and thus changed the quality of the music, thereby, creating new compositions. In 1965 I started to destroy records: scratch them, punch holes in them, break them. By playing them over and over again (which destroyed the needle and often the record player too) an entirely new music was created - unexpected, nerve-racking and aggressive. Compositions lasting one second or almost infinitely long (as when the needle got stuck in a deep groove and played the same phrase over and over). I developed this system further. I began sticking tape on top of records, painting over them, burning them, cutting them up and gluing different parts of records back together, etc. to achieve the widest possible variety of sounds. A glued joint created a rhythmic element separating contrasting melodic phrases... Since music that results from playing ruined gramophone records cannot be transcribed to notes or to another language (or if so, only with great difficulty), the records themselves may be considered as notations at the same time."
[Milan Knizak]
K7 in special packaging + inserts, Edition Hundertmark, Cologne. Germany, 1983
Issued by Armin Hundertmark publisher, a Cologne imprint specialized in artist books and multiples (now relocated in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria), who also published a few cassettes by Henri Chopin, Philip Corner, Henry Flynt or Hermann Nitsch. This limited edition of 40 signed copies of Czech artist Milan Kn
From the LP: ACUSTICA (Deutsche Grammophon 2707 059)
Kölner Ensemble für Neue Musik
I. Christoph Caskel
II. Karlheinz Böttner
III. Edward H. Tarr
IV. Wilhelm Bruck
V. Vinko Globokar
Artistic supervision and sound direction: Mauricio Kagel
Recorded Studio Rhenus, Godof Bei Köln (28. - 31. 1. 1971)
Co-production with the West German Radio, Cologne (WDR)
Deutsche Grammophon, Germany, DGG 2561039, 1969
Der Schall (1968) for five players w/ 54 instruments
Edward H. Tarr, Vinko Globokar, Karlheinz Botner, Wilhelm Bruck, Christoph Caskel: plucked, percussion and wind instruments
Mauricio Kagel: direction.
From the last interwiew With Mauricio Kagel: "... Each composer is convinced that his last masterpiece will be the most beautiful and important, but during my whole life, continuity has been always fundamental in my works. The different stages, can be qualified as organic; but contrary to many other authors, I was never subjected to any shock which would have caused a total change from one minute to the other in works. Such as when we talk about Picasso, we mention his blue, pink or cubist period etc Such a thing has no sense for me, as my course has always been linear and I would even say organic. Of course some pieces are more or less important than others, but Im not the right person to qualify them. The only thing I can declare, is that during my whole life, after I had finished a score, all my involvement, my soul and my love for music has been transferred in it. At the end, I have always been able to affirm:
- thats what I wanted, and so it had to be.
- Then the future will let us know."
Terry Allen:
(May 7, 1943 in Wichita, Kansas) is a country music singer in the outlaw country genre, painter, and conceptual artist from Lubbock, Texas, and living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His father was Fletcher Mason ("Sled") Allen (b. August 23, 1886 in West Plains, Missouri October 16, 1959 in Lubbock, Texas) a catcher in 1910 for the St. Louis Browns who continued his career as a player-manager in the Texas League.
He attended Monterey High School in Lubbock, Texas. His contemporaries at Monterey High School included Butch Hancock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Joe Ely, Jo Harvey Allen and Jo Carol Pierce. Trained as an architect, he received a B.F.A. from the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. His art has been supported by three NEA grants and a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. His work Trees (the music, literary and third trees) is installed on the campus of the University of California San Diego as part of the Stuart Collection. His artwork has been featured at the L.A. Louver art gallery in Venice, California.
Terry Allen is represented by Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, CA. His works are represented in the collections of many international museums including the New York Museum of Modern Art, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Nelson/Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, lEspace Lyonnais d'Art Contemporain, Musee Saint Pierre, Lyon, France, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
Terry Allen recorded eight albums during the years 1979 to 2004 and collaborated with David Byrne on the soundtrack for Byrne's movie True Stories. Allen's music is far from traditional. A quote attributed to Allen states: "People tell me it's country music, and I ask, 'Which country?'" Allmusic calls his 1979 release, Lubbock (On Everything), "one of the finest country albums of all time" and a progenitor of the alt-country movement.
-- Wiki.
John Cage and Rahsaan Roland Kirk - Sound?? (1966) Sometimes what seem to be polar opposites are actually on opposite sites of a circle and if they keep going around they meet. Kirk and Cage don't physically meet here, though. The brief duet of Kirk and a wolf is pretty cool.
Peter Van Riper - Room Space - (LP released by VRBLU, NYC, 1981)
Peter van Riper (1940-1998)
- was a US sound artist and saxophone player who often collaborated with performance artists such as choreographer, video or visual artists (see my Wikipedia article for more details). This LP (presumably his 2nd) documents his Long Tones saxophone technique on side A and field recordings or found sounds on side B. Van Riper being used to the magic of reverberant spaces and resonant metallic objects, his saxophone playing retains some of these techniques. Long notes are emitted in large empty rooms, the player moving around the room and interacting with resonant waves, obviously listening to the echo as much as his own instrument. I've heard similar saxophone experiment from Swiss saxophonist Markus Eichenberger during the 1980s, especially in a cassette called Atemwerke or Breath Works. That's what side A is about, breath works, with absolutely no hint at jazz music, by the way. Side B is pure sound art. Alpine Pasture is a recording of multiple cow bells, though presumably not recorded in the field. The sound is gorgeous and strangely reminiscent of Japanese temple bells - van Riper lived in Japan during the 1960s. It may or may not be part of the numerous Acoustic Metal Music van Riper created for installation artist Eug
"Dreyblatt's ensemble, consisting of altered, adapted, and prepared instruments are in just intonation and play drones or repeated tones, setting up heady resonances with a contiually changing and complex matrix of overtones. By adding drums and other percussion, and by writing fast, sometimes furious tempos, Dreyblatt avoids the dreamy and sometimes stultifying effect that is a part of so much drone music. The entire six-part title track is lively and vibrant. High Life is similar in spirit to La Monte Young and Alvin Lucier, with its nonstop drone and lavish array of overtones to inspect and exult in."
-Option
"Arnold Dreyblatt's ensemble performed a bright, colorful work for winds, strings, guitars, cimbalom... ...an essentially minimalist impulse and a spirit that's multi-cultural: its heavy drum beat and the freewheeling, almost manic quality of its string and wind writing made parts of the work seem a stew of primitive, ritual musics, both Asian and African.'
-The New York Times
Arnold Dreyblatt (b. New York City, 1953) is an American composer and visual artist. He studied music with Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, Alvin Lucier and media art with Steina and Woody Vasulka. He has been based in Berlin, Germany since 1984. In 2007, he was elected to the German Academy of Art (Akademie der Künste, Berlin).
In his installations, performances and media works, Dreyblatt creates complex textual and spatial metaphors for memory which function as a media discourse on recollection and the archive. His installations, public artworks and performances have been exhibited and staged extensively in Europe.
Among the second generation of New York minimal composers, Arnold Dreyblatt has developed a unique approach to composition and music performance. He has invented a set of new and original instruments, performance techniques, and a system of tuning. His compositions are based on harmonics, and thus just intonation, played either through a bowing technique he developed for his modified bass, and other modified and conventional instruments which he specially tuned. He originally used only a steady pulse provided by the bowing motion on his bass (placing his music in the minimal category), but he eventually added many more instruments and more rhythmic variety.
- Wiki.[/url]
A composer who uses normal instruments and noises, and a maker of art objects in the Fluxus tradition --like his Betrayal, Op. 144, a carton filled with various small objects and an EP, signed and numbered (available from Gelbe Musik). The Farewell Symphony was composed for the opening of the Friedensbiennale (Freedom Biennale) in Hamburg 1985, and is played by artists Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik and Christansen. For further listening try the LPs Fluxid: Hoehlenmonat (A month in a hole), concerto for flute and noises; Fressmonat (A month of devouring), concerto for sax, cello and noises and Fluxyl: Koenig Frost (King Frost), concerto for oboe and noises; Maskenmonat (A month of disquises), concerto for trumpet, tuba and noises (both available from Gelbe Musik).
A piano makes nice sounds while all other sorts of noises go on around it. Either Nam June Paik or Joseph Beuys or possibly both appear by telephone.
"This massive selection is from a 62 CD set called "The History of Electroacoustic Music" that was floating around as a torrent, reputedly curated by a Brazilian student. It's sketchy. The torrent vanished and the collection has long been unavailable. It's a clearly flawed selection: there's few women and almost no one working outside of the Western tradition (where are the Japanese? Chinese? etc.). However, as an effort, it's admirable and contains a ton of great stuff. Take it with a grain of salt, or perhaps use it as a provocation to curate a more intelligent, inclusive, and comprehensive selection"
Great find, Brighternow...but...I teach Paul Celan and I like Tim Hecker, so this had me really intrigued, but I can't figure out so far what it has to do with Paul Celan. Is that just a bad webpage?
"As the title says, these twelve pieces by Parmegiani are studies of the nature of sounds and their relations to each other. For example, the first piece confronts short and fast percussive events with longer sounds of various resonant bodies; the sixth piece mixes electronically treated sounds of woodwind instruments; the seventh piece explores the resonant capabilities of metallic objects. Although this work is more austere than later works like La création du monde, it might be a good introduction to Parmegiani's so varied and fascinating oeuvre." - Kater Murr / Discogs - Wiki Biography
"New York based artist and composer Marina Rosenfeld presented a new performance for 40 female improvisors for an electro-acoustic string orchestra. Following a 2-day workshop involving London based musicians and non-musicians, participants performed Rosenfeld's animated improvisational score using an array of bowable instruments, including violins, cello, electric guitars, percussion and harp.
The 40 minute composition elicits extraordinary music-making, at turns brutal and delicate, from an ensemble of where many of the players will have never touched an instrument before. The work also features Rosenfeld's own graphic notation, in the form of video-animation, and a custom-designed garment created by New York fashion collective As Four."
- http://www.marinarosenfeld.com/
"Sometimes lovely things come in small packages--in this case, Lovely Little Records. Works by John Bischoff, Paul DeMarinis, Phil Harmonic, Frankie Mann, Maggi Payne, and "Blue" Gene Tyranny."
- Lovely Music/Vital Records, 1980.
Electric Sound, Mainstream, LP, 1971
- Recorded at the Rose Art Museum Brandeis University.
"The Sonic Arts Union formed in 1966 when Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma decided to pool their resources and help one another with the performance and staging of their music. Since that time the group has performed extensively in the United States and has completed three tours of Europe."
- Discogs.
Ilhan Mimaroglu: - Was born in Istanbul in 1926. He is the son of the famous architect Mimar Kemaleddin Bey. After finishing at Galatasaray High School in 1945, he graduated from the Law School at Ankara University in 1949. He learned clarinet from Hayrullah Duygu. Mimaro?lu started preparing radio programs and wrote music critiques. In 1955, he went to New York to pursue his study with a Rockefeller Scholarship. He studied musicology with Paul Henry Lang and composition with Douglas Moore at Columbia University. In 1959, he settled in New York and started working at the Record Hunter Plaque Company. He also worked as an art critic on the radio program Voice of America. In the 1960s, he published and edited his book Müzik Tarihi in Turkey. Mimaroglu completed his masters degree in Electronic Music under Vladimir Ussachesvsky at Columbia University. He studied composition with Edgar Varese and Staphan Wolpe. Later, Mimaroglu taught electronic music at Columbia University. He was invited to the Music Research Center Studio by French Radio in 1968.
He was the producer for Charles Mingus Changes One and Changes Two, as well as Federico Fellinis Satyricon. Mimaroglu was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition in 1971. He worked as a producer for Atlantic Records, and collaborated with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard on a moving anti-war statement, Sing Me a Song of Songmy. Mimaro?lu has published some books including Günsüz Günce (1989), Elektronik Müzik (1991), Ertesi Günce (1994), and Yokistan Tasar?s? (1997)." Turkish Cultural Foundation.</span></div>
Comments
Obscure #6 - Island Records, 1976
LP released by Cornpride, ref. 007, 1980
- A bit in the same vein as some of the more extreme electronic minimalists such as Ryoji Ikeda and Alva Noto.
"In 1963-64 I used to play records both too slowly and too fast and thus changed the quality of the music, thereby, creating new compositions. In 1965 I started to destroy records: scratch them, punch holes in them, break them. By playing them over and over again (which destroyed the needle and often the record player too) an entirely new music was created - unexpected, nerve-racking and aggressive. Compositions lasting one second or almost infinitely long (as when the needle got stuck in a deep groove and played the same phrase over and over). I developed this system further. I began sticking tape on top of records, painting over them, burning them, cutting them up and gluing different parts of records back together, etc. to achieve the widest possible variety of sounds. A glued joint created a rhythmic element separating contrasting melodic phrases... Since music that results from playing ruined gramophone records cannot be transcribed to notes or to another language (or if so, only with great difficulty), the records themselves may be considered as notations at the same time."
[Milan Knizak]
K7 in special packaging + inserts, Edition Hundertmark, Cologne. Germany, 1983
Late Summer #6 by Augen.Blicke, on Flickr. Creative Commons License.
From the LP: ACUSTICA (Deutsche Grammophon 2707 059)
Peter Van Riper - Room Space - (LP released by VRBLU, NYC, 1981)
Propellers in Love & High Life
http://www.dreyblatt.de/index.php
Yoshi Wada - Off the Wall
Henning Christiansen, Nam June Paik and Joseph Beuys, Abschiedssymphony (Farewell Symphony)
Allmusic review:
A piano makes nice sounds while all other sorts of noises go on around it. Either Nam June Paik or Joseph Beuys or possibly both appear by telephone.
- Quite a mouthful . . .
ETA:
- a smaller cover:
Tim Hecker- Pluie (for Sylvain
The Sylvain
- Commissioned by Radio-France and realized in the studios of Groupe de recherches musicales (GRM now INA-GRM).
- Kater Murr / Discogs - Wiki Biography
Marina Rosenfeld - The Emotional Orchestra
Commissioned by Electra as part of "Her Noise"
Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London
23 September 2005
"New York based artist and composer Marina Rosenfeld presented a new performance for 40 female improvisors for an electro-acoustic string orchestra. Following a 2-day workshop involving London based musicians and non-musicians, participants performed Rosenfeld's animated improvisational score using an array of bowable instruments, including violins, cello, electric guitars, percussion and harp.
The 40 minute composition elicits extraordinary music-making, at turns brutal and delicate, from an ensemble of where many of the players will have never touched an instrument before. The work also features Rosenfeld's own graphic notation, in the form of video-animation, and a custom-designed garment created by New York fashion collective As Four."
- http://www.marinarosenfeld.com/
"Sometimes lovely things come in small packages--in this case, Lovely Little Records. Works by John Bischoff, Paul DeMarinis, Phil Harmonic, Frankie Mann, Maggi Payne, and "Blue" Gene Tyranny."
- Lovely Music/Vital Records, 1980.
Electric Sound, Mainstream, LP, 1971
- Recorded at the Rose Art Museum Brandeis University.
"The Sonic Arts Union formed in 1966 when Robert Ashley, David Behrman, Alvin Lucier, and Gordon Mumma decided to pool their resources and help one another with the performance and staging of their music. Since that time the group has performed extensively in the United States and has completed three tours of Europe."
- Discogs.
Ilhan Mimaroglu:
- Was born in Istanbul in 1926. He is the son of the famous architect Mimar Kemaleddin Bey. After finishing at Galatasaray High School in 1945, he graduated from the Law School at Ankara University in 1949. He learned clarinet from Hayrullah Duygu. Mimaro?lu started preparing radio programs and wrote music critiques. In 1955, he went to New York to pursue his study with a Rockefeller Scholarship. He studied musicology with Paul Henry Lang and composition with Douglas Moore at Columbia University. In 1959, he settled in New York and started working at the Record Hunter Plaque Company. He also worked as an art critic on the radio program Voice of America. In the 1960s, he published and edited his book Müzik Tarihi in Turkey. Mimaroglu completed his masters degree in Electronic Music under Vladimir Ussachesvsky at Columbia University. He studied composition with Edgar Varese and Staphan Wolpe. Later, Mimaroglu taught electronic music at Columbia University. He was invited to the Music Research Center Studio by French Radio in 1968.
He was the producer for Charles Mingus Changes One and Changes Two, as well as Federico Fellinis Satyricon. Mimaroglu was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in music composition in 1971. He worked as a producer for Atlantic Records, and collaborated with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard on a moving anti-war statement, Sing Me a Song of Songmy. Mimaro?lu has published some books including Günsüz Günce (1989), Elektronik Müzik (1991), Ertesi Günce (1994), and Yokistan Tasar?s? (1997)."
Turkish Cultural Foundation.</span></div>
There's been some talk of Daphne Oram lately with a new compilation being released - here's an older one, which is awesome.
Also this smaller album is there too:
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