Joan La Barbara, voice; Joan La Barbara, Michael Hoenig and
Bradford Ellis, sound design
Joan La Barbara's
composition, 73 Poems, was commissioned, produced and recorded by
Permanent Press (Brooklyn, NY) to accompany the publication of Kenneth Goldsmith's
73 Poems as a book and as a suite of lithographs. La Barbara's works
often involve multiple layers of her own voice, creating a kind of sonic canvas
on which she throws splashes of vocal colors. On this CD, her potent combination
of vocal and studio expertise makes it possible for her to represent in music
some of the most distinctive features of Goldsmith's visual texts.
- "was self-taught on many instruments by the time he
attended Bennington College in Vermont. His major areas of study were
composition with Louis Calabro, improvisation with Bill Dixon,
percussion with Milford Graves, and performance with artists and
choreographers including Lisa Nelson and Min Tanaka. His interest in
collaboration and interdisciplinary work continued in New York City,
where his work often involved co-mingling many seemingly disparate
elements, a love of chaos, and a thirst for reconciliation.
Bepler has worked with diverse choreographers including John Jasperse,
Sasha Waltz, Jennifer Lacey, and Wally Cardona, and has also led
ensembles of both improvised and pre-composed music, appearing often in
New York and Europe. His concert music includes commissions for the
Ensemble Modern, the Glenn Branca Ensemble, and the Basel Sinfonietta.
His collaboration with artist Ann-Sofi Siden, featuring actors,
technicians, and architecture of the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden,
was shown in Stockholm and Berlin. His work with Matthew Barney has
spanned nearly 20 years and has included seven films and nine
performances. Jonathan Bepler lives and works in Berlin."
The distribution of "Plunderphonic" stopped as of December 1989 after Canadian Recording Industry Association & CBS Records, representing Michael Jackson took a legal action against John Oswald.
"We finally agreed on a list which made me quite happy” says Oswald. “lt effectively took me out of the Plunderphonic CD distribution business. I could no longer send these things around for free. I was ordered to destroy the CDs which l had remaining in my possession, which were about 300. They were delivered to CRIA's lawyers by my lawyers and were subsequently crushed by somebody they hired. This made me quite happy because it put them in a position of being CD crushers, audio book burners and all the things we can associate with those fascist type tactics. Their initial demands were that all copies be recalled. I said I wasn‘t willing to do that, and I got my lawyer to convince them that it was impractical and unnecessary. But to back that up, I had statements from several radio stations, most particularly KPFA in San Francisco, that they weren’t willing to give up their copy, and they would welcome a visit from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police trying to take it back. We also had an agreement that if I fulfilled those requirements I could talk all l wanted about the thing.”
Ultimately, John Oswald wasn’t concerned about the destruction of the master, because of the disabled copy-protection flag, any of the existing CDs could be recorded digitally, and after all, it could be listened to in libraries and radio stations across the country. Distribution was then taken up by radio stations and organizations like the "Copyright violation squad" in Iowa who would dub copies free of charge if supplied with a blank cassette.
Dada for Now / Dada for Now, A collection of Futurist and Dada sound works / 1985 UK Cover: b/w, design: Colin Fallows according to a photo by Reg Cox. Included folder with photos and manifestos. 30cm, 33RPM, ARK, Liverpool, Dove 4.
- Including the very funny: Kurt Schwitters: Simultangedicht kaa gee dee, 1919: WW, 1922: boo, 1926: naa, 1926: bii bull ree, 1936: Obervogelsang, 1946: Niesscherzo e Hustenscherzo, 1937: Cigarren, 1921: The real disuda of the nightmare, 1946
"Basically a classical sonata [Ursonate]... It comprises an extensive
first movement, a largo passage, a scherzo and trio, and a virtuoso
finale and cadenza." Recorded at Studio 2/Radio DRS, December 29, 1991 (Zürich, Switzerland).
- The same recording as the Hat Now Art release but without the 3 extra tracks.
- A grunt. That most primal and animalistic of utterances. The new project
by Derek Piotr, his eighth solo record and a set of short-form
brutalist shards of human-digital noise, is named for this sound.
Had Xenakis bought a laptop in 1999, he may have produced something
comparable to Grunt and its posthuman #voicenoise aesthetic. Yet this is
a wholly unique piece of work. As with Xenakis, Piotr takes
recognisably analogue sounds – particularly the voice, but also drawing
on acoustic instrumentation and found-sounds from nature – and
reconstructs them into 21 intricate ‘electroacoustic’ miniatures. Yet
Piotr is less interested in dissolving these boundaries between electric
and acoustic than he is in hybridising the organic and the digital.
Grunt is subversively queer in its posthuman composition. . . .
Jean DUBUFFET'S "musical experiments" form a set of 20 pieces, 9 of which have been chosen for this disc. This selection was made with regard to the "historical" interest of certain works (La fleur de barbe, 1st publicly performed piece - Gai savoir, 1st work using 2 tape recorders - Terre foisonnante, and Prospère, prolifère, his last musical works which were mixed in the recording studio) and with the aim of providing the listener with the widest possible range of the various "instruments" used. As the different elements which combined to make up these works were recorded using monophonic techniques, they were all produced in mono during DUBUFFET'S lifetime.
Hmmm ? I was sure I posted this one, but it doesn't seem to be the case. . . .
Être Dieu: opéra-poème, audiovisuel et cathare en six parties (French for "Being God: a Cathar Audiovisual Opera-Poem in Six Parts") is a self-proclaimed "opera-poem" written by Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, based on a libretto by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán with music by French avant-garde musician Igor Wakhévitch. It was originally published in 1985.
The six-part work features Dali as God, Brigitte Bardot as an artichoke and Catherine the Great and Marilyn Monroe do a striptease. It has been published in an extremely rare 3 LP box-set by a Spanish label. It was re-released in a regular 3CD box published by German-label Eurostar who subsequently went out of business, and there are few-to-no known performances of the work. Dalí painted "Self-Portrait" (1972) to mark the composition of the opera, which was later auctioned by the United States Customs Service after being seized after Colombian drug lords tried to use the painting to launder money.
AGP149 is a transcription of an Argo LP (ZRG 799) from 1975, featuring two choral works by Igor Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms (1930) and Canticum Sacrum (1955). They are both performed by The Choir of Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and the Philip Jones Ensemble, conducted by Simon Preston. The LP was produced by Michael Bremner and engineered by Stanley Goodall. . . .
Tracks A2 to B2 recorded at the studio of the artist with his own voice. A1 realized in Radio Cologne, 1971. B3 recorded in first place at the studio of the artist and then in the studio of IPEM, 1977.
Henry Brant’s Meteor Farm (1982) is a piece scored for two sopranos, three South Indian performers, two choruses, West African chorus, jazz band, gamelan, and two percussion ensembles.
Composed by: Linda Morgan Brown, Lloyd Dunn, John Heck,
Ralph Johnson and Paul Neff
At the time of its release in 1993, "The Grand
Delusion" showed the Tape-beatles setting off in a new musical
direction, delivering their most complex and ouright "musical" work to
date. The signature found vocals and sound effects are still to be
found, but to this they add energetic rhythms, urgent melodic patterns,
and plaintive singing voices, using the same modified symphonic
structure they applied to their previous major work, Music with Sound.
Dean Suzuki, writing in Option no. 57, says:
"...The results are variously chilling, moving, humorous, tragic,
outrageous, and always both provocative AND musical. The music works in
concert with the spoken texts, just as the piano accompaniment comments
upon and supports the text and melody of an art song by Schumann. There
is a glut of musique concrete which is just so much noise, but a dearth
of that which is as musical as this."
The CD includes the entire soundtrack of the Tape-beatles' PolyVision
'expanded cinema' piece, also called "The Grand Delusion". To this has
been added a substantial amount of additional audio material to enrich
the main themes, which center on how war today is waged as much in the
psychological theatre as it is on the battlefield. This, the re-issued
version, appearing seven years after its first release, adds some twenty
minutes of never-before released works to the track sequence,
augmenting the main themes of the work with valuable new contributions.
Philip Blackburn talks with the Tape Beatles (Lloyd Dunn, John Heck, Ralph Johnson, Paul Neff, Linda Morgan Brown) at the Mandarin Cafe, Waterloo, Iowa, May 24, 1992.
Probably posted before, but such a genuine masterpiece cannot be posted too often:
. . .In both film scores we hear Ussachevsky's favorite
musical form: variations on several alternating themes. His themes are
significantly different from those of his serialist colleagues, who
often choose themes consisting of the same pitch material they would
write for traditional musical instruments. Ussachevsky instead chose
themes that often do not have traditional pitch or timbral
characteristics.
In No Exit, for example, he used three main sound sources: electronic,
vocal and concréte. The electronic sounds range from searing and slicing
noises, to the ominous, bell-like tolling at the end. Here his use of
the human voice is especially effective, starting with the torturous,
electronically manipulated screams of the opening scene, through the
voices of distant children, a woman humming, echoing male voices, and at
the end, men laughing -- suddenly silenced by rifle fire. The concréte
sounds in No Exit include a threatening, pulsing loop of hog sounds
(which appear in varied form in Line of Apogee), the rising wind (also
developed in Line of Apogee), the crackling of fire, a clock ticking,
and the rifle fire.
In Line of Apogee, Ussachevsky used an intriguing variety of sources:
Environmental: wind, footsteps, splashing water, telephone, creaking chair.
Animal: hog, songbirds, owl. Vocal: infant crying and laughing, woman humming
and laughing, choruses singing Gregorian chant; Jewish cantor intoning.
Instrumental: piano (Ussachevsky improvising), flute, organ, brass, glockenspiel,
drums.
These sources were electronically modulated through such devices and
techniques as the electronic switch, echo chamber, feedback, ring
modulation, tape loops, speed variation, volume control, complex mixing
and detailed tape editing. . . .
Ussachevsky was one of the most significant pioneers
in the composition of electronic music, and one of its most potent
forces. Born in 1911 in Manchuria, China, Ussachevsky was the son of a
Russian Army captain. His childhood was spent on the windswept and
sparsely settled Manchurian plain, visiting with the nomadic tribesmen
in their tents, and singing Old Slavonic chants as an altar boy in the
local Russian Orthodox church. By the time he arrived in California, at
the age of nineteen, he was a skilled pianist gifted in the
interpretation of Romantic music, and a fluent improvisor. After
receiving his undergraduate degree in music from Pomona College, he
earned a Ph.D. in composition from the Eastman School of Music. From
1947 until his retirement in 1980, Ussachevsky taught at Columbia
University, where he was known for his teaching of sixteenth-century
counterpoint. But in his career there, he began experimenting with the
use of tape recorders to manipulate sounds. Through much experimentation
he developed the first works of "tape music," a uniquely American
synthesis of the French musique-concréte and the German pure electronic
schools. In 1952, Ussachevsky's first works of tape music were performed
at an historic concert at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City,
along with works of his colleague Otto Luening. Through a five-year
grant awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1959, Ussachevsky
co-founded the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and directed
its course for the next twenty years as the leading electronic music
studio in the United States. . . .
Illuminatios, or Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti duo interactions, illuminated with dim red lights. In early 1970 Mort Subotnick asked Charlemagne Palestine to join his soon to be created Media Department at the new 'Dream School of the Future' endowed by the Disneys to be called the California Institute of the Arts. Charlemagne and Simone Forti met there in 1970, when La Monte Young asked them to arrange a California concert for Pandit Pran Nath. They decided to try an improvisation session together and Charlemagne invited Simone the first time to the electronic music studio where he worked regularly. Their medium blended as a play of interacting sound waves and solid matter in motion as Charlemagne and Simone shared energy and focus. The three previously unreleased recordings on this LP were made between October and December 1971. The first take, titled 'Illumination,' is for two voices moving in the space with small bells and crystal glasses while Simone Forti plays the molimo, a corrugated tube meant for connecting the gas stove. The second take titled, 'Wed Oct 13th 1971,' has Simone and Charlemagne in a song dialogue as animals do. It was also at Cal Arts that Charlemagne Palestine first encountered a Bosendorfer Imperial Piano of Vienna. He played it often as Simone danced during their 'Illuminations'. Take three is a song sang in falsetto while playing the Bosendorfer Imperial in an arpeggiated style that predates the 'strummings'. Listening to these 'three takes' 40 years later, they ooze a timeless, carefree mystical, magical, dreamy atmosphere that evoked the times of the late 60s to early 70s in Charlemagne and Simone part of the California Art Scene. 'Illuminations' were a unique open spontaneous form of performance, ritual and prayer
I was only able to get the Corner & Knowles tracks from Ubu as the George Brecht track listed as Das "Hsin Hsin Ming" Des Seng Ts'an is actually an excerpted track from the Flux Tellus compilation with James Tenney.
Ps- These were a most enjoyable listen and the Alison Knowles track Bean Sequences • Bohnen-Sequenzen will certainly show up again in this years garden rotation!
It's going to take a while till I get around to this and I hope it's as interesting the Bean Sequences. 1992 Frijoles Canyon
Ruth Crawford Seeger, orig.Ruth Porter Crawford, (born July 3, 1901,
East Liverpool, Ohio, U.S.—died Nov. 18, 1953, Chevy Chase, Md.), U.S.
composer. She studied piano as a child and was self-taught as a composer
until she entered the American Conservatory. After early works
influenced by Alexander Scriabin, she wrote several astonishing serial
pieces, including her String Quartet (1931). She married the
musicologist Charles Seeger (1886–1979) in 1931, becoming folk singer
Pete Seeger’s stepmother. She composed little after that but became an
influential curator of American folk music.
Perhaps the most astonishing, seductive and compelling of
Partch's works, Delusionstands as the Choral Symphony or Ring Cycle do
to other composers: a culminating testament to a lifetime of "doing
your own thing."
Like composer Conlon Nancarrow, Partch had to wait until late in life
for his radical contributions to the arts to receive wide attention.
With the 1969 production of Delusion he was "discovered", idolized, and
gurufied, as a 43-tone-to-the-octave, ex-hobo, eccentric, maverick,
iconoclastic instrument-builder, and a "philosophic music-man seduced
into carpentry." Hippy hyperbole notwithstanding, Partch was a genuine
far-out radical whose time has come. Again. "Sounds like this have
rarely been heard before, at least not on this planet." Delusion of the
Fury is a 72' totally-integrated, corporeal, microtonal, elemental work
of ritual theater, incorporating almost all of Partch's hand-built
orchestra of sculptural instruments. Using mime, dance, music,
vocalizations, lighting, and costume, Partch presents two tales
concerning reconciliation of life and death, one after a Japanese Noh
drama, the other after an Ethiopian folk tale.
Comments
Musique Concrète Soundtracks To Experimental Short Films vol 1 - 6 (1956-1978)
"We finally agreed on a list which made me quite happy” says Oswald. “lt effectively took me out of the Plunderphonic CD distribution business. I could no longer send these things around for free. I was ordered to destroy the CDs which l had remaining in my possession, which were about 300. They were delivered to CRIA's lawyers by my lawyers and were subsequently crushed by somebody they hired. This made me quite happy because it put them in a position of being CD crushers, audio book burners and all the things we can associate with those fascist type tactics. Their initial demands were that all copies be recalled. I said I wasn‘t willing to do that, and I got my lawyer to convince them that it was impractical and unnecessary. But to back that up, I had statements from several radio stations, most particularly KPFA in San Francisco, that they weren’t willing to give up their copy, and they would welcome a visit from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police trying to take it back. We also had an agreement that if I fulfilled those requirements I could talk all l wanted about the thing.”
Ultimately, John Oswald wasn’t concerned about the destruction of the master, because of the disabled copy-protection flag, any of the existing CDs could be recorded digitally, and after all, it could be listened to in libraries and radio stations across the country. Distribution was then taken up by radio stations and organizations like the "Copyright violation squad" in Iowa who would dub copies free of charge if supplied with a blank cassette.
Dove 4.
Kurt Schwitters: Simultangedicht kaa gee dee, 1919: WW, 1922: boo, 1926: naa, 1926: bii bull ree, 1936: Obervogelsang, 1946: Niesscherzo e Hustenscherzo, 1937: Cigarren, 1921: The real disuda of the nightmare, 1946
Recorded at Studio 2/Radio DRS, December 29, 1991 (Zürich, Switzerland).
- The same recording as the Hat Now Art release but without the 3 extra tracks.
All Stockhausen scores, CDs and books can be ordered at Stockhausen Verlag.
All music courtesy of Stockhausen Foundation for Music, 51515 Kürten, Germany.
Had Xenakis bought a laptop in 1999, he may have produced something comparable to Grunt and its posthuman #voicenoise aesthetic. Yet this is a wholly unique piece of work. As with Xenakis, Piotr takes recognisably analogue sounds – particularly the voice, but also drawing on acoustic instrumentation and found-sounds from nature – and reconstructs them into 21 intricate ‘electroacoustic’ miniatures. Yet Piotr is less interested in dissolving these boundaries between electric and acoustic than he is in hybridising the organic and the digital. Grunt is subversively queer in its posthuman composition. . . .
This selection was made with regard to the "historical" interest of certain works (La fleur de barbe, 1st publicly performed piece - Gai savoir, 1st work using 2 tape recorders - Terre foisonnante, and Prospère, prolifère, his last musical works which were mixed in the recording studio) and with the aim of providing the listener with the widest possible range of the various "instruments" used.
As the different elements which combined to make up these works were recorded using monophonic techniques, they were all produced in mono during DUBUFFET'S lifetime.
Être Dieu: opéra-poème, audiovisuel et cathare en six parties (French for "Being God: a Cathar Audiovisual Opera-Poem in Six Parts") is a self-proclaimed "opera-poem" written by Spanish surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, based on a libretto by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán with music by French avant-garde musician Igor Wakhévitch. It was originally published in 1985.
The six-part work features Dali as God, Brigitte Bardot as an artichoke and Catherine the Great and Marilyn Monroe do a striptease. It has been published in an extremely rare 3 LP box-set by a Spanish label. It was re-released in a regular 3CD box published by German-label Eurostar who subsequently went out of business, and there are few-to-no known performances of the work. Dalí painted "Self-Portrait" (1972) to mark the composition of the opera, which was later auctioned by the United States Customs Service after being seized after Colombian drug lords tried to use the painting to launder money.
Salvador Dali's lost opera
- Two truely wonderful pieces . . .
It reminded me then to get my copy out and listen again.
Henri Chopin – Cantata For Two Farts & Co.
Ralph Johnson and Paul Neff
At the time of its release in 1993, "The Grand Delusion" showed the Tape-beatles setting off in a new musical direction, delivering their most complex and ouright "musical" work to date. The signature found vocals and sound effects are still to be found, but to this they add energetic rhythms, urgent melodic patterns, and plaintive singing voices, using the same modified symphonic structure they applied to their previous major work, Music with Sound. Dean Suzuki, writing in Option no. 57, says:
"...The results are variously chilling, moving, humorous, tragic, outrageous, and always both provocative AND musical. The music works in concert with the spoken texts, just as the piano accompaniment comments upon and supports the text and melody of an art song by Schumann. There is a glut of musique concrete which is just so much noise, but a dearth of that which is as musical as this."
The CD includes the entire soundtrack of the Tape-beatles' PolyVision 'expanded cinema' piece, also called "The Grand Delusion". To this has been added a substantial amount of additional audio material to enrich the main themes, which center on how war today is waged as much in the psychological theatre as it is on the battlefield. This, the re-issued version, appearing seven years after its first release, adds some twenty minutes of never-before released works to the track sequence, augmenting the main themes of the work with valuable new contributions.
Philip Blackburn talks with the Tape Beatles (Lloyd Dunn, John Heck, Ralph Johnson, Paul Neff, Linda Morgan Brown) at the Mandarin Cafe, Waterloo, Iowa, May 24, 1992.
In No Exit, for example, he used three main sound sources: electronic, vocal and concréte. The electronic sounds range from searing and slicing noises, to the ominous, bell-like tolling at the end. Here his use of the human voice is especially effective, starting with the torturous, electronically manipulated screams of the opening scene, through the voices of distant children, a woman humming, echoing male voices, and at the end, men laughing -- suddenly silenced by rifle fire. The concréte sounds in No Exit include a threatening, pulsing loop of hog sounds (which appear in varied form in Line of Apogee), the rising wind (also developed in Line of Apogee), the crackling of fire, a clock ticking, and the rifle fire.
In Line of Apogee, Ussachevsky used an intriguing variety of sources: Environmental: wind, footsteps, splashing water, telephone, creaking chair. Animal: hog, songbirds, owl. Vocal: infant crying and laughing, woman humming and laughing, choruses singing Gregorian chant; Jewish cantor intoning. Instrumental: piano (Ussachevsky improvising), flute, organ, brass, glockenspiel, drums.
These sources were electronically modulated through such devices and techniques as the electronic switch, echo chamber, feedback, ring modulation, tape loops, speed variation, volume control, complex mixing and detailed tape editing. . . .
Ussachevsky was one of the most significant pioneers in the composition of electronic music, and one of its most potent forces. Born in 1911 in Manchuria, China, Ussachevsky was the son of a Russian Army captain. His childhood was spent on the windswept and sparsely settled Manchurian plain, visiting with the nomadic tribesmen in their tents, and singing Old Slavonic chants as an altar boy in the local Russian Orthodox church. By the time he arrived in California, at the age of nineteen, he was a skilled pianist gifted in the interpretation of Romantic music, and a fluent improvisor. After receiving his undergraduate degree in music from Pomona College, he earned a Ph.D. in composition from the Eastman School of Music. From 1947 until his retirement in 1980, Ussachevsky taught at Columbia University, where he was known for his teaching of sixteenth-century counterpoint. But in his career there, he began experimenting with the use of tape recorders to manipulate sounds. Through much experimentation he developed the first works of "tape music," a uniquely American synthesis of the French musique-concréte and the German pure electronic schools. In 1952, Ussachevsky's first works of tape music were performed at an historic concert at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, along with works of his colleague Otto Luening. Through a five-year grant awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1959, Ussachevsky co-founded the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and directed its course for the next twenty years as the leading electronic music studio in the United States. . . .
Philip Corner from UbuWeb
1990 Philip Corner/Alison Knowles/George Brecht 1997 Word - Voices
- Fluxus
I was only able to get the Corner & Knowles tracks from Ubu as the George Brecht track
listed as Das "Hsin Hsin Ming" Des Seng Ts'an is actually an excerpted track from the
Flux Tellus compilation with James Tenney.
Ps- These were a most enjoyable listen and the Alison Knowles track
Bean Sequences • Bohnen-Sequenzen will certainly show up again
in this years garden rotation!
It's going to take a while till I get around to this and I hope it's as interesting the
Bean Sequences.
1992 Frijoles Canyon
Like composer Conlon Nancarrow, Partch had to wait until late in life for his radical contributions to the arts to receive wide attention. With the 1969 production of Delusion he was "discovered", idolized, and gurufied, as a 43-tone-to-the-octave, ex-hobo, eccentric, maverick, iconoclastic instrument-builder, and a "philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry." Hippy hyperbole notwithstanding, Partch was a genuine far-out radical whose time has come. Again. "Sounds like this have rarely been heard before, at least not on this planet." Delusion of the Fury is a 72' totally-integrated, corporeal, microtonal, elemental work of ritual theater, incorporating almost all of Partch's hand-built orchestra of sculptural instruments. Using mime, dance, music, vocalizations, lighting, and costume, Partch presents two tales concerning reconciliation of life and death, one after a Japanese Noh drama, the other after an Ethiopian folk tale.