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Alvin Lucier is best known for his pioneering work in the mid-sixties in the exploration of sonic environments, particularly sounds that we would never perceive under ordinary circumstances. Vespers and Other Early Works restores to the catalog several of his key works from that time. In Vespers (1969) performers with Sondols (sonar-dolphin), hand-held pulse wave oscillators, explore the acoustic characteristics of given indoor or outdoor spaces by monitoring the echoes of the pulse waves off th…
Yellow vinyl edition of 100 with download card. Fabrica Records announces the second volume in the Same Animal, Different Cages series by American composer and improviser David First. On this second installment in the Same Animal, Different Cages series of tonal investigations, David First dons his no-madder-than-you scientist's lab coat and proceeds to fire up and overheat his newest subject, a Korg MS-20. The resulting six tracks are characterized by rapid-fire analog oscillations, relentlessl…
Pogus Productions is proud to release The Complete Gramavision Session by The World Casio Quartet, composer David First’s 1980s microtonal group. The members of the group were David First, Esther Sandrof, and Brian Charles, all playing Casio CZ-1000’s and Kevin Sparke on a Casio CZ-101. I had the opportunity to see them perform once or twice back then, and it was indeed a magical and mind-bending thing to experience. Now, finally, with this release, everyone can have a listen as well.Here’s what…
Deep Listening Publications, 1990. Second edition. Stapled wrps., 42pp. Illustrated. Fifteen pieces some including audience participation (1971-1990). Through her Deep Listening Pieces and earlier Sonic Meditations (1971), Pauline Oliveros helped introduce the concept of incorporating all environmental sounds into musical performance. This requires focused concentration, skilled musicianship. and strong improvisational skills, which are the hallmarks of Oliveros' form.
"The New Backwards" was conceived by Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson in 2007, revisiting stray tracks which hadn't seemed to gel with the material he had chosen for the more somber "Ape of Naples" from 2005, Coil's initial posthumous release, a sort of requiem and a kiss-goodbye to his then recently deceased partner John Balance. Significantly different to its sister release, this album collects the brilliantly chaotic and outrageously rhythmic material from the original sessions for the album tha…
Wall of Sound is a music of sonic sensations. It is a physical and sensual approach to the phenomenon of thick sound worlds. Sound waves become physical objects, four-dimensional sonic sculptures to be experienced, bodily and mentally. Ulrich Krieger's Wall Of Sound is a series of CDs about music that invites the listener to indulge themselves in sound. It doesn't guide an audience through a narrative, like a song, but offers the listener slow changing and developing soundscapes, acoustic sculpt…
A fifty-foot wire runs through the poles of a large magnet and is driven by an oscillator, with microphones at either end. Set going at four different frequencies, it produces not the low drone you would expect but a shifting set of chords.
CD with 20-page booklet. Recorded March 2001, Hessischer Rundfunk, Frankfurt. "Time and again I find myself having to pare away any musical gestures in a work in order to uncover the true idea in a piece." Alvin Lucier said this about his own practice of stripping composition back to its acoustic logic - removing the performer's ego, the expressive gesture, the narrative arc, until only the phenomenon remains. What is left, in each of the five works gathered here, is resonance: sympathetic vibra…
Three works investigating interference between instruments and oscillators. When closely tuned tones sound together, their oscillations create audible beats that spin through space. Lucier reveals acoustic phenomena through minimal means
Scorn is dead. Mick Harris has said it himself, repeatedly, over the years, but this time the sentence has the weight of finality. Anamnesis, expanded to a four LP set and issued by GOD Records as catalog GOD 80, is the last word. Few projects have travelled the distance Harris travelled. From the blast beats that helped invent grindcore in Napalm Death to the cavernous low end and pulverising patience of Scorn, his career describes one of the strangest arcs in British underground music. Formed …
Recorded in Paris in 1965, Don Cherry’s Togetherness is a five‑part live suite where pocket‑trumpet chants, Gato Barbieri’s searing tenor, vibes and a dancing rhythm section turn early free jazz into something fiercely open yet strangely joyful.
With With a Heartbeat, Pharoah Sanders and Bill Laswell ride the amplified pulse of the human heart into a slow, glowing trance, fusing tabla cycles, electronic drones and cornet smears into four long arcs of cosmic late‑period Sanders.
Akio Suzuki has always been an artist in search of unexpected sound, and curiosity has been his guiding principle. Whether that be curiosity for objects, spaces or places, his work has been guided by a porousness and pliability which has allowed him to explore an enormous sonic terrain. This freedom has also allowed him to develop a language in sound that remains utterly his own. Nowhere is this more evident than in his approach to instrument creation. During the 1970s Akio Suzuki devised a seri…
"With concentration, or elevated tension as he has called it, Akio Suzuki enters completely into the substance of sound, its emergence and its passing. What he does with sound may propose a rarefied world to many people, and yet it possesses a persuasive quality of rightness. One of the most difficult aspects of music and soundwork to explain is the concept of ‘right action’. How is that music can be evaluated almost immediately, just as quickly as a fire alarm or a baby’s cry? When Akio perform…
With Annular Silhouettes, Brad E. Rose traces an undulating pathway through ideas of place, memory, and intergenerational exchange. The edition is a mediation on how perspective is shaped, and reshaped, in time. More so it explores how change is simultaneously incremental and accumulative. This is reflected in the compositional strategies he deploys. Elements arrive and pass with an almost subconscious logic. Their pace is measured, but entirely fluid, creating a sense of breathing or perhaps ev…
Remember hearing music while dreaming, fully confident that you’ll be able to reconstruct it once awake? Music that, as it turns out, you were the sole witness. In retrospect, why ruin the experience by something so vulgar as hearing it a second time, much less having to share it? We don’t mean to alarm you, but David Grubbs and Liam Keenan have returned from the dark side of the pillow bearing Your Music Encountered in a Dream.
In late 2014, feeling stifled by the negativity of the Australian political discourse, the narcissistic excess of social media, and facing a long summer of migraine-inducing heat, I turned to the prepared piano as a refuge. I was coming out of an intense two-year period of composing for every conceivable instrumental combination, and not sure where to go next. I felt the need to get back to basics, and create something essential, elemental. These pieces are meditations, each with its own …
"Ken Jacobs, an essential figure of avant-garde cinema, and I had over-a-decade-long collaboration. We first performed fo his Nervous Magic Lantern project at the Argos Festival in Brussels in 2007. Before flying to Europe, Ken invited me to the top-floor loft on Chambers Street in TriBeCa, where Ken and his wife, Flo, have lived and worked since 1965, to experience a private screening. He turned on the apparatus and the image flashed onto the screen: geometric patterns — something of a Rorschac…