Futurism & Dada Reviewed
Archive aural document collection edited by James Nice and originally released via Sub Rosa in 1989. This unique CD compiles over an hour of original sound recordings made between 1912 and 1959 by luminaries from both 20th Century art movements, including: Marinetti, Antonio Russolo, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, Wyndham Lewis, Guillaume Apollinaire, Kurt Schwitters, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck. Includes musical and interview material, tone poems, and sleevenotes. Artwork…
Erratum #4 / Sound Review / Art + Noise + Poetry
Sound poetry and poetry of sound. Edited and assembled by Joachim Montessuis. Joël Hubaut, Erik Samakh, Atau Tanaka, AGF, José Iges, Lee Ranaldo, R.H.Y. Yau, Rainier Lericolais, Francisco López, Gary Hill, Charles Pennequin, Ira Cohen, Phill Niblock, Joachim Montessuis, Le Dépeupleur, Julien Ottavi, Robin Minard, Guillermo Goméz Peña, Guillermo Galindo, Brandon LaBelle, Pierre André Arcand, Christina Kubisch, Fréderic Dumond, Christophe Charles, Henning Christiansen, EHB, laboiteblanche, Tommi G…
Erratum #3, Revue Sonore / Sound Review
This lengthy compilation offers up a mixed bag of the fascinating and the wearisome. Peak bits of said fascination here would have to be Gregory Whitehead, Gilles Richard and the duo of Patrick Muller and Jean-Francois Bory, who all offer up wonderfully sick vocal based surrealist audio malformations. Elsewhere, Zbigniew Kakowski dishes up nerve janging sinewaves and distorted field recordings while Dinsinformation and Charlemagne Palestine both maddeningly revel in stasis, with unwavering low-e…
BAUHAUS REVIEWED 1919-1933
The first audiobook CD to explore the highly influential Bauhaus school of art and architecture, which operated in Germany between 1919 and 1933.The spoken word element centres on a revealing talk by Walter Gropius, the architect and theoretician who founded the Bauhaus in 1919. The CD also includes contributions from the school's third and final director, architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and teacher Josef Albers. All interviews are in the English language. The music content of the CD feature…
Avanto 2006
Three-way split release featuring an extended piece each by Tony Conrad, Ralf Wehowsky, and Jim O’Rourke. Tony’s piece works a lone processed violin to glorious effect; the solo variant of his “four violins.” Ralf’s is a musique concrète piece built out of assorted instrumentation and children’s vocals (coming across like a lost international harvester/älgarnas trädgard out-take in spots...) jim’s is an awesome side-length-plus rumination of drone-sound (harkening back to his “disengage” era) in…
20 JAHRE INVENTIONEN IV
Sound installations and audiovisual material: This CD-Rom provides the programme notes accompanied by audiovisual material in the form of short QuickTime movies, photographs and mp3-files. It may be viewed with any current web browser on a variety of platforms.David Behrman: Pen LightDavid Behrman: View FinderGordon Monahan: When It RainsGordon Monahan: Etheric Theremin HarmonicTerry Fox: Litanies of InterferenceTerry Fox: bad installationRobin Minard: SoundBits 01Hannah Leonie Prinzler: _['dΛzn…
Music for Tinguely
This is volume 5 of Omega Point's newly-reissued Obscure Tape Music of Japan series, available in a limited edition of 1000 copies, also with an LP version in a limited edition of 300 copies. Toshi Ichiyanagi is a well-renowned Japanese avant-garde composer who made brilliant pieces of tape music. Most of his works have not been issued on CD, or have only been issued in very small editions. This CD consists of three of his obscure tape works. "Music for Tinguely" (1963) was made from the jun…
Rational Melodies
“I want to find the music, not to compose it". This statement, one of Tom Johnson's most effective, explains the general sense of the music of this CD and of most of Tom's musical research. The Rational Melodies are one of the most important instrumental cycles of the "new music" repertoire. Here we have the application of rational methodology to musical composition, using additive operations, combinations, permutations, substitutions, inversions and other logical processes as directed by the ea…
À travers le bord
The product of a definite convergence of ideas as well as my own nascent french, the title Á Travers le Bord can be interpreted as both a ‘crossing through’ a material edge or border and a liminal move from exterior to interior, or vice versa, in terms of, for example, flesh, or more generally, selfhood. A happy accident. Though I would never presume to attribute any central meaning to music, such border crossings are a constant in my life a…
Ataraxia
Long out of print now, an awesome CD by Terry Fox "Apparently (reading between the lines of the cover notes) Terry Fox is of that breed of sound artist that refuses to get into technology, and instead seeks out other ways of making sound that feels electronic or unreal. As such, it is hard to believe that 'Ataraxia' is all totally acoustic, with no electronic manipulation. It sounds as though tape loops, echo and reverb devices are used on most numbers, but what he uses instead are long wires, p…
Light forms (music for light bulbs and churches)
This is the third release on the Semishigure label that specializes in music & sound works related to films or installations from the visual arts. Light Forms is the new album from Calfornia based musician/artist Steve Roden which contains two pieces that are constructed from the sound material of two installations that he made in Germany. Both of these pieces started with the same sound: a group of small glass light bulbs handled acoustically. These acoustic sounds were then processed electroni…
I speak through a hole in my head...
the series of texts was originally spoken improvisationally into a micro cassette recorder while driving to and from my studio in 1988. nothing was written down or planned before i pressed 'record'. the entire work is printed here. unedited and in the order spoken. the periods mark the ending of each recorded segment. some of the pieces are responses to things seen and some are about speaking, and the sounds of words. i would suggest not only a mental reading, but a verbal one as well.the drawin…
One stone and arcs and ears
this 7" was created for the exhibition "invisible other" at the new american art union in portland oregon. in the original installation the 7" sat on a turntable that could be activated by viewers. here are some notes that accompanied the work... the sound was created by editing out all of the speaking out of the soundtrack LP of robert bresson's film "proces de jeanne d'arc".
ear(th)
beautiful catalogue + cd edition, the cd contains a field recording of the installation ear(th), which was a collaboration with two scientists from cal tech - Ann Polsenberg-Thomas, and Mark Simons. The installation consisted of an 8' x 16' x 24' wooden structure with 80 robots on the roof that would strike glockenspiel bars based on data translating an image of an earthquake. It was comissioned by the Williamson Gallery at Art center college of design for The tender land festival. The CD was d…
More Canned porridge
Sten Hanson has been working with experimental music, literature and art since the beginning of the 1960's, cultivating both instrumental, vocal and electro-acoustic music for performance on radio and television, on outdoor occasions or from the concert platform. From an early stage he was aware of the importance of tape-recording techniques in the renewal and development of poetry’s resources. Text-sound-visual image, often combined with intensely personal 'live" performances, are vital ingredi…
Canned porridge
The works here come from four decades, which in Swedish folklore is called an "adult man´s lifetime". Four decades is a long time, even if it may seem scarily short when you look back on it. Of course the artist is not the same person at 70 as at 30. Knowing that, I have made it a principle never to go back and reverse old works, even if I'm not too happy with them. Doing that you can be almost certain to make the works worse and not better, as one can learn from countless historical examples.In…
The Sonosopher Retrospective
Awesome anthology of Sten Hanson text-sound composition..."Fylkingen has, in the course of its many years of activity, become a familiar factor in Swedish, as well as international, musical life, a unique forum for the presentation of experimental art. Since very early it began to work in collaboration with an electronic music studio in Stockholm for the creation of technically satisfactory performance possibilities. The movement within Sweden in sound poetry/text-sound composition took hold in …
Sten Hanson
'Hymne à la beauté' (1995), 'Recyclings' (1993-96), '8 variations sur une polska de Hammerdal', 'La mer d'Ulysse' (1999).
Text-sound gems & trinkets
England's Bob Cobbing and France's Henri Chopin. A sound poet -- or text-sound composer as the Swedish like to call this art form -- of exquisite talent, Hanson has scattered an impressive number of works on compilation albums and the odd solo LP or CD, most of which remain very hard to find. In 2002, Firework Edition Records released Text-Sound Gems & Trinkets, a solid collection of 25 of Hanson's recordings for a total duration of 73 minutes. Presented in chronological order, the short pieces …