Cornelius Cardew. A reader
A very nice book brings together a diverse collection of Cornelius Cardew's major essays and writings from different stages of his career, together with commentaries by other writers associated with his work. It reflects developments, changes and contradictions in his thinking about music from the late 1950s to the end of his life. As a companion volume to John Tilbury's biography 'Cornelius Cardew a life unfinished', Copula, 2006 (ISBN 0 9525492 3 9) it provides essential material for the study…
Vex
Vex consists of three sections, each section features a different collaborator: Michel F. Côté, Louis Ouellet, Gregory Whitehead. Vex is a meeting place which is divisible by three: Erik Satie, Gilles Deleuze, Antonin Artaud. Vex is a series of accidents, problematic strategies, absurd tactics and misunderstood languages. Communication between two persons becomes a third. This other is the territory where the two coexist and translate each other. It is a junction where collisions abound, a site…
Twelve signals
New CD from German sound artist Christina Kubisch on Semishigure, a similar exploration of sound & silence as the first one, Diapason (SEMI 002). On Twelve Signals Kubisch used original miner bells from a German mine to produce an hour long piece of bell tones. Several electrical bells were hit with small hammers each giving forth a sequence of clear bell tones that hover in the air. This live recording was made in the St. Matthaeus-Kirche in Berlin: halfway through the recording the original ri…
Diapason
Germany most famous sound artist with a new album recorded exclusively with tuning forks. A meditative album that takes on a different meaning, feeling and association with every sound, in places almost microsound-ish and in others like a heavily delayed gamelan set. CD comes with a beautiful 16-page colour booklet with shots of the tuning forks and the installation where this is piece is taken from. Last copy available
Dreaming of a major third
The second Christina Kubisch CD on RZ, from one of Germany's more important sound composers. This features is a composition for the clocktowerof the MA Museum of Contemporary Art. All the sounds derive directly from the original bells from the MASS MoCA clocktower. The sounds have been pitch shifted and attack shaped, but have not been electronically altered. The result is a CD of ultimate installation drone and a must for fans of the Het Apollohuis aesthetic, sound artists like Bill Fontana, et…
Vier Stücke
Four pieces from arguably the most cited sound-sculpt of our time, recently fêted via an exposé in The Wire (October 2001). 'Vocrolls II' (1988) consists of recordings of a glass sphere coming to rest in a Tibetan metal bowl, processed in physics-defying fashion through an early desktop port of the now-prevalent phase vocoder algorithm. 'Mouse Ware' (1998) is the soundtrack to an installation (10 different makes and models of computer mouse are preserved in alcohol, accompanied by 10 user-friend…
Live improvisations
All live improvisations should be this much fun! This live date between turntablist and electronic weirdmeister Christian Marclay and percussionist and electronics tinkerer Günter Müller is what the art of improvisation is supposed to be: fun, continually compelling textually, and inspired. While many intellectuals have made wild pronouncements about Marclay and his art -- and it is art, make no mistake -- writing all sorts of blather about how he strips the adult century bare by his cutting up …
More encores
Since 1979 Christian Marclay has been experimenting, composing and performing with phonograph records. His interest in records, both as objects and bearers of sound, is expressed through sculpture, performance, video and music. In performance, he mixes a wide variety of records on up to 8 turntables, fragmenting, repeating, altering speeds, playing the records backwards, etc. More Encores was originally released as a 10" vinyl record on No Man's Land (Germany) in 1988, composed entirely of recor…
Replay Marclay
extremely limited LP by the artist/turntable god Christian Marclay’s ‘Guitar Drag’. The piece was originally a video, shown in 2000 at London’s Hayward Gallery, following an electric guitar lashed to the back of a pick-up truck in dusty San Antonio, Texas. The guitar was dragged by the truck for 15 minutes and the sound recorded, which resulted in otherworldly rumblings, hissing, buzzing and crunching – even the odd chord strangely enough, and of course, the soundtrack quickly achieved cu…
TV cello
Private edition limited to 200 copies "A documentation of Charlotte Moorman activities as a performer is generally available only on the iconographic level in various catalogues which documents the crucial intersection with the work of Nam June Paik or the association with events connected to the Fluxus movement. One of Charlotte Moorman's more substantial merits is having consciously reversed the traditional role of the virtuoso performer on her own instrument, uncovering by this overturning on…
Sacred Bordello
2004 release. Special edition of Sacred Bordello (originally published by Black Dog Publishing) bundled with a limited edition CD released by Alga Marghen. As one of the most influential figures of experimental music and performance, Charlemagne Palestine has remained an enigma. Unlike his illustrious contemporaries Terry Riley, John Cale, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass, little has been written on Palestine and his continuing influence. In his own right, he was and remains today a pivotal person…
negative sound study
Negative Sound Study was composed in 1969 directly on a historical Buchla 100-System experimental synthesizer available at the Intermedia Centre of the New York University. Charlemagne Palestine was dreaming of an expressive continuous evermoving, everchanging sound form; an enormous sonorous, 3-dimensional sculptural canvas in mid-air using electronically produced sounds. The first experiments were done with simple sine tone generators emitting the purest sound waves without any overtones. With…
Godbear / Jamaica
Originally released on the Barooni label and sold out since a long time. Charlemagne palestine and Alga Marghen have decided to make the two cds available in a new 2cd set edition. The cds are a new print of the original ones, both included in a newly designed slipcase. Godbear. Flying. In the stratosphere of the overtones. Turn out the lights. Close your eyes. Trance out. Into SONORAMAGNIFICATALAND. Pushed by Remy Martin cognac, the piano would replay the encoded performances exactly in three p…
Charlemagne at Sonnabend
First time available 2CD set art-edition of the Charlemagne Palestine performances at Sonnabend Gallery, New York City, 2001. Privately issued by the composer in collaboration with Sonnabend Gallery and issued in an edition of 300 signed copies in large silkscreened gatefold folio in 2002. This art edition was never officially distributed and after 10 years a limited amount of copies is now exclusively available for the first time from Alga Marghen. The first contact between Charlemagne Pa…
Jamaica Heinekens in Brooklyn
“Charlemagne Palestine made recordings of the Jamaica Day parade in New York City - where people from Jamaica, Guyana, Cuba, Haiti and other places come to dance, sing, eat and drink. These field recordings of shouting people, passing parade floats and helicopters hovering overhead are interwoven with the electronic sonorities. Together they give a completely new dimension to Charlemagne’s work: Jamaica Heinekens in Brooklyn is colorful, exciting, trance enducing and it slowly unfolds into a mag…
Live in London 1982
'Autumn 1982, Brixton, London, Brion gysin, the eternal accomplice of William Burroughs, renews the methods of performance by reciting texts, hastily brought together: Tessa, a member of Slits, Steve, of Rip, rig and panic, Jail, of Penguin café orchestra and Ramuntcho Matta on guitar. Ramuntcho, in the style of Brion, called this session 'white funk'. Most of the texts were written upon meeting Burroughs, at the time of the invention of the cut-up. The influence that Brion gysin has had on cont…
Poems of poems
His record presents some of the most important experiments in cut-up and recording technique by the famous poet and artist, Brion Gysin. Originally recorded in 1958 at the histori- cal Beat Hotel in Paris: ‘Language is an abominable misunderstanding which makes up a part of matter. The painters and the physicists have treated matter pretty well. The poets have hardly touched it. In March, 1958, when I was living at the Beat Hotel, I proposed to Burroughs to at least make available to literature …
Site specific sound
Site Specific Sound documents a series of sound installations from 1998 to 2002 by sound-artist and writer Brandon LaBelle. Each installation was created as part of the Beyond Music Sound Festival in Los Angeles, an annual festival on sound practice at Beyond Baroque Literary/Arts Center. Functioning site-specifically, and drawing upon the architectural structure of the building, the installations explore the relationship between sound and space by staging social and spatial interventions. In do…
50/70
50/70 presents a set of fantastically stirring performances by sound-poet and heroic cultural activist Bernard Heidsieck. Fantastic verbal anarchy sure to appeal to anyone who has ever ventured deep into the margins of free-thinking labels like ESP, United Dairies, Come Org. Features '”Poème-Partition ‘B’”' (1957), for Bernard de Pontcharra, killed in Algeria; “Poème-Partition ‘M’”, suggested by a comment made by Henry Miller about “Déserts” by Edgar Varèse; “Démocratie II” (1977) and “Publicité…
La poinçonneuse
one of his best and inspiring work, along with a huge book documenting the CD's vocal poems.