I’ve been on a crazy musique concrete kick lately, buying up classics like Cage’s Cartridge Music and the Panorama of Musique Concrete from ’56.
And just arrived from the Netherlands – Popular Electronics: The Singles Collection
#664/1000, this velvet box set was issued in 2008 by Basta Records – the label which produced the magnificent three-volume Manhattan Research set. This compilation contains faithful reissues of 1950s musique concrete 7″ classics from Dutch electronic music composers Kid Baltan, Tom Dissevelt, and H Badings.
The set contains:
Electronic Ballet Music: Cain and Abel (Philips 400 036 AE) (1956)
Electronic Popular Music (Philips 315 538 NF) (1957)
Electronic Movements (Philips430 736 PE) (1958)
and Electronic Music (Philips 430 791 PE) (1961)
Each disc includes the original sleeve and liner notes.
I first got into Baltan/Dissevelt under their Electrosoniks moniker when I found the Philips “Electronic Music” LP from 1962 at my local antique mall. Wonderful stuff!
This morning I took a trip to my old hometown of Rochester and made my routine pilgrimage to my favorite record store – The Bop Shop. The owner, Tom put a record in my hands and told me that I had to own it.
Tom has always been a wonderful source for musique concrete, minimalist works, early experimental electronic recordings and other lovely treasures of the avant-garde. Many of my favorite LPs are original pressings from his personal collection.
The LP he held was John Cage • Christian Wolff, a 1963 album featuring Cage’s side-long “Cartridge Music” – one of Cage’s earliest attempts to produce live electronic music by manipulating turntable cartridges. I’ve known Tom for years and he has never steered me wrong and this latest LP is no exception. Wonderful stuff!
I also spotted a box set in his shop which I snatched up without hesitation. Readers may recall my copy of Cyril Ritchard reading Alice in Wonderland which included a facsimile clothbound hardcover copy of the 1865 first edition with all of the original illustrations. Today in store, I discovered that Ritchard had produced a reading of Through the Looking Glass as well! And it too included a copy of the 1872 hardcover. How could I pass it up?
Upon returning home I was struck by a recollection that a Kickstarter project had been initiated for a first-ever “Earthling Edition” of the historic Voyager Golden Record, (our message to the stars). As the Kickstarter page describes:
The Voyager Golden Record contains the story of Earth expressed in sounds, images, and science: Earth’s greatest music from myriad cultures and eras, from Bach and Beethoven to Blind Willie Johnson and Chuck Berry, Senegalese percussion to Solomon Island panpipes. Dozens of natural sounds of our planet — birds, a train, a baby’s cry — are collaged into a lovely audio poem called Sounds of Earth. There are spoken greetings in 55 human languages, and one whale language, and more than one hundred images encoded in analog that depict who, and what, we are.
The closest I’d come to the Voyager disc was the limited edition “A Glorious Dawn” single from Third Man Records. The single was composed and performed by Symphony of Science and credited to an auto-tuned Carl Sagan singing about the magnificence of the universe. And etched upon the second side of the disc is the image of the Golden Record.
As a tremendous fan of Carl Sagan’s work and his legacy, and as a “cultural curator” of historically significant recordings, this anniversary Voyager project was something I knew I had to support, and to claim a copy for my library if at all possible.
The beautiful box set is being remastered by Timothy Ferris – the original producer of the Golden Record, and will include:
A cloth-covered box with gold foil inlay
Three translucent gold, heavyweight vinyl LPs in poly-lined paper sleeves
Three old-style tip-on jackets, black ink and gold foil
A hardback book showcasing the photographs and art featured on the original disc
A lithograph of Voyager Golden Record cover diagram, gold metallic ink on archival paper
A full-color plastic digital download card for all audio of the record in MP3 or FLAC
What a wonderful way to celebrate our message to space!
And it turned out that my hunch was aptly timed, as I found there were only five days remaining in the Kickstarter campaign, and pledging to the project is the only way to claim a copy of this special release! I pledged immediately and look forward to the album’s launch in 2017.
Check out the short official video for the project and pledge while you still can!
A friend from one of the vinyl communities I frequent kindly recommended that I explore the Austrian Recollection GRM sublabel – a series of reissues of records and archival recordings from Groupe De Recherches Musicales, produced by Peter Rehberg in coordination with Christian Zanési & François Bonnet at GRM under the parent label, Editions Mego. They contain fantastic specimens of experimental electronic / Musique Concrète and certainly right up my alley.
I compiled a complete v0 label archive last night in order to survey their recordings and was surprised to find that a few of the albums are reissues of another favorite sublabel of mine – France’s Philips Prospective 21c siecle. (Certainly indicative of their quality!)
Here is the Discogs index, featuring recordings from Bernard Parmegiani, Iannis Xenakis, Jean-Claude Risset, Pierre Schaeffer and others.
And as my friend kindly noted, this is the only way you’ll find Luc Ferrari’s “Presque Rien” in its entirety in a vinyl format.
With the whole of my Saturday evening at my command I decided to delve deeper into the culture surrounding a yet-unread title on my bookshelf – The notorious Illuminatus! Trilogy. Little did I know that the exploration would bring a number of my artistic and musical favorites full-circle in a sphere of related influence!
Having read Malaclypse the Younger’s Principia Discordia, (a wonderful bit of counter-cultural madness), I already had a fundamental (mis)understanding of the lunacy that is Discordianism. But in my readings, there were multiple references to its earlier incarnation – the social revolutionaries known as The Situationist International.
For those unfamiliar with the group, their philosophy is, for the most part, summarized thusly:
[Situationism] is derived primarily from anti-authoritarian Marxism and the avant-garde art movements of the early 20th century, particularly Dada and Surrealism. Overall, situationist theory represented an attempt to synthesize this diverse field of theoretical disciplines into a modern and comprehensive critique of mid-20th century advanced capitalism.
Essential to situationist theory was the concept of the spectacle, best-illustrated in Guy Debord’s 1967 book and found-footage film – each titled, La société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle).
The Spectacle is a criticism of advanced Capitalism, where real-life experiences are replaced with the commodified consumerist culture of living through one’s possessions. The Situationists viewed this passive consumption as damaging to the quality of human life for both individuals and society. Instead of living vicariously through one’s purchases and property, the Situationists sought to create situations – moments of life deliberately constructed for the purpose of reawakening and pursuing authentic desires, experiencing the feeling of life and adventure, and the liberation of everyday life.
The film, The Society of the Spectacle (1973) is available in its entirety, dubbed Fr subbed Eng here:
And only a few years later, the film Network (1976) would similarly address the societal dangers of mass media.
This philosophy was clearly an influence on the hippie art scene of the 1960 with their staging of nearly-spontaneous Happenings. I was honored to attend the first Happening of the season in Buffalo for an impromptu performance of Terry Riley’s In C with participation from children in the audience.
Tracking the influence back even further (and then again, to the present) I learned of the French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou known as Lettrisme (Lettrism) and his concept of Hypergraphics in 1954.
Here is an Orson Welles Interview featuring Isidore Isou and Lettrist poetry – rich with Dadaist influence.
In 1958, Columbia Records issued the very first recordings of Letterist poetry – Maurice Lemaître presente le lettrisme.
This poetry adds another level of historical context to the performance I attended by composer Ethan Hayden at the University at Buffalo this past January. While there was likely a Situationist influence on his work, “…ce dangereux supplément…” (2015) for solo voice (with optional electronics & video), Hayden’s piece is phonetically and linguistically more refined (though equally absurd!) both in its content and his delivery. While I absolutely recognize the importance of Isidore Isou’s philosophy and his primitivist poems, Hayden has a far-greater command of language (or perhaps of nonsense?) and I look forward to his future performances.
And in 2007 to celebrate the life of Isou, The End of the Age of Divinity was published in his honor. The book is available for free below.
Once again coming full-circle to more recent artistic movements, Lettrism brought me to aforementioned Lettrist hypergraphical art, pictured below.
While I am by no means a scholar of art history, the influence here is clear as day on the 1990s typographic art of David Carson (famed for his work in Raygun Magazine and for Nine Inch Nails) and on Karl Hyde and John Warwicker’s Tomato art collective, which created the deconstructivist typographical art for Underworld’s Dubnobasswithmyheadman.
The work of David Carson…
and of Tomato…
Art of this nature is rooted in the cut-up technique first employed by the Dadaists in the 1920 and again in the late 1950s and early 1960s by William S. Burroughs. But it was the audio incarnation of cut-up that I first encountered in music culture, from the earliest (and quite literal) tape cut-ups of musique concrete, to the resurfacing of the method by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Eno, and others, to the explosion of sampledelica culture in 1980s and 90s hip-hop and turntablism.
And around the same time, the radical and subversive art of culture jamming was born. The term, coined in 1984, refers to any form of guerilla communication, such as the vandalist works by The Billboard Liberation Front and the illegal-art sample-based music of Negativland.
All of this brought me back, yet again full-circle to The KLF. The documentary, On the Passage of a few People through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International 1956-1972 contains flashes of the phrase,
“The Time for Art is Over.”
This very notion was later reiterated by Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond of the KLF in the K Foundation’s cryptic adverts appearing in UK national newspapers in 1993. The first ad proclaimed,
The Situationist documentary is available on Youtube in 3 parts.
It is only now that I realize that John Higgs’ endlessly fascinating book, THE KLF: Chaos, Magic, and the Band Who Burned a Million Pounds directly referenced the Situationists, the Discordians, Alan Moore and “Ideaspace”, and Robert Anton Wilson – all of the key figures I am now exploring.
Incredible discoveries are waiting to be made every day, and quiet Saturday evenings, like yesterday’s, are gleaming with potential for magic just like this. I’ve now a week ahead of me and a century of exciting new art to explore.
Anyone who follows this blog with any frequency knows how much of a stretch it is for me to dig a contemporary recording, let alone a modern track by a “band” instead of a composer. Even scarcer still are the selections I enjoy which contain lyrics and any sort of verse structure akin to rock.
The above is particularly applicable at present as I’ve spent the past week delving deep into the masterworks of musique concrete and electroacoustic composition – recordings which not only abandon contemporary pop structures like lyricism and melody, but forgo the entire tonal system itself, instead favoring abstract and atonal plunderphonics!
So it is with immense surprise and satisfaction that I state the following – A user contacted me on last.fm this week and shared an unsigned band’s recent video… and I absolutely loved it!
They call themselves Museum – four gents from Berlin who self-released their album, Traces Of on their own label – beat is murder.
Traces Of followed the release of two EPs – Exit Wounds and Old Firehand but the 2012 single “The Law” is the fan-recommended track which introduced me to their work. (They actually do the whole lowercase-sentence-fragment thing but I’ve capitalized their releases here for the sake of readability. Sorry lads.)
Their official site is inactive, simply stating that the album’s release is scheduled for Jul 6, 2012, however the band appears to be active with a performance scheduled at FiestaCity 2014 on Aug 29th – Place du Martyr, Verviers, Belgium.
This recording came onto my radar at quite an opportune time. The first thing I noticed from the first 20 seconds of the tune’s music video was that the band had incorporated elements of tape music and musique concrete as the very foundation of the track.
The lyrics did not detract from the layering of minimal, looped sounds, as they too were cut up in a fragmented presentation which would have made Burroughs proud. And while the kaleidoscopic video effect is nothing new, it works well with the track.
Check it out for yourself – “The Law” from Museum.
I began the week with the discovery of a historic jazz release in the Netherlands which should arrive in the post in the next 10 days (Stay tuned for a special feature with high-res photos once it arrives!)
I had been compiling data on the milestones of free jazz and was very happy to find one of them re-issued by Impulse! Records in 2011 – the same label which released the original recording in 1968.
The psychedelic cover art commanded my attention when I found it in a local record shop, and while I had never listened to Archie Shepp before I knew I had to check out this record.
I previewed it for a mere 30 seconds – whetting my sonic appetite with Shepp’s free jazz psychedelic tenor frenzy accompanied by five (count ’em – FIVE) talking drum percussionists. 30 seconds was all I needed.
I instantly purchased the record and added it to my jazz collection, delighted by my discovery but slightly irked that there was no mention of this album by any of the free jazz essentials lists I had compiled. That’s just further evidence that you’ve really got to get out there and dig.
But on to today’s theme – Music Lit. I knew it was going to be an intellectually stimulating week when I found Julian Cope’s legendary music crit, Krautrocksampler offered up on the Web in PDF format. As you’re probably aware, this title is long out of print and the author has sworn never to reissue it. Copies surface on various marketplaces for hundreds of dollars. Thankfully, a dedicated fan painstakingly scanned every page of the book, and while it is hardly archival quality, it is the only way most of us will ever see the book.
This will be a pleasure to peruse over the coming weeks, even in its crudely-photocopied form.
I picked up another jazz book from a local used bookshop as it was only a few dollars and I was curious to see what a writer would have to say about jazz in the middle of the era. The bulk of the text was written in 1962, with the “jazz-rock” chapter at the end likely added for the 1975 and 1979 printings.
Erlich’s perspective of jazz is hardly academic, and clearly it is not intended to be. The book’s approach is that of a simple love of the genre and acts as a guided tour through the history of its greatest influences, from African drum music to field hollers all the way up to the Third Stream and jazz-rock era.
From a historical context the book successfully builds a fundamental framework of jazz’s legacy. The language is elementary and makes for an effortless read, with a circular structure of artist introductions, childhoods, development, and lasting impacts.
However there are many titles available which better-examine what will soon be a century of jazz culture. There are very few references to What Jazz Is All About anywhere on the Web, and even fewer reviews. I’ve since moved on to better-known resources for further exploration of the genre.
The History of Jazz by Ted Gioia is Amazons’ best-selling jazz text. I’m enjoying it thus far, and was happy to see that it included a Recommended Listening index at the end of the book.
I also ordered two highly-acclaimed guides to 20th Century avant-garde music – The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century and Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music.
The Rest is Noise was a Pulitzer Prize Finalist and cracked the New York Times’ Top 10 Books of the Year. Audio Culture is a compiled volume of manifestos and writings from every music theorist from the first discussions of noise by Jacques Attali and Luigi Russolo to a piece about post-digital tendencies in contemporary computer music by microtonal composer Kim Cascone.
Best of all, Audio Culture includes a hefty index with a chronology of noteworthy recordings, a glossary and a Select Discography.
I also enjoyed watching a documentary film this week titled, In the Ocean – A Film About the Classical Avant Garde which sparked my further exploration of musique concrete.
One of the interesting things I took from the film was the discovery that Cage was really interested in Finnegans Wake (his 1979 mesostic composition, Roaratorio is entirely based upon the novel both in structure and in content.) And by delightful coincidence – what very title arrived in my mailbox just one day earlier?
The Law of Very Large Numbers is a beautiful thing in practice.
All these new music books inspired me to print up some appropriate bookmarks, so I made these… (extra points if you can name the jazz record which featured the Jackson Pollock print.)
So pick up the music books I’ve featured, check out Magic of Ju-Ju and I’ll be back next week with a fantastic new box set!
It’s been a very busy season this past month! I’m developing six multimedia lectures (and all are music-related, of course.) The first will take place at the city’s finest bookshop in January, and is free to the public. Locals are encouraged to attend.
I have also been approached by a local university professor who is interested in me bringing the series to their American Music class.
The more technical talks on subjects like Managing Personal Servers With 10k+ Files will be offered to an area Meet Up group and will detail handy functions such as on-the-fly real-time trans-coding to best suit the DAC of the end user and to ensure smooth playback at any speed.
Thankfully just in time for my first lecture I received the last two albums I needed for my debut presentation.
The first is that glorious cult classic, that godfather of industrial noise – Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music.
It’s a mesmerizing listen. This 2012 edition is a new stereo mix of the original 1979 quadrophonic release. And finally holding it in my hands I read the notes on the back which confirmed my supposition that Reed was inspired by the work of La Monte Young.
And the other wishlist item came as a total surprise. It’s Raymond Scott’s 1946+ recordings from Manhattan Research Incorporated, released as a triple gatefold 3LP set in 2001 in the Netherlands. My copy turned up in Malaysia and arrived in time for Christmas.
If you haven’t heard these fantastic snippets of futurama space-age electronic musique concrete, hop over to the Tube and have a listen. Scott developed a stockpile of electronic noise generators decades before the synthesizer, and in the 50s every company wanted his futuristic sound for their advertising.
My favorite vocal samples from this collection:
“Don’t beat your wife… every night… chew Wrigley’s!”
and“Someday, science tells us… we’ll be able to clean our walls… electronically.”
Also picked up a German import of A Clockwork Orange OST, and I’ve just recently developed a fondness for the downtempo stylings of deep house. (Don’t think floorstompers or heavy bass… think 120BPM with a focus on smooth mid-tones and jazz chords.)
I’ll try to post a few prime cuts in the coming weeks.
The Innerspace Connection 