I am so excited to have achieved a new musical milestone, having assembled a complete collection of all full-length studio releases issued in the vinyl format by The Penguin Cafe Orchestra and their later incarnation, The Penguin Cafe. This includes the first-ever vinyl edition of The Penguin Cafe’s 2011 debut, A Matter of Life, issued by Erased Tapes on May 6, 2022.
I’ve previously written about my adoration of this fine ensemble back in 2017, where I summed up the beauty of their music thusly:
The music of The Penguin Cafe Orchestra is tranquil, eclectic, and magically pastoral. The albums are classified as works of minimalism but are impressively dynamic recordings. Rich with subtly and understatedly intricate instrumentation, their music is a seamless and masterful blending of an impressive roster of genres, weaving together classical and contemporary elements. The result is magical and elegantly surreal.
These records are stubbornly difficult to label or classify. Spanning a broad range of influences from classical to jazz, featuring middle eastern or perhaps Indian inspired drones, as well as Cajan, traditional folk melodies, African rhythms, and more, these elements blend seamlessly into marvelous soundscapes and musical vignettes reminiscent of Moondog’s symphoniques.
There is a timeless serenity to these recordings, and I’m grateful that I was at last ready to let them into my life at a time when they served as a sensational complement to my headspace of late.
From start to finish, The Penguin Cafe is a treasure of heady and engaging arrangements, and some of the most peaceful sounds you’ll ever hear. I really enjoyed an observation from a fellow listener named bpnicast who remarked, “The dispassionate, cerebral atmosphere here creates its own unique space that seems to slow time and demand hushed attention – an emotional connection achieved through stillness and abstraction.”
That is precisely what I enjoy about these albums. It will be a pleasure to play them again and again and to share them with those who bring joy into my life.
I’ve made it an astonishingly productive end of the year at Innerspace Labs with one of my most beloved collections!
Recently, I took a trip to my old home town and dropped by a local record shop which had posted some of their latest vinyl arrivals to social media. Among the titles my keen eye spotted My Squelchy Life – one of the few albums missing from my Brian Eno vinyl collection. I didn’t pass up on the opportunity and added it to my library.
This however, required that I restage and reshoot my photo of the updated collection, which takes exhaustive hours of work to implement. I spent a few days updating my related collection documents and staging the new photo. Then, as my silly luck would have it, the very next day I picked up five more of his albums that I was missing from another shop, and then found myself with a decision to make.
Every time I add a title to this collection, I’ve needed to update my spreadsheets for the discographic chronology, update my 55-page process guide to make sure nothing is overlooked, gather the LPs from their various filing locations and box sets, sort them in order of release date, un-polybag all releases to reduce camera glare, stage the shot, photograph them, then post-process to correct lens distortion, perspective, white balance, and other properties, update the collection photo in all of my archival documents, then publish and share the results to social media before re-polybagging and re-filing all titles.
As such, to reduce the workload, I took it upon myself to perform an itemized audit of the nearly 200 releases in Eno’s catalog to build as complete a library as possible of the artist and producer’s works issued in the vinyl format before photographing them again. After inventorying his discography and checking the complete release history of every album to see whether each was issued on vinyl, I then checked the resulting set against my own library to see what I was missing and which had the potential to be secured from various marketplaces around the web. Finally, as Eno has collaborated with hundreds of other artists, I examined the tracklist and liner notes for all missing releases to determine how essential each would be for my library, primarily based on how significant Eno’s role was for each given release.
Once I had a final list of missing titles, I secured mint sealed copies of each qualifying release at the lowest price with international shipping for all items and, as of the end of 2021, have satisfactorily constructed as complete a library of Eno’s work on wax as I’m going to be able to build. With that stage of the project complete, I set myself to the task of staging and re-photographing the collection once again, post-processed the raw images and updated all related documents.
In addition to the dozens of art prints, books, lithographs, 409 digital releases, and other miscellanea I’ve acquired, I’ve now successfully built a sizable library of most major releases issued in the vinyl format by the artist. The vinyl portion of my Eno library now comprises 49 of his best-loved works totaling 77 discs of content, including the highly sought-after Music For Installations 9LP limited edition box set.
Just dropping in for a quick collection update – My holy trinity of 1987. The two singles were featured prominently on mash-up culture mixes and retrospective surveys of early hip hop / dance music. The full-length LP is the rare debut album by The KLF, (Kings of the Low Frequencies / Kopyright Liberation Front), then performing as The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, and would be impossible to release in today’s litigious music market.
They faced similar challenges in August of 1987, when The Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society ordered The JAMs to recall and destroy all unsold copies of the record. The JAMs made a bonfire in the Swedish countryside and burnt the LPs.
Pictured:
Eric B. & Rakim – “Paid In Full (Seven Minutes Of Madness – The Coldcut Remix)”
The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu (The KLF) – 1987 What The F***’s Going On?
Bomb The Bass – “Beat Dis (Extended Dis)”
Interestingly, both “Beat Dis” and “Seven Minutes” contain samples of “Train Sequence” by Geoffrey Sumner (1958) and “Pump That Bass” by Original Concept (1986). And all three of these releases were first issued in 1987. Furthermore, M | A | R | R | S’ hit, “Pump Up The Volume,” also released in ’87, shares its namesake titular sample with the Coldcut “Seven Minutes” mix, each lifting the spoken-word vocal from Eric B. and Rakim’s “I Know You Got Soul” from their debut Paid In Full LP released earlier that same year. Whosampled dot com cites no fewer than 437 songs that went on to sample the classic hip hop track.
The Coldcut Remix is filed under Hip-Hop, “Beat Dis” is House/Breaks, and 1987 is Leftfield/Plunderphonics. Each is a milestone in the history of DJ culture.
It’s a very special month at Innerspace Labs thanks to a gift from a very generous reader! My followers will recall my sharing my “Brian Eno Collection Milestone” from August of 2020 wherein I showcased photos and details of my Eno collection to date, as well as my “Rest In Beauty: Compiling an Archive in Memory of Harold Budd” post from December of that year where I featured my vinyl discography of the late Harold Budd. If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, you are well aware that the catalogs of these two iconic veterans of ambient music are among my most-cherished musical treasures.
In September I was contacted by a reader who, himself, is quite the avid collector. He had amassed an impressively substantial library of Eno and Budd artifacts, both physically and digitally, and maintains documentation cataloging and itemizing all facets of his collection. This fellow kindly offered to share his work with me, gifting me a wealth of releases missing from my humble collection. I was honored!
In all, he gifted me 341 folders of rare album releases I was missing from Eno and Budd’s catalogs, bringing my digital totals for these artists to 409 folders for Brian Eno and 82 folders for Harold Budd, respectively.
I was fascinated to learn of incalculably rare works among his library, such as Budd’s “Untitled Piece (Text-Sound composition)” from the 1969 Source Magazine #6. This release is noteworthy as, prior to its discovery, the earliest documented work by Budd was the markedly rare The Oak Of The Golden Dreams issued by Advanced Recordings in 1971 which last surfaced in 2020 and sold on Discogs for $420. The 38-minute “Untitled Piece” predates this recording by two years, and included with the recording were high-resolution PDF scans of the accompanying periodical summarizing Budd’s early composition.
Other new-to-me Budd rarities were included such as a Various Artist release, the Chicago ‘82: A Dip in the Lake cassette from Belgium which contains two tracks by Budd. Similarly, The Greetings – Piano Live 1991 is another various artist release, issued in Italy by Materiali Sonori in 1993, and an EP of Glyph Remixes by Hector Zazou & Harold Budd issued by SSR in Belgium in 1996.
A library of lone tracks and rarities were also among the collection, featuring Budd retrospectives on several experimental music podcasts. Also included were a set of unofficial live concert recordings – something I never thought I’d see for an artist of Budd’s quiet and reserved nature!
The Eno library was even more exhaustive, as one might expect from such a prolific and active artist. I took incredible care when developing a folder structure to merge our respective collections, electing to create three primary folders for Official Releases, Unofficial Releases, and Non-Album Content (Apps and Themes). These folders dive deep and reward careful exploration, as nested networks of subfolders reveal a tremendous wealth of carefully-curated content.
The additions did pose quite a challenge, however, as nearly none of the media had accurately or consistently-applied metadata, which is critical to the navigation of my archive. As such, I devoted many nights’ work to the task of reformatting all the metadata uniformly from scratch for values which were erroneous or missing. I utilized batch processing techniques wherever possible for efficiency, but the inconsistency of the tagged information required a nearly track-by-track analysis and correction.
I brought it all to as close to an archival standard as I was able by performing digital forensics for the missing or conflicting data and employed semicolon delimiters for multi-value tags like those of artist collaborations, etc. I utilized the aforementioned nested folder structure for the primary categories and for multi-disc content with a date of issue prefix to create a chronological hierarchy to facilitate navigation both by folder and by ID3-based browsing. Thereafter, I had to synchronize all the newly-introduced content with all of my various music library databases, spreadsheets, documents, and other content management systems to incorporate critical data from over 4,000 files relating to these two artists.
As I’ve said previously, I understand that there are collectors with far more vast libraries of these gentlemen’s work. I’m grateful to have been able to compile 64-discs worth of Eno’s primary discography on vinyl, all eight of Harold Budd’s original LPs, and his collaborations with John Foxx on wax as well. I am not a wealthy man but I consider myself quite rich with the beautiful library of soundworks I’ve been able to enjoy in both the digital and physical form.
I want to extend another word of heartfelt gratitude to the reader who so generously reached out and shared the fruits of his research with me. It is a gift which I will enjoy repeatedly for years to come.
I am by no measure well-versed in the realms of classical music. The principal foci of my archive center around minimalism, ambient works, the classical avant-garde, and early milestone compositions of electroacoustic / musique concrète. But with that said, I understand and greatly revere the foundational soundworks which directly inspired much of what came to pass in 20th century music. Paramount among these are the musical impressionism of Claude Debussy, Erik Satie, and Maurice Ravel, (though Debussy, himself staunchly rejected the “impressionist” label). These composers’ use of musical “color,” unique chord combinations, ambiguous tonality, extended harmonies, use of modes and exotic scales, parallel motion, extra-musicality, and evocative titles were together fundamental in inspiring what came to be known as “ambient” music in the West later in the 20th century.
So it seemed only fitting that I obtain for my library the finest and most complete collection of these composers’ works. For the first stage of this endeavor, I selected Debussy as the target of my research. I began by securing collections and compilations and researching the release history of interpretations of Debussy’s work by various performers, and reading up on the mastering and performative quality of each.
On compact disc I obtained –
A multi-volume collection of Alexis Weissenberg’s interpretations of Debussy on Deutsche Grammophon issued in West Germany in 1986
The Orpheus Trio’s renditions of Ravel, Faure, Debussy, and Devienne issued by Vanguard Everyman Classics in 1987/1980
Four of the five volumes of the 1991/2 EMI Classics France albums comprising unparalleled performances of Debussy by Aldo Ciccolini
The London Philharmonic’s performances of La Mer, Prélude à l’aprés-midi d’un Faune, and Jeux conducted by Serge Baudo issued by EMI Eminence in the UK in 1986
The Solomon Trio interpreting Ravel, Debussy, and Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Trio issued by Masters Pickwick Group in England from 1992
Simon Rattle conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s performances of Debussy’s Images, Jeux, and Musiques pour “Le Roi Lear” issued by EMI Digital in 1990
Debussy – Images performed by Simon Trpceski issued by EMI Classics in 2008
Then I collected the following digital releases –
Claude Debussy – The Debussy Edition [17CD+18th bonus disc of historical recordings] box set issued by Deutsche Grammophon in 2012
Debussy · Ravel – Orchestral Works [8CD] set directed by Jean Martinon featuring Aldo Ciccolini on piano, recorded by Sale Wagram, Paris, 1973 & 1974 issued by EMI Classics in 2002
Claude Debussy – The Complete Works For Piano performed by Walter Gieseking [4CD] set issued in 2006
I found some particularly interesting details about the Gieseking 4CD set.
Cristofori on Amazon reviewing Gieseking’s The Complete Works For Piano stated:
There aren’t many historical/mono classical recordings that I can firmly say have not been bettered by more modern renditions but Gieseking’s Debussy are among a handful that have yet to be surpassed. Gieseking’s use of tones and colors is amazing. Listening to his playing puts you in a dreamlike state. There may be more technically perfect pianists out there but I have yet to hear one that gives the same kind of feel and nuance as does Gieseking’s.
These recordings, made in the mid 1950’s near the end of Gieseking’s death, are his final say on the piano music of Debussy. Many aficionados will point to his 1930’s renditions as superior but truth be told I can’t give an opinion as I haven’t listen to those much. I do know that his first Debussy cycle has always been harder to find and sound quality may be hit or miss depending on who is doing the transfers.
The mid 1950’s mono sound on these recordings actually enhances the listening experience rather then take away from it, giving it a ghostly, ethereal quality that cannot be duplicated today. This new 5CD box by Warner is probably the cleanest these have ever sounded but I actually don’t mind the “haze” on some of the older editions as it adds to the dreaminess of Gieseking’s playing.
Curiously, upon researching this release further, I discovered that the original 1990s CD release was later remastered for Super Audio CD and issued as a hybrid 4xSACD set in Europe in 2012.
Additional commenters on Amazon described the noticeable improvements on the Super Audio edition. Leeber Cohen said:
This is an incredibly wonderful box !!! I learned the Suite Bergamasque and Chidren’s Corner Suite decades ago and I forgot how much I enjoyed Gieseking’s performance which was one of my favorite LPs as a child. Gieseking is a perfect pianist for this music. His range of color and dynamics is very close to perfect. I agree with the other reviewers that the quality of the recorded sound in these CDs is a vast improvement. I compared my 1990s copy of the two books of the Preludes to this CD and the haze is pretty much gone. Please obtain these 5 CDs while they remain available. The box is budget priced and is an incredible bargain.
And Thomas said:
I like this remastered version better than the remastered version of 1992. In this newer version, all the notes are clear and resonant. In the older version The notes sound shallow and muddy.
Also, on vinyl, my library already included the following –
The Debussy – Leonard Slatkin, Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra – La Mer • Prélude À L’Après-midi D’Un Faune • Danses Sacrée Et Profane LP issued by Telarc Digital from 1982
Tomita – Snowflakes Are Dancing (The Newest Sound Of Debussy), comprising Tomita’s arrangements of Claude Debussy’s “tone paintings” performed on a Moog synthesizer and a Mellotron
Snowflakes was released by RCA Victor in 1974. It was nominated for four Grammy Awards in 1975, including best classical album of the year, and it was NARM’s best-selling classical album of the year.
The release notes for the La Mer Telarc Digital LP state the following about the recording and mastering:
During the recording of the digital masters and the subsequent transfer to disc, the entire audio chain was transformerless. The signal was not passed through any processing device (i.e., compression, limiting, or equalization) at any step during production.
Sampling frequency conversion of Telarc’s Soundstream digital master to the Compact Disc format was accomplished with the Studer SFC-16 sampling frequency converter. The digital information was not subject to any analog intersteps, thus preserving the integrity of the original digital master.
My goal was to acquire as complete a library of Debussy’s work as was available in the vinyl format. I performed a search on the Discogs database for complete box sets of Debussy’s works issued on vinyl and I found the following:
Claude Debussy, Werner Haas – Complete Works For Piano Solo • Das Klavierwerk • Œuvres Pour Piano Seul – 5LP (Netherlands) and 6LP (Spain) complete piano solo box set
Claude Debussy, Walter Gieseking – L’Œuvre De Piano – 5LP box set
Claude Debussy – Louis De Froment, Orchestra Of Radio Luxembourg – His Works For Orchestra Volume I: La Mer, Prelude A L’Apres-midi D’un Faune, La Plus Que Lente, Le Martyre De Saint Sebastien, Le Triomphe De Bacchus, Le Roi Lear, Marche Ecossaise, La Boit A Joujoux, Excerpts From L’Enfant Prodigue, Berceuse Heroique – 3LP box set of Complete Orchestral Works Vol 1 which is concluded with:
Debussy – Orchestra Of Radio Luxembourg, Louis De Froment – His Works For Orchestra (Complete); Vol. II – 3LP box set
Debussy*, Peter Frankl – Complete Piano Music Volume 1 & 2 – Volume 1 is 1LP, Vol 2 is 3LPs
Claude Debussy – Jörg Demus – Complete Piano Music – 8 single-LP volumes issued by the Musical Heritage Society
My interest was primarily in Debussy’s solo piano works, so my ideal choice of these vinyl editions appeared to be Claude Debussy, Werner Haas – Complete Works For Piano Solo • Das Klavierwerk • Œuvres Pour Piano Seulwhich was only issued in the Netherlands and in Spain.
When I researched the production history of that particular release further, I discovered that some of those recordings were issued on two CDs in 2007 by Philips Classics, though reviewers on Amazon make note of the noticeably quiet mastering and subtle hiss present on the CDs.
Listener on Amazon had this to say:
Debussy’s music is not meant to be performed with exaggerations, as many other pianists do in their recordings of his music. Haas offers what is on the page and does it beautifully. The playing is also, from a technical aspect, absolutely perfect. I cant find any “Teutonic” qualities as the other reviewer said. Instead I found much tenderness and subtlety as there should be. There only bad quality I could find is with the recording. Since it is old, from the late sixties, there is a noticeable hiss, especially in the quieter passages. It is, as with the case of all Philips CDs, slightly expensive for the amount of music, but nonetheless still a great purchase. This is a must buy. I only lament that this, along with his equally great recording of Ravel’s works, is all there really is from Mr. Haas.
This vinyl box set includes an 8-page LP-size booklet with musicological notes in English, German and French. There are a few differences between the Netherlands and Spanish editions, most noticeably the language of the cover text. The Spanish edition also includes a sixth LP, featuring the works for two pianos or piano 4-hands, but I opted for the English packaging to facilitate interpretation of the track listing.
I’ve been performing similar research for the music of Erik Satie and have selected a vinyl box set of his complete piano works but it is an exceedingly rare import so I’ll have to postpone that project for the time being. Still, Haas’ Complete Works For Piano Solo is a wonderful beginning for this journey.
It’s a red-letter day at Innerspace Labs! Just arrived from England is a wonderful new treasure – an autographed copy of the newly-published biography on Alex Paterson of The Orb, along with an exclusive 12-track album showcasing music he intends to release on the new record label he’s started to feature up-and-coming ambient artists from around the world!
From The Orb’s official announcement:
New Biography – Babble on an’ Ting
Always steered by Alex Paterson, The Orb were the mischief-making pioneers of the late 80s acid house revolution. Inventing “ambient house”, they took it to the top of the charts, before continuing its idiosyncratic flight path through subsequent decades, battling meteor storms en route.
Published 28th May via Omnibus Press, Babble on an’ Ting: Alex Paterson’s Incredible Journey Beyond the Ultraworld with The Orb, is the first full account of his life story. Written by close friend and music journalist Kris Needs, the book reveals Alex’s astonishing journey from traumatic Battersea childhood through punk, Killing Joke and KLF to starting The Orb in 1988, then the five decade roller coaster that followed. Moving, shocking, hilarious and inspiring, at the heart of this story lies a true survivor doggedly following their musical passion.
First-hand interviews include those with Youth, Andrew Weatherall, Primal Scream, Jah Wobble, Jimmy Cauty and a parade of friends, collaborators and starship mechanics.
“I decided to do a book now as I have reached one full human cycle – 60. Also, to tell my side of stories and to set the record straight on planet Orb,” says Alex. “Working with Kris was seriously brilliant fun. We have been friends and allies for decades now. He’s a beautiful man with a deep knowledge of all things secret and actually lived through some of the stories together.”
The book’s title, of course, is a reference to a Victor Lewis Smith prank call sampled by The Orb on their number one album UFOrb.
And of the new record label, they announced:
New Label – Orbscure Recordings
Always keen to collaborate, ever prolific, and with his creativity as flowing as ever, Orbscure Recordings is a new vehicle for Paterson’s impressive quantity of output in different groups which runs parallel to his continued music within The Orb. Set up under the Cooking Vinyl umbrella at the suggestion of label head Rob Collins, Orbscure will also be an outlet for new music from artists from around the world.
“The name is a play on the Obscure label Eno set up on Editions EG in the 1970s. Orbs Cure. Clever parrot-Orbscure! Orbscure! Orbs Cure for all ills. Orbs Cure made 2 chill” states Alex.
Having helmed the Orb collective for over 30 years, releasing music on other people’s labels in partnership with various label managers/A&Rs, Alex now finds himself in the driving seat, coordinating an even wider group of talent. Picking up from his past experience as an A&R for the legendary EG Records, there is already a raft of new releases in the pipeline with three albums set for release this year. The label will feature artists from Uganda, Kenya, Argentina, Japan and America with further collaborative projects to follow.
Paterson’s initial new musical project adopts the moniker, Sedibus with a full-length LP titled, The Heavens. From the official announcement:
The first release on Orbscure Recordings is Sedibus ‘The Heavens’, released 28th May an astonishing collaboration between Alex and original Orb member Andy Falconer who engineered/co-wrote the ambient sides of the Ultraworld album back in 1991. 30 years have passed since that seminal release when the two were last in the studio together.
Kris Needs is a British author and music journalist. The author bio from the official press statement for Babble on an’ Ting notes that Needs started his career writing for the seminal monthly magazine, Zigzag in the 70s, becoming editor while writing for NME and Sounds. The 352-page adventure is issued in paperback by Omnibus Press and special signed copies autographed by Paterson, himself were bundled with the 12-track sampler CD of upcoming tracks from Paterson’s new record label.
The tracklist for the Orbscure Recordings Sampler is as follows:
Intro – Roney FM
Unknowable – Sedibus
Wow Picasso! – OSS
Home – Chocolate Hills
Squirrels In Jumpsuits – Roland & Albert
Shika – Mawe
Latchmere Allotments – The Orb
America Is Unavailable – Transit Kings
Turn Right – Cripps Said Mason
The Librarian – DF Tram
Fara – Nick Neutronz
Here For Beer – High Frequency Bandwidth
Curiously, while the TownsendMusic Ltd website’s copies of the autographed book bundle, priced at just $30 plus shipping, dispatched the day before official public release on May 28, 2021, Amazon’s regular unsigned copies of the book without the Orbscure Sampler album are priced at $24.99 and will not ship until September 9th. Though Americans paid $31.50 in postage for DP US Direct Tracked shipping from the UK, the TownsendMusic Ltd offer was still incredibly alluring, especially for an historic release such as this.
I’m honored to have been able to claim a copy of this special bundle. Paterson is an ambient veteran and pioneer of an immeasurably influential genre of music – one of the most treasured artists in my library. It is a joy to see, even at the age of 60, that Alex still has fresh new ideas and is taking an active role in pushing new and emerging ambient electronic artists from around the globe to the fore.
Orbscure Recordings will be a label to watch in the months and years ahead.
I was deeply saddened to learn of the passing of my favorite ambient composer, Harold Budd this month, who we lost to complications due to COVID-19. I’ve always been able to count on his ethereal soundscapes to soothe my nerves and vanquish my anxieties, so the finality of his death was a blow to my musical world.
Budd released an impressive catalog of albums over his 49-year career in music. I maintain a digital archive of 46 of his major album releases including his latest collaboration with his longtime friend, Robin Guthrie titled Another Flower, issued just days before his passing.
I feel so fortunate to have collected all of Budd’s albums from the 70s and 80s comprising his first eight major releases issued on vinyl before his label switched to the then-popular compact disc format, as well as the three albums he recorded with John Foxx combined into a single deluxe vinyl box set with a signed art print by Foxx.
There is one LP which preceded his first official album, The Pavilion of Dreams – the elusive The Oak Of The Golden Dreams from 1971, copies of which command many hundreds of dollars on the rare occasion that they surface. That recording was realized on the Buchla Electronic Music System at the California Institute of the Arts (then in Burbank) in 1970 and was not an official commercial release.
I’m overjoyed to have collected all of Budd’s early official vinyl releases. There are a few later albums that were issued on vinyl which I would love to own but sadly few if any have resurfaced on the used album market. Collectors purchased them directly from the label and held fast to their treasured copies, all the more so now that Budd has passed away. I watched several listed copies of his first album vanish before my eyes after news of his death spread on social media, so I had to act quickly and decisively, as I don’t expect these albums to get any less expensive and will only become rarer as more time passes. (Pavilion nearly doubled in price the day the news of his death was announced.)
I ordered the LPs I was missing on December 9th. The first hundred dollar package ended up shipping from just a few miles north of my home. Had I known that I would have instead just opted to pick it up myself. Unfortunately, the US Postal Service mis-shipped the package nearly nine hundred miles off course to Alabama, delaying its delivery in the midst of the holiday season. And as insurance was not offered on the purchase, the delay was agonizing, all the more so as a replacement copy would require international shipping and would command a still higher purchase price. After working with my local Consumer Affairs Department, I eventually received the package 19 days later, thankfully intact.
Pictured below are Budd’s first eight LPs, as well as the aforementioned Nighthawks, Translucence And Drift Music autographed box set issued in 2011. These are among the most-treasured LPs in my Archive. They include:
The Pavilion of Dreams
Ambient 2: Plateaux of Mirror
The Serpent (In Quicksilver)
Abandoned Cities
The Pearl
The Moon And The Melodies
Lovely Thunder
The White Arcades
Nighthawks
Translucence
and Drift Music
John Diliberto of Echos published a wonderful feature on Budd to celebrate his memory, saying, “Harold Budd Has Left the Planet: Rest in Beauty.”
I have a decent starter-collection of jazz vinyl, focusing primarily on Miles Davis’ catalog including the 6LP Miles at the Fillmore box set, as well as a selection of the better quality big band box sets on wax. But I’ve been working on building the digital portion of my jazz collection, the larger box sets of which total 1,626 albums. These highlights help me add a sense of order to the 22,000 jazz recordings in my digital library.
To date, my focus has been on essential classics, vocal jazz standards, the crooners, tin pan alley, jazz pop (1920-1960), highlights of avant-garde jazz, the big bands, swing, a bit of ECM, future jazz (in the electronic realm), film noir scores, gypsy jazz / jazz manouche, and their related subgenres. I’ve been in the mood to explore The Great American Songbook, (jazz vocal standards by Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Ellington, etc), so I started doing some research.
I’m no jazz expert, but some preliminary Google searches, list-generators, and review surveys provided me with sufficient information to begin building a respectable personal library. One intriguing release offered for sale on Toronto’s JazzFM website was an astonishingly large 500 CD box set called, The World’s Greatest Jazz Collection. Of course, due to licensing restrictions, the set lacks some of the classic milestone recordings which come to mind when such a title is raised, but the sound quality and sheer volume of the collection warranted its addition to my library.
The 500-CD World’s Greatest Jazz Collection comprises five 100-disc sub sets:
100-CD Bebop Story box set
100-CD The Big Bands box set
100-CD Classic Jazz box set
100-CD Modern Jazz box set
100-CD Swing Time box set
Next I tackled building discographic archives of key figures in the history of classic and modern jazz. Larger jazz artist discographies in my archive include but are not limited to the following:
156-CD Thelonious Monk discography
135-CD Keith Jarrett discography
100-CD RateYourMusic.com’s Top 100 Future Jazz LPs
98-CD Miles Davis discography
78-CD Jimmy Smith discography
75-CD Sun Ra discography
61-CD Ornette Coleman discography
52-CD Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers discography
43-CD Herbie Hancock discography
43-CD Jimmy McGriff discography
40-CD Duke Ellington discography
35-CD Charles Mingus discography
30-CD John Coltrane discography
22-CD Dave Brubeck discography
16-CD Future Sounds of Jazz box set
as well as the 16-CD Diana Krall discography. (My late father was a fan and sparked my interest in her catalog when I was starting college.)
And as I’ve discussed in former features, I worked hard to build analog and digital archives of the finest big band collections ever issued to the public. Some of these were exclusively available from mail order subscription services on vinyl and later on compact disc, but thankfully, archivists around the world have painstakingly digitized the vinyl-exclusive volumes and produced complete digital libraries of these sets at professional archival quality.
In my Big Band Archive I have:
30-LP box set of Time Life: The Big Bands
27-CD Ken Burns Jazz Series and Jazz: The Story of America’s Music (22-CD + 5CD)
11-LP box set of The Great Band Era
10-volume Benny Goodman Collection
7-volume The Big Bands box set
4-CD Smithsonian Big Band Jazz archive
2-disc Glenn Miller Gold Collection
1-CD The Glenn Miller Orchestra Collection
Other smaller and more precisely-focused jazz collections in my library include:
8 CDs from the Jazz Moods series
6 of the essential albums by The Bill Evans Trio
6-CD Gypsy Jazz / Jazz Manouche box set
5-CD 100 Hits American Songbook box set which includes one hundred standards recorded by Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Billie Holiday, Nat King Cole, Shirley Bassey, Sammy Davis Jr, and more.
5-CD Film Noir jazz series collection
3-CD Complete Recordings of Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
and the single-disc Complete Recordings of Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong
My collection is leagues away from exhaustive or complete in the vast scope of the world of jazz – an insurmountable task for certain, but I’ve done my best to construct a modest library showcasing the key subgenres I enjoy most. These will provide me with years of listening enjoyment on lazy Sundays and on my afternoon drives queued up in the car from my personal media server.
In an effort to determine the best recordings to sample first, I began compiling various “best-of” lists. Rateyourmusic user erikfish found 22 “top jazz albums of all time” lists in books, magazines and web sites and combined them into one meta-list here. And TheJazzResource.com compiled a similar list of the Top 25 Jazz Albums of All Time. Spinditty published a feature on Ten Coltrane Albums Every Jazz Fan Should Own and NPR put together a similar roster called The Cocktail Party Guide To John Coltrane. I also assembled some of my own lists including Modal Jazz Essentials, Recordings of the First Great Quintet (Davis and Trane in ‘56), as well as 17 Essential Hard Bop Recordings courtesy of critic Scott Yanow and a Top Ten Essentials list of Thelonious Monk LPs.
I would love to hear your recommendations for your favorite titles from the collections mentioned above which deserve priority listening, or your suggestions for other collections which would complement my current library. If I’ve any glaring omissions, please let me know! I’m always eager to learn.
Today I’ve proudly reached a milestone with my Brian Eno collection. In addition to the dozens of art prints, books, lithographs, 85 digital releases, and other miscellanea I’ve acquired, I’ve now successfully built a sizable library of most major releases issued in the vinyl format by the artist.
While there are still a number of bootlegs and collaborative efforts, as well as titles from Eno’s catalog originally issued in the 90s now being released for the first time on vinyl, my library comprises 40 of his best-loved works totaling 64 discs of content, including the highly sought-after Music For Installations 9LP limited edition box set.
This feature will showcase the most noteworthy elements of my collection to date. I’ll begin with the LPs, themselves. It was quite a challenge to photograph 40 12” multi-disc releases all in one shot, particularly without photographer’s lamps and other equipment, but I’ve done my best using the trusty digital SLR I received from my family when I first started art college twenty-two years ago.
Here are the LPs:
Next, for some art, here is the “Electric Love Blueprint – A History of Electronic Music” theremin schematic created by the Dorothy design collective. The infographic “celebrates over 200 inventors, innovators, artists, composers and musicians who (in our opinion) have been pivotal to the evolution of electronic music, from the invention of the earliest known sound recording device in 1857 to the present day.” Of course, Brian Eno’s name appears typeset in the largest point size of any pioneer cited among the layout.
The 60 x 80 cm art print is printed with metallic silver ink on 120gsm Keaykolour Royal Blue uncoated stock. It was gifted to me by a dear friend and hangs proudly in my listening room.
Next is a limited edition oversized promotional art print for Eno’s 77 Million Paintings exhibition at Moogfest in 2011.
And just for fun, I had a t-shirt printed up with the art from one of the most influential early Eno solo albums, Before and After Science.
I also made sure to track down an original UK pressing of that very album specifically for the large lithographs exclusive to that edition painted by Peter Schmidt. I had the lithographs professionally framed for my dining room.
I also secured both original and remastered pressings of Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks. The Extended Edition includes the For All Mankind bonus LP and I was among the first 250 to order which got me a handsome 42cm x 59cm poster of the Apollo cover artwork which I had framed as well.
I was similarly inspired by Eno’s pioneering ambient effort, Music For Airports, so I prepared a framed print of the sheet music of the album’s score.
Then there is the DVD collecting Eno’s experiments with film, Thursday Afternoon (1984) and Mistaken Memories of Mediaeval Manhattan (1981)
I’ve previously shared my excitement when I learned that Eno had collaborated with one of my other musical heroes, Karl Hyde of Underworld. I framed the pair of postcards included with their two album releases.
There was also an art print included with original pressings of Eno and Hyde’s first collaboration, Someday World, which I’ve framed in my listening room.
And while working as a designer, I independently produced a 24” x 24” oversized PVC-mounted vinyl print of a graphic I designed mapping a chronology of all of Eno’s creative works both as an artist and as a producer. Here is a web-friendly downscaled copy of the artwork with a magnified sample of an area of text.
Of course, what Eno collection would be complete without an edition of the Oblique Strategies oracle deck?
And finally, here is my library of thirteen books examining the mind and the art of Brian Eno. It was great fun compiling them all, including a copy of Eno’s own diary, A Year With Swollen Appendices.
That is the collection to date. I know that it is far from complete. My research reveals an additional 14 vinyl releases far more rare than anything I have and nearly 2,600 releases with Eno named in the credits, but I made sure to collect all of the titles which were of great significance to me, personally.
Thank you for permitting me to share my love for great music. Eno and his work are an unparalleled inspiration in my life.
Just a quick check-in today. I’m grateful to have received an incredible gift this weekend of several UK import KLF and related singles from a wonderfully generous friend who was thinning out their personal record collection. He knew that no one in the city would appreciate them more than I. With the new titles added, it seemed fitting to take an updated photograph of the collection to date. Here’s what I have so far, including Drummond’s Silent Protest deck of cards, (the tiny black item toward the lower right), a rare first-edition of The Manual, the Stadium House Trilogy VHS, and several titles from the exquisite Recovered & Remastered series, (highly recommended!)
My KLF collection now comprises 45 physical LPs, CDs, books, and other ephemera. The digital portion of my KLF library includes 164 albums, EPs, and other releases totaling over 109 hours of music and 93 films clocking in at 19 hours of rare video footage and interviews.
I understand that there are collectors with far larger KLF libraries, but I’m pleased with what I’ve built so far. Special thanks to my very generous friend!
The Innerspace Connection 