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4LP BOX
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VOD 085LP
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2011 release. Limited hand-numbered edition of 600. Includes tracks from Spurt Ditties (1982), Waiting for the War (1983), and Concocting Chaos ('83); collaboration tracks with Unovidual; Searchlight & Torch ('84, with Stefan Tischler of Port Said); tracks from Limelight ('85); compilation-tracks '83-'88, and Tempus Fugit ('88). Excellent wide-ranging minimal synth tunes by one of the most outstanding female artists in the '80s cassette-culture and minimal wave underground, who released a total of four tapes and one LP and contributing to numerous cassette and vinyl compilations. Tara Cross's family, who had come to the United States from Ireland, kept in touch with their roots by filling the household with lots of Irish and American music. Her father was a great singer and an admirer of Bing Crosby and Perry Como. Cross's interest in music awakened at age 13, when she began to play the guitar. She studied at Hunter College in New York, where she majored in music and psychology, yet she decided not to pursue her musical studies in an academic institution, as her primary interest was centered in the performing arts. Despite the opposition of her family, she devoted her time to her musical career while keeping a full-time job in the corporate world. Her jobs ranged through secretary, typist, microfilm supervisor, librarian, etc. Cross was the first of six children and needed to help with the family finances. In the late '70s and early '80s she formed punk rock bands in New York and later went on to experiment with an Electro-Harmonix mini-synthesizer and a primitive drum box. She developed her efforts into a very unconventional, experimental kind of music. In the early-to-mid-'80s, she herself produced, composed, and performed her own works, acted as her own public relations agent, and took care of administrative and secretarial work. She worked mainly at first with cassettes, later moving to reel-to-reel four-track, then eight-track, recording everything at home and releasing it worldwide. In 1997 she opened a hair salon, getting out of the corporate environment, called Le Chandelier Salon. As a musician, she considers herself a sort of sound structurer who experiments with sound the same way a painter would experiment with colors. Presented in a plush embossed box set featuring full-color inner sleeves (with intense Bobby Houlihan-designed images of the artist's head) and an insert.
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