Browse by Artist: PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	Alloy (Golden 1)
Label:	ALGA MARGHEN (ITALY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	ALGA 035CD

2008 repress. "The Golden Research is the name chosen for the complete documentation of previously unpublished works by Charlemagne Palestine starting from the early 1960s to the mid-late 1970s. Such a huge project will include seminal collage and electronic music, Bell Studies, New York and California Drones, Piano drones as well as more specific compositions. All the recordings will be exclusively available through Alga Marghen. Be ready to change your own opinion about minimalism and music in general? Holy1 and Holy2 were both recorded in NYC in 1967. Charlemagne Palestine was listening to a lot of ethnic world music; he was also immersed in the late night New York soundscape and absorb the spatial sound diversity and beauty that such a big city could only express very late at night? He worked also at night building up a sound, oscillator by oscillator; then add tiny increments of white noise that would gradually make the sounds thicker and thicker until they were immense sacred machines humming like gargantuan Tibetan bees. The sounds were played very very loud making all the room and objects in it resonate while outside all was quiet and sleeping. Holy1 & Holy2 were done this way. Then, in 1969, Tony Conrad asked Charlemagne Palestine to make some carillon music for his film Coming Attractions. They were seeing each other regularly when the Free Music Store of radio station WBAI asked Palestine to create a piece for an event they were preparing to broadcast live on radio. So he asked Tony, his saxophonist Bob Feldman and his then wife and soprano Deborah Glaser to collaborate on a work that he would organise around an instrument that he invented at that time called an Alumonium. Tony Conrad played an instrument that he invented, the Long String Drone, that was a long string attached to a long wooden structure and amplified. Bob played the chimes and a conch. Deborah sand and played chimes and Charlemagne sang, also played the chimes and some percussion instruments that they found lying around the hall where they played. The piece became Alloy and the sound used as all electronic background continuum, played through loudspeakers in the hall, were Holy1+2 from 1968. Digipak CD edition with folded insert and liner notes."

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	In Mid-Air
Label:	ALGA MARGHEN (ITALY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	ALGA 047CD

2008 repress. "The first electronically generated sounds that Charlemagne Palestine ever heard came from the machines he encountered in ordinary daily urban life. Machines like the refrigerator electric motor, or electrical generators; but it was especially the sounds of motion (race cars, motorcycles, war planes, rocket ships) that first excited his sonic imagination as a young teenager. Then he heard the electronic music of Tod Dockstader, Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, the famous 'Podme Electronique' of Varese, Xenakis and 'Gesang der Junglinge' of Stockhausen. He immediately reacted buying a cheap reel to reel tape recorder, cutting and pasting recording tape and making collage sound experiments. Then, one day, Charlemagne Palestine experienced at an electronic music studio what electronically produced sounds waves looked and sounded like through an oscilloscope and he began studying Helmholtz's on the sensation of tone. He started 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 access to more complex systems the sound was constructed using the sine/sawtooth/square wave oscillators in a fluid everchanging mix of adding or filtering overtones and white noise to create sonorities constantly changing timbres and weight. Five early electronic compositions including 'Sine Tone Study' (1967); 'Open Closing' (1968), created through speed alterations of 'Holy 1+2'; 'Seven Organism Study' (1968); 'Negative Sound Study' (1969) and 'Timbral for Pran Nath' (1970). Late night electronic sonorities created on the Buchlas 100 & 200 systems available at the New York University Intermedia Centre. All compositions previously unreleased. 3-folded digipak cover with original photos and liner notes written by the composer."

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	Sharing A Sonority
Label:	ALGA MARGHEN (ITALY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	ALGA 068CD

"Alga Marghen proudly presents a new chapter in the documentation series of Charlemagne Palestine's historical works. This CD of previously unavailable recordings not only presents you Charlemagne Palestine activities in 1974, collaborating with some of most important experimental artists and composers from either the New York loft scene and Cal Arts, but also features world premiere recordings of Terry Jennings and The Fundamental D Flat Group. 'Short & Sweet' is the title of a breathtaking duo for piano and sax performed on April 24th by Charlemagne Palestine and Terry Jennings. The two composers happened to play together in very private concerts at Cal Arts, but never recorded those sessions, until a special day when Charlemagne happened to have a little tape recorder around. The recording was considered lost for more than 30 years, when finally a copy was found thanks to Tony Conrad. The piano part reminds some of the early pieces by Charlemagne Palestine titled 'Piano Drones' (as the one pre-dating of a couple of years this duo and presented on the Continuous Sound Forms CD issued on Alga Marghen. The liner notes of the same CD mention this duo with Terry Jennings at the time considered lost). Terry Jennings' soprano sax is very elaborated and decorative. Around 1967, Charlemagne was experimenting mainly with voice and electronics. He also occasionally recorded piano and sax improvisations with his friend Bob Feldman. This CD featured a very special duo by Palestine and Feldman playing electronics and flute. The two artists met in 1961 when Bob Feldman worked in a jazz record shop in the Times Square subway station. Palestine didn't know much about jazz and Feldman guided him through the new progressive jazz styles of the times. Later at the Intermedia Center of NYU where they had a Buchla synthesizer, Charlemagne and Bob Feldman experimented between jazz raga and electronics. Very little was recorded. This is one rare duet that dates probably from around 1967. The last track on this CD is the first 30 minutes of a recording from April 22, 1974 by The Fundamental D Flat Group performing in Db. During one trip back to NYC from Cal Arts, Charlemagne Palestine was invited by Tony Conrad (together with Rhys Chatham) to Albright College in New Jersey for a Sunday afternoon concert. That was the first and last time The Fundamental D Flat Group played in public (Tony Conrad: violin, horn, string drone; Rhys Chatham: flute, organ, string drone; Charlemagne Palestine: voice, pipes, snifter). Although the piece lasted all afternoon, the first 30 minutes were the only portion recorded during the performance. The Fundamental D Flat Group invite you to listen and meditate in the mode of Db. To hear this is to enter the deepest realm of knowledge of the sound current. The ear, the understanding, and the core of the spirit resonate to the mode of the single tone and its harmonic family. You read, and hear, and feel the empathy of human spirit. This CD is housed in a beautiful digipack with a full color sleeve with photos and liner notes. The edition presents some of the best recordings ever issued by Charlemagne Palestine, a highlight in the Alga Marghen catalog and a unique chance to listen to the core of Charlemagne Palestine."

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	Voice Studies
Label:	ALGA MARGHEN (ITALY)
Format:	LP
Price:	$26.00
Catalog #:	ALGA 072LP

"The VocSon series presents on limited edition LPs the most advanced international vocal experiments and is mainly dedicated to the documentation of sound poetry. This series includes now the new LP record by Charlemagne Palestine titled Voice Studies. Charlemagne Palestine's introduction to music or sound was first with his own voice. He began at four years old to sing versions of popular songs and operas in his own way. Later on, a director of a Jewish sacred music choir auditioned him to sing with them, Charlemagne was seven years old at the time and for the next seven years, he sang all over the East Coast and the U.S. as a member of a choir that sang with many of the greatest European Chazans (Jewish Sacred Singers) who had fled Europe during the rise of anti-Semitism and resettled in America. From them he learned to sing in a long chanting style with his own natural voice. At the same time he met Pran Nath, the master of Kirana singing and studied a short time with him as well as Javanese singing with Ki Wasito di Puro at Cal Arts. Over the years, Charlemagne Palestine has performed and recorded vocal works as an important part of his output as a sonic artist. This LP includes the very early 'Surrealistic Studies,' recorded in Brooklyn in the beginning of the 1960s. Using a Webcor reel-to-reel tape recorder and discovering a technique of shouting into the microphone and immediately pulling it out, creating an interior echo chamber where the sound would turn around on itself, changing and distorting. No other electronic sound manipulation techniques were used. 'Voice + Piano Study I & II' are short and beautiful piano improvisation with tape superimposition of accelerated voice pieces. Recorded at Cal Arts on September 29th, 1971. 'Voice Study' was recorded in Manhattan in the mid-1960s. In this study Charlemagne sings in a falsetto duet with himself on two separate tracks. Sung in a resonant space reminiscent of a synagogue in the falsetto voice that he began to develop from Jewish male sacred chant falsettos. He searches for intervals that resonate together and respond like electronic sound wave oscillators played against each other. Finally, there is the fantastic 6-minute 'Beauty Chord + Voice' with Charlemagne playing piano and singing. Edition limited to 385 copies."

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	Sacred Bordello
Label:	ALGA MARGHEN (ITALY)
Format:	Book w/CD
Price:	$65.00
Catalog #:	MARGHEN 17

Special edition of this book (which by itself is published by Black Dog Publishing and available elsewhere -- we don't carry the book by itself; this version includes a limited CD bundled w/ the book, only available via Alga Marghen. It is, unfortunately, a lot more expensive as a result -- the book itself lists for $29.95). "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 personality whose research in musical composition and performance has been characterized over the years by its incantatory repetitiveness, its flamboyance and its mysticism, but also by its violence.
       Born in Brooklyn in 1947 his first musical experiences were as a cantorial singer in the synagogues of New York. Through his contact with Tony Conrad Palestine was soon introduced to the thriving experimental art scene of the late 1960s. The circles around Andy Warhol and La Monte Young provided a crucial backdrop for Palestine's work which increasingly extended beyond the scope of music. His groundbreaking appearances, which combined violent piano playing, performance, video and installation, were considered to be amongst the most radical musical experiences, leaving a lasting impression on followers such as Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, and the Sex Pistols as well as Tintin creator Herge. His musical oeuvre escapes any ready categorisation Brooklyn, is a synthesised drone mixed with field recordings of a festival.
       Palestine's epic durations, microtonal trembles and dense overtones are reoccurring features in contemporary industrial and electronic music. Palestine's unique style of singing, Indian singer Prandit Pran Nath 'Charleworld', were crucial influences on artists such as Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. Through recent collaborations with Barcelona based techno duo Pan Sonic and David Coulter (Kronos Quartet) Palestine remains a crucial contributor to today's experimental music scene.
       A wonderful full colour book (size cm. 23,50x18,50), with flexicover, 192 pages including essays, scores, original photos of�both performances and installation. The most complete documentation on Charlemagne Palestine art. The compact disc will feature the 60 minutes recordings of a lecture that Charlemagne Palestine gave on March 7th, 1975 at ArtNow Centre in Canada. After the performance of a strumming music concert, the author freely speaks about his music, the philosophy beyond his composition techniques�and art involving the students in some kind of magic ritual. Starting as a question and answer conversation, the lecture develops into an intimate speech in which particularly private subjects are discussed. The lecture ends�with a particularly touching suspended atmosphere showing how real communication in universities should be. The compact disc also includes a breathtaking multi-layer voice study of the early 1960s never published before on record, very similar in sound and structure to the electronic music studies just issued by Alga Marghen."

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	A Sweet Quasimodo Between Black Vampire Butterflies...
Label:	COLD BLUE MUSIC
Format:	CD
Price:	$13.00
Catalog #:	CB 025CD

...For Maybeck. "A Sweet Quasimodo... is stunning music for two pianos played simultaneously in a tremolo style that Palestine calls 'strumming,' a technique that has defined his piano music since the late '60s. It spins out its sonic tapestry in surges and ebbs, and dense sonorities with hypnotically dancing overtones growing from its few opening pitches. This live recording from the Maybeck recital hall (February 2006) also contains Palestine's short spoken reminiscence about his life in California more than 30 years earlier and a few very short 'ritual' songs in his unique falsetto vocal style accompanied by the drone of a rubbed brandy snifter."

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	Charlemagne at Sonnabend
Label:	CP RECORDS (NETHERLANDS)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$42.00
Catalog #:	C@S 2001

"First time available 2CD set of the Charlemagne Palestine performances at Sonnabend Gallery, New York City, 2001. Privately issued by the composer and exclusively distributed by Alga Marghen. The first contact between Charlemagne Palestine and the Sonnabends took place in Paris with Simone Forti. It was 1972 and collaboration immediately started. Soon after Charlemagne created a sound installation at their gallery on rue Mazarine in Paris and then, when they decided to move to West Broadway Soho and leave Paris, they asked the composer to inaugurate their new Soho address by creating a double disk, '4 manifestations on 6 elements'. The Sonnabends organised several concerts and installations with Charlemagne until the middle seventies. Some time after the composer gave up performances and his sculpture was presented more in Europe than America. At the end of the nineties a new meeting happened and the Sonnabends announced that they had decided to leave Soho for a bigger space in Chelsea and proposed again for Charlemagne Palestine to create a disk. This time it was agreed to record a series of performances done directly in their new space on 22nd street and so Charlemagne at Sonnabend was born. The 2 disks comprise a private performance recorded at their gallery 2 days before the concerts on a Sunday (which is disk one) and the second disk comprises the 2 live performances recorded on the following Tuesday and Wednesday middle of September 2000. All the performances are played on a Bosendorfer Imperial piano."

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	Godbear/Jamaica Heinekens in Brooklyn
Label:	CP RECORDS (NETHERLANDS)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$34.00
Catalog #:	CP 002/3CD

"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 parts. 'Strumming'. 'Lower Depths'. 'Timbral Assault'. A re-evaluation of work from the seventies, recorded in the eighties, released in the late nineties and available on CP Records now. A long fuckin' journey, don't cha think? Nuf said! Jamaica Heinekens in Brooklyn. Charlemagne Palestine recordings on the 5th of September 1997, on Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, of the Jamaica Day Parade. With a small Sony DAT player and a small stereo microphone, Palestine walked throughout the festival very slowly for several hours to let the ambient sounds of each block naturally change in real time. The 60+ minutes segment on this record is played without any editing. Superimposed upon this extract Palestine has composed three series of drone textures for Yamaha organs, 16 Serge & Rubery oscillators with bandpass filtering, and a thick Arp Synthesizer texture using oscillators, filters and other sound modulation devices. All together this work creates a dialogue between pure and mixed electronics and the real-time ambient sounds of a traditional urban ethnographic popular festival. Edition of 500 copies."

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	Strumming Music
Label:	NEW TONE (ITALY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$19.00
Catalog #:	NT 6742CD

1995 CD reissue of one of the alltime classic artifacts of Minimalism. Originally issued on LP in the contemporary composer series on the legendary Shandar label. "Charlemagne Palestine is probably the least known, and the most legendary, among the great masters of the American Minimal Music, but he is not, for this reason, less important. Differently from La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, Charlemagne Palestine, after a first phase of intense research to definite the musical language that in the late seventies will be called Minimalism, preferred to dedicate his creativity in the visual arts field presenting very personal installation with exhibition in many important galleries getting a very successful response. This choice cut him out of the musical world, his carrier as pianist and composer was interrupted and he never succeeded in getting the public recognition his musical activity deserved. The music consists of a single track of approximately 45 minutes per solo piano played by Palestine. A composition very strong and intense, the acoustic sound of the piano, thanks to a great technique and a very strong physical force, becomes the sound of an entire Orchestra full of harmonics. From the historical point of view gives the opportunity to discover the music of one the pioneer of the minimal music."

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	Schlingen-Bl�ngen
Label:	NEW WORLD RECORDS
Format:	CD
Price:	$15.00
Catalog #:	NW 80578CD

"Schlingen Bl�ngen is an invaluable addition to the slender but precious discography of Charlemagne Palestine, one of the legendary figures of the amazingly fertile New York and West Coast experimental music/art scene of the sixties and seventies. He is considered to be a seminal figure of early minimalism -- as important as his better-documented contemporaries. His performances on the giant bells at St. Thomas Church and his evening-length B�sendorfer shows are still spoken of with awe by those who were present. Palestine left the music scene in the mid-seventies to focus on his visual art; he eventually moved to Europe where he still resides. Schlingen Bl�ngen -- a 70 minute long perambulation through the organ's sonic landscape -- was recorded in 1988 (ten years after its initial performance) in a small Dutch church near the North Sea. It is difficult to describe because so little happens in it, yet at the same time an immensity of activity is going on and there is so much of it that it boggles the mind. We experience sounds set into motion by the initial choosing of a chord and its timbres (the setting of the registers or stops); the melodic changes that occur are subtle and few. In short, it is a relentless and uncompromising exploration of the physicality of sound as well as its spiritual dimensions. Palestine's music left its mark on a number of slightly younger composer-performers, among them Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca. Absolutely essential for a comprehensive understanding of the roots of minimalism and its offshoots."

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	From Etudes to Cataclysms
Label:	SUB ROSA (BELGIUM)
Format:	2CD
Price:	$18.00
Catalog #:	SR 272CD

This is the first solo work by Charlemagne Palestine on Sub Rosa -- the first but probably not the last -- the label would also like to re-release a series of his classic works, which have previously been unavailable. From Etudes to Cataclysms is one of Charlemagne's most important works. An impressive composition of more than 140 minutes based on a unique instrument -- a double piano on which one keyboard is played by the feet. "Several years ago, Martin Kaufmann of Kaufmann Pianos in Brussels told me he had seen and heard an amazing and unique instrument in Italy. A piano with two separate bodies! One with a normal grand piano body having 88 notes to be played with the fingers, and below this piano was a second piano also with a grand piano body that could play simultaneously the lower 37 notes of a grand piano with pedals for the feet. Having known my music for years and that I had been a carilloneur where one plays with both fists and feet simultaneously, Martin Kaufmann thought that the Borgato would be perfect for my music. The inventor of this unique instrument was Luigi Borgato from Padua, who developed this instrument with his wife, Paola. I was intrigued, and through an intermediary, the Italian pianist Roberto Posseda visited the Borgatos in Lonigo where they have their workshop and found that their instrument was perfect for my body and my music. We immediately decided to organize recording sessions in a local church for one week and From Etudes to Cataclysms is the result!" --Charlemagne Palestine, October 2007

Artist:	PALESTINE, CHARLEMAGNE
Title:	The Apocalypse Will Blossom
Label:	YESMISSOLGA (ITALY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.00
Catalog #:	OLGA 001CD

"Yesmissolga Records is proud to present its debut release with a stunning piano performance by Charlemagne Palestine. The Apocalypse Will Blossom brings Palestine's recorded work thundering into the 21st century. Working in the lower registers of the piano, as he did in the late '70s, this intensely powerful live performance is unlike anything previously released by Palestine. Recorded by Christoph Heemann in Aachen, Germany at the Ludwig Museum in 2000 on the occasion of the 1000 year celebration of Charlemagne and subsequently processed by Heemann, The Apocalypse Will Blossom offers the closest experience you can have to hearing Palestine live without witnessing one of his performances. This recording is offered in a CD digipak printed in full color with a collage inspired by Palestine's visual work representing the four horsemen of the apocalypse and an original collage detail of Triomph de la Morte by the French artist, Jacques Brissot. Charlemagne, NOW!"

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