Browse by Artist: VARÈSE, EDGARD

Artist:	VARÈSE, EDGARD
Title:	The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse Volume 1
Label:	EL RECORDS (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$17.00
Catalog #:	ACMEM 125CD

Reissue of the first edition of these seminal early Varèse tracks, originally self-issued on LP in 1950 as EMS 401 (this was later reissued to a wider audience on the Finnadar label in 1977). Features: "Integrales"; "Density 21.5"; "Ionisation"; "Octandre" & "Interpolations From Deserts". Recorded 1950, with Robert E. Blake, sound engineer. Performed by the Julliard Percussion Orchestra and New York Wind Ensemble. "Interpolations" is added as bonus to the original LP, an important tape/concrete realization, recorded in Paris, 1954. First time these recordings are on CD. "These compositions by Edgard Varèse, keepsakes of tomorrow originally conceived way back in the 1920s and '30s, offered the aspiring young composer Frank Zappa a sense of life-affirming danger and mystery amid the suffocating cultural conformity of his 1950s upbringing. [This is]...the original 1950 EMS release, recorded under the composer's supervision, the sound couldn't possibly be more vivid or more terrifyingly alive. There's a curiously eastern ambiance to Varèse's haunting melodic visions of solo flute on 'Density 21.5,' an effect he expands on in the gripping chamber voicings of 'Octandre,' where his mastery of the overtone series is such that he makes acoustic woodwinds suggest analog synthesizers. Likewise, on his famous percussion work, 'Ionisation,' Varèse's layered, chanting polyrhythms achieve a perfect balance between tribal communalism and modernist defraction. The previously unreleased recording of 'Interpolations' is a jarring hard-left, hard-right, no-center-fill stereo collage of 'organized sounds' recorded on magnetic tape in Paris in 1954. The work anticipates a host of musical milestones we now accept as commonplace -- everything from techno and industrial to turntable back-spinning and radical hip-hop sampling." --Zan Stewart/Stereophile

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