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2LP
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BT 120LP
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Black Truffle presents the first vinyl reissue of David Rosenboom's unique Future Travel, originally released on the short-lived Detroit label Street Records in 1981 and here presented in an expanded edition with an additional LP of wild, previously unheard live and studio material from the same period. Future Travel emerged from the confluence of two important streams in Rosenboom's work at this time. First, his exploration of "propositional music," defined as "complete cognitive models of music" that start from the radical question, "What is music?" In this case, the music belongs to the universe of Rosenboom's In the Beginning (1978-1981), in which proportional relationships determine the material available to the composer in all musical parameters (harmonic relationships, melodic shapes, rhythmic subdivisions, dynamics, and so on). Second, the work documents a key moment in Rosenboom's long collaboration with synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla. Having played a role in developing concepts for some of the modules of the Buchla 300 Series Electric Music Box (an innovative analogue modular system controlled by micro-processors), Rosenboom went on to write the software for Buchla's hybrid analogue-digital keyboard synthesizer, the Touché, the instrument heard most prominently here. In a way that no purely analogue synthesizer could, the 300 Series and Touché allowed Rosenboom to work with the In the Beginning algorithms in real time, the synthesizers becoming "intelligent instruments" that actively collaborate with the performer. Developing the open structures of the electronic pieces from In the Beginning, Future Travel explored the possibilities of simply "playing the system," recording live at Francis Ford Coppola's Zoetrope studio in San Francisco. Future Travel is bracingly sui generis, existing in a unique universe where radical formalization spontaneously gives rise to expressive jazz harmonies and old-timey folk melodies. At several points throughout the record, the distinctive voice of Jacqueline Humbert is heard reading passages from the text component of In the Beginning, a dialogue between "The Double" (an embodiment of humanity's timeless desire to replicate itself in spiritual and technological copies) and two "Spirit Characters.: Fittingly, as all are conceived as embodiments of a future form of techno-human collective consciousness, distinctions between the three characters are not immediately evident in Humbert's delivery, just as the music blurs the boundaries between intelligent computing and human spontaneity. The record includes a 12-page booklet with notes about the album.
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2LP
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BT 048LP
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2021 restock. Black Truffle present the first ever vinyl reissue of David Rosenboom's legendary Brainwave Music, originally released on A.R.C. Records in 1975. This is an expanded double-LP edition with over 40 minutes of additional contemporaneous material. Pioneer of live electronics, innovator in music education, collaborator with artists as diverse as Jon Hassell, Jacqueline Humbert, Terry Riley, and Anthony Braxton, Rosenboom is renowned for his ground-breaking experiments with the use of brain biofeedback to control live electronic systems. Each of the three pieces that make up the original Brainwave Music LP integrates biofeedback with musical technology in different ways. In the side-long "Portable Gold and Philosophers' Stones", four performers have electrodes and monitoring devices attached to their bodies to receive information about brainwaves, temperature, and galvanic skin response. This information is analyzed and fed into a complex set of frequency dividers and filters, manned by Rosenboom, but essentially played by each of the performers through their psychophysiological responses. The result is a slowly unfolding web of filtered electronic tones over a tanpura-esque fundamental, possessing the unhurried, stately grandeur of an electronic raga. In "Chilean Drought", three different variations of a text about a drought in Chile, read by a different voice in a different style, are associated with the beta, alpha, and theta brainwave bands. Alongside an insistent piano accompaniment, three constantly shifting vocal recordings are controlled by the relative preponderance of each of the brainwave bands in the soloist. "Piano Etude I (Alpha)", the earliest piece included here, is based on research into the link between alpha brain wave production and the execution of repetitive motor tasks. As Rosenboom plays a very rapid, incessantly repeated pattern in both hands, two filters controlled by monitoring his brainwaves process the piano sound, moving gradually higher in frequency as the average alpha amplitude increases. For this reissue, the original LP is supplemented with an additional LP containing an unreleased 1977 live recording of Rosenboom's "On Being Invisible", in which the composer himself performs on an array of electronics that are fed information from his brainwaves. Stretching out over 40 minutes, the piece begins in similar territory to "Portable Gold and Philosophers' Stones" but eventually becomes far wilder, building up to pointillistic bleeps and dense layers of electronic fizz that unexpectedly cut to near-silence. As Rosenboom explains, the piece creates a situation in which the "performer's active imaginative listening became one of the ways to play their instrument, as well as an active agent in how self-organizing musical forms might emerge." Includes archival images and new notes from the composer. Gatefold sleeve design by Lasse Marhaug. Mastered by David Rosenboom from the original analog tape masters. Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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2CD
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NW 80735CD
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"David Rosenboom (b. 1947) is a composer/performer known as a pioneer in American experimental music. This series of eight works, created between 1978 and 1981 and presented on these discs in chronological order of their composition, demonstrate a remarkable extension of Rosenboom's techniques from his ...Plymouth Rock... series of 1969-71 using the harmonic and sub-harmonic series. The In the Beginning series exemplifies the idea of model-building as a compositional process. A simple process is defined, and is carried out rigorously at as many different levels of the music as possible, producing a complexity from simple elements that can be felt, somehow, while moving one's attention freely from its micro to macro levels, and everywhere else between. The composer plays inside it, using it freely, stretching it into different forms. The play one experiences in hearing the work is a reflection of the purposeful play that went into its creation."
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2CD
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NW 80689CD
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"David Rosenboom (b. 1947) has been widely acclaimed as an innovator in American experimental music since the 1960s. Although much of his work has been collaborative, virtually none of his large-scale collaborative works has hitherto been documented on record. How Much Better If Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the Pilgrims (1969-71) is considered to be one of the most important, prompting the following Washington Post review after a 1970 performance: 'If there were a device whereby one could plug into the deepest levels of human consciousness, and then translate this input into sound, what we would hear would probably resemble How Much Better if Plymouth Rock Had Landed on the Pilgrims, the radical composition by David Rosenboom... The elemental pulsations of the piece seem to echo not only our fundamental biological cycles, but those innate psychical tides that govern the flux of human thought and feeling... The listener becomes receptive to fantasy and hallucination and instants seem stretched to eternities... Rosenboom's idiom poses a new esthetic... Against the ascetic, disciplined, puritanical streak that one associates in this country with the Pilgrims, this new music hurls a rejuvenated sensuality and mysticism.' This is the world-premiere recording of the complete work."
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CD
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NW 80668CD
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"David Rosenboom, Buchla Touché & 300 Series Electric Music Box, piano, violin, percussion, texts. David Rosenboom (b. 1947) is a composer, performer, interdisciplinary artist, conductor, author and educator. Since the 1960s, he has explored ideas about spontaneously emerging musical forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques in scoring for ensembles, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art and multimedia, the interactive music of the infosphere, an approach to compositional modeling termed propositional music and extended musical interface with the human nervous system. His work is widely published, recorded, distributed, and presented around the world, and he is known as a pioneer in American experimental music. Future Travel (1981) is a journey in sonic imagery. It is set sometime in the future and its starting point is Earth. The traveler, whose point of view we imagine, is a spirit being representing the first awareness of a new form of consciousness to which humans have evolved. At an earlier point in the evolution of the Earth, human beings had become aware of the unstoppable momentum of the course they had set and the unlikelihood of their surviving. Consequently, attention was turned towards learning to direct the process of their evolution to a new form. This form is a macroscopic one, a large-scale organism, to which all individual entities of earlier earthly forms contributed. The first awareness of this new form of existence is beginning now. And Out Come the Night Ears (1978) is a solo for piano interfaced with an electronic system developed through a particular improvisation practice that manifests anew in each performance. Because this practice has an identity in my mind associated with specific piano exercises I composed for myself, certain musical materials, particular interactive electronics techniques, and a body of performances, it is as such a piece that is not a piece and I call it a piece. The recording presented here is extracted from an approximately one-hour-long performance given in a concert that was coincident with the rollout of the then new Buchla 300 Electric Music Box. I sometimes think of the piano as if it was an orchestra, and in this rendition, the Buchla 300 provided a means of extending that orchestra.' --David Rosenboom
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