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ARTIST
TITLE
Battling the Invisible
FORMAT
LP

LABEL
CATALOG #
NMN 184LP NMN 184LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
2/20/2026

Edition of 300. Includes 8-page booklet. In 1969, while American minimalism was consolidating into its most recognizable forms, Charlemagne Palestine was conducting solitary experiments with oscillators and sine waves that only now reveal their visionary scope. This was the New York of lofts and abandoned industrial spaces, of artists pushing sound toward its physical limits -- a city where the boundaries between music, performance art, and bodily endurance were dissolving. Battling the Invisible unearths two electronic studies from that crucial year, paired with rare 1972 Bösendorfer sessions -- a document that illuminates the passage from pure electronics to the keyboard as an instrument of prolonged ecstasy. "Low Sounds 3" opens the record with fifteen minutes of low frequencies that seem to emerge from the very foundations of the sonic edifice. There is no development in the traditional sense, but a static presence that gradually colonizes the listening space. Think Eliane Radigue's meditative drone work filtered through a raw, almost brutalist sensibility. "Sine Tone Study" on Side B extends this practice for nearly nineteen minutes -- sine waves overlapping, creating beating patterns, zones of interference explored with the patience of an entomologist. The two 1972 Bösendorfer fragments function as bridges toward the Palestine the world knows better -- the strumming ecstasies, the hypnotic accumulation of overtones, the piano as a vehicle for transcendence. Here the physical approach to the keyboard is already evident -- what he would describe as a "battle." This release is part of Alga Marghen's The Golden Research series -- a concept devised by Palestine himself around the idea of "perfect sound." The series focuses exclusively on completely unreleased archival materials, bringing to light legendary recordings that have never been heard before. The LP includes a 8-page interview conducted by Sumner Crane and Rudolph Grey in January 1979 at Palestine's NYC loft, with Arto Lindsay present, later redacted by Alan Licht. The insert is an anastatic reproduction of the original 12-page typescript. Unfiltered, explosive -- Palestine on violence, on the body as battleground, on his Brooklyn childhood. Essential reading.