ALGA MARGHEN - Forced Exposure

$25.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 5/30/2025

This third Gil J Wolman record released by Alga Marghen, bringing together mégapneumes from the '60s, sheds new light into the poetic revolution of the time, or a kind of organic infra-language. It's the physical poetry of a serial killer that is recorded in the two "Mégapneumesm" as well as in the extract from the (last?) "Mégapneumes" (excerpt), the tape that was found still wound on Wolman's tape recorder after his death. "Les Callas," an astonishing piece possibly based on several super-imposed recordings of Wolman's voice at Radio Télévision Française (ca 1961), features a Lettrist choir recycling Rimbaudian vowels, while high-pitched screams emerge, culminating in a polyphony worthy of some tribe resistant to domestication. "Un coup pour rien", "Un coup pour deux" and "Tu vas la taire ta gueule", recorded at Radio Canada in 1965, are presented here for the first time on record, completing the program of this historical and radical anthology. In a conversation with Ilse Garnier, she told Frederic Aquaviva (the curator of this edition for Alga Marghen) that Henri Chopin had precipitated the end of his attempts at sound poetry with this definitive formula: "Le souffle, c'est moi!". On the other hand, in Gil J Wolman's record library appears this eloquent dedication by Chopin on his record Audiopoems, released by the English label Tangent in 1971: "For Gil J Wolman, evident in 1 (because the first), evident in 1971, evident in 2071, evident in 3071, in short to the sup-herbal Gil." But unlike Isidore Isou, Wolman was not the sort of person to send out a leaflet in order to make clear what he had achieved with this new poetry, and besides, he himself had consigned Isou to the old world, with the new beginning represented by his mégapneumes, which in fact date from 1950, when he first joined the Lettrist movement. He was undoubtedly one of the first poets to use the resources of the tape recorder and its varispeed, for example in L'Anticoncept, in 1951, also used a decade later by Brion Gysin with "I Am that I Am" and Henri Chopin. Also, in 1973, François Dufrêne produced a manuscript on a torn silkscreen poster where one can read "Gil J Wolman is one of the most important phonetic poets." Wolman is an essential innovator and artist: a poet, writer, visual artist, film-maker and video-maker who, like Gherasim Luca, did not need to give numerous public recitals or recordings to make his mark. To be Duchamp or Arman: Wolman chose his side!

$25.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 5/16/2025

Paul and Limpe Fuchs at the peak of their creativity and power, tense and radically pursuing freedom with every texture, tone and beat. This LP issued in an edition of 300 copies finds Anima-Sound at the crossroad between sound art/sculpture, radical free jazz and the German sonic avant-garde. Anima-Sound has been defined as "finding authentic sound combinations together" -- and you can hardly describe it tighter. The music of Paul and Limpe lives on such dialectical tensions in many ways, as these 1987 recordings in the municipal gallery in Rosenheim demonstrate. Tension in the musical dialogue between the two, tension between traditional music and the spontaneous sound formation that arises from the moment, tension between conventional instruments and Paul Fuchs' "sound sculptures," tension between the sound of instruments and voice, between metals and woods, between strings and membranes. In order to create as much freedom as possible, Paul and Limpe developed most of the instruments themselves. Sound sculptures like the "pendulum strings," heavy metal rods that hang from piano wires under resonating drums. When struck, bowed or plucked, bell effects, flooding or rough rubbing surfaces of sound are created. Sometimes the vibrations and beats become more concentrated, as if there was a constant cloud of sound over the room. Or the "fox horns," boldly looped wind instruments that again resemble the shape of prehistoric animal horns, or the "tube drums" and other idiosyncratic percussion instruments, such as the circular saw blade used as a cymbal or a simple, flexible bronze plate with a sliding tone scale when brought to swinging with the drumsticks from Limpe, held by Paul. As Limpe recalls: "In the Anima duo with Paul Fuchs beside the drum set I used iron tools and metal sheets from the workshop. Instead of the hi hat cymbals I had a metal ring with five strings and plucked them by foot with a plectrum. Paul had built the Fuchsharp with two pickups and glided up and down the scale." Paul and Limpe Füchs in Baummusik managed to maintain the creative tension, a deeply resonant space and sound, throughout the whole performance: a rise and fall of dynamics and rhythmic intensity, the change of the respective "leading sonority," the choice of timbres were so obvious, as if this music were the reflex of organic life, like breathing. And both the moments of complete silence as well as the outbursts of uncontrolled chaos fit logically into the flow of the music.

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On this album, Smegma was: WhateverWoman (Amy, Amazon Bambi), Chucko-Fats (D.K.), The Quackback Kid (Dennis Duck), Ju Suk Reet Meate with Reed Burns, Richard Wagner, and Danton Dodge. At the end of October 1973, Ricky Reets Hubba-Hubba Band was disbanded. It had been decided that what was needed was "a band without musicians" and many wild experimental jam sessions took place. Finally on November 23, a particularly inspired jam was named "Cat Cheese" and the band Smegma was born. Although they had only been playing music together (or at all) for a few months, they decided to record a full length "live in the studio" Christmas album that included three original songs and an Elvis Presley cover. Budding sound engineer Mike Lastra offered them their first studio recording session in a garage in San Diego, and after a few rehearsals every track was recorded in one take and history was made. They wanted to do some old fashioned songs so they asked two willing "musicians," Reed Burns and Richard Wagner, to help, and since only four Smegma members could make the session "Danny" Danton Dodge (14 years old) was recruited as well. Of course, at the time only two or three copies on cassette were ever dubbed. The "Ace Of Space" received one and promptly became the first person to join the group, but now 50 years later this album is finally made available to public for the first time!

$17.50 IN STOCK

Boston/Tenor/Index presents for the first time some of the earliest works by the American composer Phil Niblock, including the three never before released "Index" (1969), "Tenor" and "Boston III" (both from 1972), thus making it possible to discover Niblock's starting point as a composer. Until now, it's been impossible to encounter Niblock's compositions from earlier than the '80s, a reality thankfully rectified by the long overdue publication of this Boston/Tenor/Index, now on CD from Alga Marghen. "Tenor" (1972) represents the first evolution of Niblock's musical thought towards the aesthetics of microtones, overtones, and drones which the composer would develop in following decades. The piece was recorded by the photographer Martin Bough on tenor saxophone and gradually dubbed back and forth by the composer in his New York studio. The audio materials activated in "Tenor" through technologically de- and re-composed sounding textures, became a vehicle for those sound anomalies that would determine Niblock's audio poetics. Performing gestures are deconstructed though disseminating and editing processes by the imperceptible gestures of the composer. With its smooth flowing structure, "Boston III" (1972) stands at the very beginning of this illusion. It was recorded at the Intermedia Sound studio in Boston with Rhys Chatham (flute, voice), Martin Bough (tenor saxophone), and Gregory Reeve (viola, voice); the composer himself also contributed with his voice. "Index" (1969) is an improvised sound performance by the composer himself. The listener is lucky to listen to the movements of the artist's fingers hitting a guitar string and the soundboard in breathtaking tempo. The piece itself represents early minimalism in its virgin state, untouched by distancing technology. Guitar (both its body and strings), fingers and fingering fuse in a vehement action around which barely listenable sounds and resonances vibrate. This CD also includes "Boston I" (1972), or the first chapter of the "Boston" series. This 25-minute bonus track is less massive than "Boston III," but this version is much richer in dynamics and presents a more recognizable voice of each instrument. The music changes according to the loudness of playback. The interaction of the upper harmonics changes especially, with much richer overtone patterns being produced at louder levels. Edition of 300 copies in digipak sleeve, including an eight-page booklet with photos and liner notes.

$172.00 LOW STOCK LEVEL

New volume of the Avant Marghen series issued in a numbered edition of 80 copies only. This luxury black boxset edition actually includes the fifth group of seven LPs previously issued for the VocSon series and now sold out. Each individual LP record includes a numbered Avant Marghen inner-sleeves. LP 1 features Jean-Louis Brau's Instrumentations verbales. Jean-Louis Brau (1930-1985) approached everything in an explosive way, sometimes achieving some major results, like his sound poetry, as demonstrated by "Turn back nightingale" (1972). Also included on this one-sided LP are "Elégie Elémentaire" and "Ataloche Roche," both recorded in 1961, as well as "Instrumentation Verbale" and "Cantate pour l'interdiction de Mandrake," both recorded in 1963. LP 2 features Maurice Lemaitre's Poemes et musiques lettristes et hyperphonie. An exceptionally wild sonic art and poetry document, Poemes et musiques lettristes et hyperphonie was recorded between 1952 and 1968. Also included on this LP is a previously unreleased torrid "concerto" titled "L'alcove" for a lettrist male chorus and female solo orgasms, followed by "L'ascension du Phenix M.B." a sound collage from 1967. LP 3 features Ulises Carrion The Poet's Tongue LP. All pieces from this LP, recorded at the Instituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht between September and October 1977, have in common their refusal of discursiveness. LP 4 features Anton Bruhin's 11 Heldengesänge und 3 Gedichte with four-page insert. 11 Heldengesänge und 3 Gedichte is a sound poem which takes listeners into a medieval world of minstrels and errant knights. LP 5 features Gil J Wolman's Wolman et son double. Wolman et son double, a previously unreleased recording probably from the late '70s, is Wolman's most theatrical -- as well as musical and lyrical -- piece. LP 6 features Eduardo Kac and Porn Art Movement's Pornéia, also including an LP-size 40-page full-color book. These previously unissued recordings from the Porn Art Movement (1980-1982) include five performances recorded live on Ipanema Beach in 1982, as well as a selection of previously unheard studio recordings of Eduardo Kac yell-poems. The LP also includes the Manifesto Pornô (1980) and four recordings of Flatographic Poems from 1982 LP 7 features Jose Luis Castillejo TLALAATALA with a dark-grey sleeve, only available with this boxset edition. A killer reading of Jose Luis Castillejo TLALAATALA book by Fernando Millan, recorded in Madrid in 2001.

$28.50 IN STOCK

Hemann Damen is a Dutch artist and language designer who, among other things, has created visual poems, performance works and "verbosonies" -- a genre that Damen developed where vocalized morphomic elements are assembled in different ways. In his works, he has been exploring "kinetic language" and the spatial aspects of language. Damen's manifesto Semiotic Theatre states that his work "places itself outside official literature and wants to fascinate, shock or activate people by combining and replacing writing and articulation with extra-linguistic signs and techniques like pictures, drawings, graphics, photos, montages, collages, de-collages, projects, objects, light, darkness, signals, symbols, gestures, happenings, noise, silence, smells, tastes, situations, states, properties, streets, landscapes, etc." The first side of this LP presents five verbosonies recorded between 1966 and 1970. The second side presents three phonographies recorded between 1967 and 1973. Hermann Damen was also the founder and editor of the AH! Magazine, a magazine for "verbal plasticism." Somehow parallel in contents with the legendary Revue OU, Damen's AH! occasionally also included vinyl records and represented an ante-litteram multi-media. This edition includes eleven inserts. Because of its specific contents, this edition was issued in a limited run of just 220 copies.

$25.00 IN STOCK

Alga Marghen presents the previously unreleased Collage 2 and Collage 3 (Dies irae) for magnetic tape, both realized at the Studio di Fonologia Muisicale RAI in Milan with the technical collaboration of Marino Zuccheri. These pieces are precious testimonials to Aldo Clementi's intense and ongoing interest in electronic music in the 1960s. The electronic composition Collage 2 dates from 1960. It was the first experiment with electronic music for Clementi whose original and consistent adherence to structuralism is reflected in several of his instrumental works written around that time. The first idea of Collage 3 dates back to 1966, in the form of a short electronic collage on the Beatles' song "Michelle." The composer wanted to replace old concepts and clichés which had become popular and common, through the use of "natural wells of timbre, live and organic, springing from a world of symmetry and fixed blocks." This original idea underwent a drastic transformation when the RAI (the Italian radio) commissioned Clementi to write a longer work. To his initial desire to start from scratch was added the problem of a longer duration. It was only when Clementi had almost completed the piece that he gave it its final title of "Dies irae," owing to the extreme tension that accompanied its composition.

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Boston/Tenor/Index, presents for the first time some of the earliest works by the American composer Phill Niblock, including three never before released pieces: "Index" (1969), "Tenor," and "Boston III" (both from 1972). Until now, it's been impossible to encounter Niblock's compositions from earlier than the 1960s, a reality thankfully rectified by the long overdue publication of this Boston/Tenor/Index LP on Alga Marghen. "Tenor" (1972) represents the first evolution of Niblock's musical thought towards the aesthetics of microtones, overtones, and drones which the composer would develop in following decades. The piece was recorded by the photographer Martin Bough on tenor saxophone and gradually dubbed back and forth by the composer in his New York studio. "Boston III" (1972) was recorded at the Intermedia Sound studio in Boston with Rhys Chatham (flute, voice), Martin Bough (tenor saxophone), and Gregory Reeve (viola, voice); the composer himself also contributed with his voice. The LP also includes "Index" (1969), an improvised sound performance by the composer himself. Guitar (both its body and strings), fingers and fingering fuse in a vehement action around which barely listenable sounds and resonances vibrate. Considering the extended pulsation as an organic blend of impulse, rhythm, drive, strength, vitality and passion, the end of this sole solo in Niblock's complete oeuvre is not defined by the fixed duration of the piece but as the consequence of the tiredness of the performer. The music changes according to the loudness of playback. The interaction of the upper harmonics changes especially, with much richer overtone patterns being produced at louder levels. Edition of 450 copies, including an insert with liner notes and photo.

$25.00 IN STOCK

In Là is the outcome of the collaboration between Gavin Bryars and the Italian visual artist Massimo Bartolini. Staged as a large-scale installation at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato, Italy, during the autumn of 2022, Bartolini transformed scaffolding into pipe organ bars, suspended from the ceiling across seven rooms of the museum as the central piece for his retrospective exhibition. It is the music played by these singular organs, composed by Bryars, that makes up the two sides of Alga Marghen's LP edition. Here is a compositional practice by Gavin Bryars returning to some of the experimental and conceptual territory that defined his work during the early 1970s, prior to the composition of seminal works like "The Sinking of The Titanic" and "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet". In Là presents the composer working across the vast space of the installation, with sounds physically spread in each of the museum's rooms and placed in careful consideration of the space continuity, while at the same time never fulling being experienced in its totality by the listener. This allows the LP documentation of the work to become a singular complement to the live, real-time aural adventure, unveiling phenomena and perceptions of the work's rich tones and poetic structures that would otherwise be unavailable. While Gavin Bryars background in music is well documented, the connections of Massimo Bartolini's poetic to sound as less known. The early practice of modifying architectural or domestic devices into sound producers, eventually led Massimo Bartolini to create installations made of scaffolding tubes which are modified into the pipes of an organ. Conceived in different forms and in relation to different architectural contexts since 2008, these works clearly relate to Baroque organs, the most visual of musical instruments, and to the use of scaffolding in construction sites. The organ conceived for the solo survey at Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato is the largest incarnation of these series and altogether the largest installation ever conceived by the artist. Hung from a structure that runs along the museum ceiling and suspended just centimeters above the floor, Bartolini built a continuous 75-meters-long wall of scaffolding tubes which winds through seven of the ten rooms of the exhibition space. For this structure of complex engineering Gavin Bryars was invited to compose a specific polyphonic score. Assigning each room a unique melody, the composition creates a richly layered soundscape that is constantly shifting with the viewer as they move through the space. As the title suggests -- alluding to the dominant tonality (La) of the piece -- the score is always "beyond," out of reach, never experienced in its entirety by a single listener as, in fact, the shape of the organ itself. Standard edition of 400; including an insert with liner notes and photo documentation of the installation; numbered.

$208.00 IN STOCK

LP version. Limited edition of 90; signed and numbered copies in a sleeve specially conceived by Massimo Bartolini, including a score from Gavin Bryars and an original engraving by Massimo Bartolini. In Là is the outcome of the collaboration between Gavin Bryars and the Italian visual artist Massimo Bartolini. Staged as a large-scale installation at the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato, Italy, during the autumn of 2022, Bartolini transformed scaffolding into pipe organ bars, suspended from the ceiling across seven rooms of the museum as the central piece for his retrospective exhibition. It is the music played by these singular organs, composed by Bryars, that makes up the two sides of Alga Marghen's LP edition. Here is a compositional practice by Gavin Bryars returning to some of the experimental and conceptual territory that defined his work during the early 1970s, prior to the composition of seminal works like "The Sinking of The Titanic" and "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet". In Là presents the composer working across the vast space of the installation, with sounds physically spread in each of the museum's rooms and placed in careful consideration of the space continuity, while at the same time never fulling being experienced in its totality by the listener. This allows the LP documentation of the work to become a singular complement to the live, real-time aural adventure, unveiling phenomena and perceptions of the work's rich tones and poetic structures that would otherwise be unavailable. While Gavin Bryars background in music is well documented, the connections of Massimo Bartolini's poetic to sound as less known. The early practice of modifying architectural or domestic devices into sound producers, eventually led Massimo Bartolini to create installations made of scaffolding tubes which are modified into the pipes of an organ. Conceived in different forms and in relation to different architectural contexts since 2008, these works clearly relate to Baroque organs, the most visual of musical instruments, and to the use of scaffolding in construction sites. The organ conceived for the solo survey at Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci in Prato is the largest incarnation of these series and altogether the largest installation ever conceived by the artist. Hung from a structure that runs along the museum ceiling and suspended just centimeters above the floor, Bartolini built a continuous 75-meters-long wall of scaffolding tubes which winds through seven of the ten rooms of the exhibition space. For this structure of complex engineering Gavin Bryars was invited to compose a specific polyphonic score. Assigning each room a unique melody, the composition creates a richly layered soundscape that is constantly shifting with the viewer as they move through the space. As the title suggests -- alluding to the dominant tonality (La) of the piece -- the score is always "beyond," out of reach, never experienced in its entirety by a single listener as, in fact, the shape of the organ itself.

$25.00 IN STOCK

While preparing a new edition of Anton Bruhin works in 2008, Alga Marghen discovered some mysterious tapes by Hans Krüsi. Fascinated by the raw and brute contents of those sounds, mixing field recordings of insects, sheep, and distant bells with primitive chanting, percussive noises, and distorted radio folk songs, Alga Marghen started to conceive one of the most obscure editions in the catalog, an LP to be issued in collaboration with the Swiss Kunstmuseum des Kantons Thurgau (the repository of the artist's estate), published on the occasion of Alga Marghen's invitation to the Artist's Record Pavilion at Art Basel 2008 in an edition of 200 copies and instantly sold out. The Swiss-born, self-taught painter Hans Krüsi (1920-1995) was a wiry man who eked out an existence on the margins of society. Even among outsider-art experts, his work is less well known than that of his Swiss compatriot Adolf Wölfli, who died in 1930 and whose richly patterned drawings have become treasures of classic European art brute, or raw art, made by untrained, visionary artists. Krüsi was orphaned as an infant and brought up on a farm in northeastern Switzerland by foster parents who largely ignored him. He scraped by with odd jobs (including gardening work) and eventually settled in the city of St. Gallen. There, Krüsi lived in run-down buildings. In his late 20s, he began commuting by train almost daily to Zurich, to the west, where he sold flowers and, later, his artworks, on the Bahnhofstrasse, one of the most luxurious shopping streets in Europe. Among the wall-to-wall clutter of Krüsi's ramshackle lodgings, where pigeons flew in and perched, evidence of an unexpectedly experimental spirit abounded, including Krüsi's old cameras and the second-hand tape recorders with which he liked to capture the sounds of birds, insects and church bells. The artist's inventiveness and fertile imagination seemed to contrast sharply with his humble way of life. Krüsi took subjects from the agrarian world that he knew: alpine farmhouses, forested mountains, cows, birds, rabbits and cats. In his varied oeuvre, the folkloric and the psychedelic often appear to converge. Some works are even hallucinatory, with bright, brushy passages of acid green, lemon yellow or Pepto-Bismol pink in which watchful, lounging cats, clusters of dithering birds or watery human figures huddle or writhe. After being out-of-stock for 15 years and following the many solicitations over the past decade, Alga Marghen decided to do a new edition to be included as the first record of the new Musique Brut series. Edition of 150.

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Though often compared to Frank Zappa, Moondog, Captain Beefheart, Sun Ra, Jandek, and Father Yod, Damiao Ferreira da Cruz, better known as Damiao Experiença, it's a truly unique outsider multi-instrumentalist (without any real capability to play any of the many instruments he uses) compulsive hoarder from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Reportedly born on September 27th, 1935 in Bahia, Damiao lived an unhappy childhood and ran away from home at the age of 10 to escape the mistreatment by his parents. In Rio de Janeiro he served as a radar operator for the Brazilian Navy; while in the Navy he allegedly fell off a ship's crow's nest, hitting his head on the floor, which could have provoked his erratic mental state. Desertion is also sometimes mentioned in his auto-biography as well as the fact that he was sentenced to solitary confinement for many years. After retiring from the Navy, Damiao went to live with a prostitute in a stilt house, became a pimp and was able to produce his record LPs thanks to money obtained via procuring. It was in the early '70s that he adopted the name "Experiença" as an homage to Jimi Hendrix Experience, his favorite band and major influence. In 1974, he self-released his first album, Planeta Lamma, and many others followed throughout the 1970s to the early 1990s, all issued on his own Gravadora Planeta Lamma. Well known for his unsociable personality, he always avoided interviews and attention from the media, even refusing to give autographs or sign any documents. Damião's musical style is impossible to categorize accurately, since he experiments with numerous genres, more prominently freak folk, psychedelic rock, reggae, and experimental music. His songs have no logical sense at first sight, and most of them are sung in a dialect created by him, the "Planet Lamma dialect" (spoken in his eponymous "home planet"), with improvised lyrics. Side One opens with "1308 Registrou gravou rose Oliria Experiença" with Danimhao paying his one-string guitar and singing at the same time in a very primitive folk style mixing Portuguese with his own invented dialect in his lyrics. It continues with the heroic 18-minute "Ritmo Linguagem Planeta Lamma", a purely distilled Phase-3 Damiao Classic of the most refined nature, with the superimposing of many layers of over-recorded Planeta Lamma endurance. Side One ends with "Planeta Lamma", also from his first LP, an intense solo-screaming one-minute piece. Side Two is also pure Phase-3 with his 21-minute "SOL" masterpiece, one of the highest moments in Daminhao Experienca vast discography.

$28.50 NOT IN STOCK

Alga Marghen presents the last chapter from the Feedback Works documentation series, a brand-new LP including "In Memoriam-Ostinato" and "Danse des Dakinis", two previous unreleased tracks by Eliane Radigue. Among the works of fixed duration from the feedback period, "In Memoriam-Ostinato" is the link between "Jouet Electronique" (ALGA 029LP) and "Opus 17" (ALGA 045LP), and allows you to understand the evolution of her approach. "In Memoriam-Ostinato" is a game of mirroring symbols which glide into a non-measured, bent and elastic, temporality. Eliane Radigue's working method and her aesthetic direction are evident in this work from 1969: her very own unique temporal space of sonic experiences. Even though it bears the same name as the third part of "Adnos III", "Danse des Dakinis" is a peculiar work in Eliane's oeuvre. Conceived in a short time, with all kind of tapes from the composer's past work, it fluently shows a kaleidoscopic vision of Radigue's sensibility for sound. In 1998 she put together a curious self-portrait in sound. There is a feedback ostinato conceived around 1969 and which refers to "In Memoriam-Ostinato" and "Opus 17". All through "Danse des Dakinis" you plunge into the sound of a creek recorded at Mills College campus that brings you back to the field-recordings from the beginning of the 1960s, made on the coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. Such elements construct "Elemental1" (ALGA 029LP) as well. There are also some discreet interventions on the ARP 2500 synthesizer. It is indeed a peculiar work, which doesn't have the same features of her other compositions, especially at that time of her compositional path. There is an explanation for the composer producing this kind of sound material in 1998, and not limited to the sound waves of the ARP synthesizer. Invited to a workshop at Mills College in 1998, Eliane Radigue could not load herself down with her bulky instrument on such a trip. So, she left with just a few tapes taken from her own collection, drawn from different periods, and composed "Danse des Dakinis" with those old elements. There is tension in this composition, a certain wildness, an unpredictability of elements, those which are recognized as fundamental elements, which give structure to the universe. "Dance des Dakinis" is an intimate and wild symphony, alive and unpredictable, which is to be the next-to-last gesture of the composer before completely stopping her work with electronics.

$25.00 IN STOCK

Limited restock. Alga Marghen's third installment of Smegma's original "Suburban Primitive Avant-folk music" period (1973-1975) based in Pasadena, featuring three previously unreleased tracks from the deep vault of their home recordings. In the beginning, the band Smegma had only one rule. No musicians. Starting from scratch, they took the road much less traveled. They were inspired by outsider musical artists of the time such as John Cage, Sun Ra, Captain Beefheart, Wild Man Fisher, Art Ensemble Of Chicago, etc. and they recorded every experiment with youthful enthusiasm. Mostly they only succeeded in tormenting their own friends and neighbors (except for the few who joined the band) but somehow, they never chose imitation, but stumbles on a path that allowed past (shamanistic) and future (space) sounds to lead the way. The titled track gently pulls you in and carries you off with a way-out inner-mind group jamming/not-jamming trip, featuring prepared piano, modular synthesizer, human mouth sounds, pan pipes, tabla, and electric bass guitar. "Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow" (defiantly not the 1960s pop hit) rips you straight into a high energy New Years Eve Party jam, in a romping free jazz style with stream of consciousness vocals and exuberant alto sax solos. Side B starts with Beatnik finger popping and wild dogs barking from a record player, while breathless flute playing leads you down the rabbit hole of mysterious group vocalizing, including imitating the cry of the wild tropical parrots that lived in the palm trees in the front yard of the house in Pasadena that they had lived in. Always out of sync with their own time, 49 years later these tracks still throb and pulsate Beautifully with their own inner logic. Edition of 230.

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Alga Marghen present Underground Altena, two visionary long-form works by Anima Sound, the radically freedom-pursuing Paul and Limpe Fuchs duo. 1973 represented a peak for Anima sonic explorations into sculptural sound at the crossing of krautrock, free jazz, and experimental music. Limpe Fuchs studied piano, violin, and percussion in Munich, but all changed in the late 1960s when she met sculptor Paul Fuchs and discovered there was much more space to experiment and discover her own way as in the sculptural environment she had the chance to work directly with materials. Paul first built a horn as a sculpture (the famous Fuchshorn) and started experimenting with its sounds. Then he built a pedal kettledrum adding things to it like woodblocks and welded a steel ring to the hi-hat stand that was strung up with several strings which Limpe played with her toes, or using a saw blade and a shovel. Even if in the beginning Paul and Limpe were more interested in experimental film, there were other communities like Amon Düül and Tangerine Dream and Anima started touring with them as well as with Popol Vuh or Xhol and very quickly became well known within this krautrock scene. After they were engaged in the Underground Explosion Tour 1969 and had made the Tractor Tour at 19 km/h between Munich and Rotterdam in 1971, came Friedrich Gulda who joined them in the early '70s. He was very fond of the duo and he especially liked Limpe singing and their way of just improvising. He was a famous arranger, but wanted to play in an improvising group. Later on, Anima was included in the infamous "Nurse With Wound List" and came the connection to Steven Stapleton who included them in the An Afflicted Man Musica Box anthology together with Jac Berrocal, AMM, Operating Theatre. Even if Anima was in fact part of the krautrock scene, they had a very distinct sound which was a result of the confluence of Paul's "visionary" sculptural world and Limpe's aural universe. Playing on self-built instruments also had a major role in building their specific sound which became more and more unique in the early 1970s as the Fuchhorn, the Fuchzither, the Fuchsbass and other sound sculptures were created. Heavily guided by Limpe's unique approach to percussion playing and vocals, with Paul delivering a striking arsenal of tonal interventions on his invented instruments, "Underground" and "Altena" plays like the outer reaches of free jazz dropped in an alien landscape. Howling and clattering, entirely free and spontaneous, while never losing the sense of deep consciousness, purpose and control.

$19.50 IN STOCK

2022 repress. On tape from the Judson days. Remember? When you made these things at home, on the best equipment you or your other poor friends could find? Electronic music from the 1960s. And you had that Japanese tape recorder with built-in mike; indeed, that was the only piece of furniture on your tatami floor on the Lower East Side that summer of 1961. This compact disc presents tape music recorded between 1962 and 1963 for the friends meeting once a week in a loft in NYC. The first track, "Lucinda Pastime", was the soundtrack for a dance piece by Lucinda Childs: "the tape was made in the kitchen sink, with primitive equipment and all the different kinds of plates and bowls in the house. The enjoyment of listening to this musique liquid at night, in bed, and always finding it too short." "Memories: Performances": "Ah yes... yes! The principle of this tape is the recombining of recorded performances from the past, my past, this time. Because the idea, and practice, of collage was really around in that time." "From Thais", was made on request of Yvorine Rainer, "collaging mostly extracts from Massenet opera, mix after mix to get thrown around fragments of the opening until the thin, otherworldly quality of the ending." "Oracle, a Canata on Images of War", was commissioned by the Living Theatre: "All sounds in violent counterpoint, made by me at home... playing with real noises, with a deliberately pulverized reality made of over-recorded close-miked crashes which even blew the machine's circuitry. Mixed into the 'Darkest White Noise' ever made." "Flares" used dancers and musicians and slides and lights in a total-space multimedia; this is the only piece on this compact disc which uses purely generated tape sounds. "Circus Tape" was for "a whole evening of inspired crazy-fun, from burlesque to creaking doors." All previously unreleased works presented in a digipack CD with 16-page booklet.

$25.00 IN STOCK

2022 repress. Alga Marghen present the first ever release of Illuminations, or Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti duo interactions, illuminated with dim red lights. In early 1970 Mort Subotnick asked Charlemagne Palestine to join his soon to be created Media Department at the new "Dream School of the Future" endowed by the Disneys to be called the California Institute of the Arts. Charlemagne and Simone Forti met there in 1970, when La Monte Young asked them to arrange a California concert for Pandit Pran Nath. They decided to try an improvisation session together and Charlemagne invited Simone the first time to the electronic music studio where he worked regularly. Their medium blended as a play of interacting sound waves and solid matter in motion as Charlemagne and Simone shared energy and focus. The three previously unreleased recordings on this LP were made between October and December 1971. The first take, titled "Illumination", is for two voices moving in the space with small bells and crystal glasses while Simone Forti plays the molimo, a corrugated tube meant for connecting the gas stove. The second take titled, "Wed Oct 13th 1971", has Simone and Charlemagne in a song dialogue as animals do. It was also at Cal Arts that Charlemagne Palestine first encountered a Bosendorfer Imperial Piano of Vienna. He played it often as Simone danced during their "Illuminations". Take three is a song sang in falsetto while playing the Bosendorfer Imperial in an arpeggiated style that predates the "strummings". Listening to these "three takes" 40 years later, they ooze a timeless, carefree mystical, magical, dreamy atmosphere that evoked the times of the late '60s to early '70s in Charlemagne and Simo ne part of the California Art Scene. Illuminations were a unique open spontaneous form of performance, ritual and prayer. Edition limited to 365 copies with an essay by both Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti, as well as photos of the performances reproduced on the LP front sleeve.

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Alga Marghen presents the second and final chapter in documenting Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti seminal collaborations. The Meditative Sound Environments LP is more centered around electronic music and also includes a unique two-voice work based on Simone's chanting, the magically suspended "Simone Tape". All the tracks of this new LP present only previously unreleased recordings. Charlemagne Palestine met Simone Forti through Dr. Richard Alpert, a professor at Columbia University who went to India to study with a Hindu guru and he himself became a guru afterwards called Baba Ram Dass. Coming back to US he brought Pandit Pran Nath with him. It was a time when everybody was experimenting. All came with a lot of orientalism because people were into timelessness, meditation, and being stoned. It was in that atmosphere that Charlemagne met Simone because she also knew Pran Nath. Around that time Palestine moved from NY to California to work with electronic music at the newly invented school California Institute of the Arts. Simone was also living in LA and even though she was not officially connected to CalArts she knew many of the artists who were teaching there. In summer 1970 Simone Forti was invited by Allan Kaprow (one of the Deans of CalArts) to do an evening of dance at the Pasadena Art Museum and for this performance she asked Charlemagne Palestine to try developing a new kind of work together. It immediately clicked. In January 1971 in Pasadena they did their first Illuminations. All of a sudden, they were doing a new kind of jamming together. Everybody in the audience loved it because it was so dreamy and they found amazing how a man and a woman can act in that strange, very dreamlike oriental way as in trance, together. Other artists were mostly doing very structural works while with Illuminations it was totally like they were on magic drugs. These performances had certain fixed elements... the piano or some electronics like in "Meditative Sound Environment", the title track of this LP. It turned out they liked red lights so they started to always do it in red light. Also, they liked to do it in a resonant spaces. It became more an approach than a piece, because there were never two "Illuminations" that were alike. The aspect of Charlemagne's music that most inspired Simone Forti's imagination was his melodies. Sometimes their texture of repetitions and evolving variations were so close that the term melody doesn't seem to apply. Liner notes by Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti. Edition of 365.

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"Four signed LPs with hand-drawn sleeves edition of 30 signed and numbered linen boxsets also including a 112-page signed book with title page in calligraphy. Alga Marghen started their activities in 1996 soon to become a reference for experimental music, sonic arts and sound poetry publishing. Now in 2021 it's time to celebrate the 25 years of activities and we decided to start by presenting for the first time on vinyl some of most radical and uncompromising Fluxus events. Alga Marghen is therefore very proud to present Philip Corner Fluxstuff, a four-LP edition in linen box, limited to 30 signed and numbered copies, also including a 112-page LP-size signed book collecting some of the most relevant documents from the early days of Fluxus. Each LP comes with hand-drawn sleeve by Philip Corner as well as signed labels. The signed and numbered book also has an individual handmade calligraphy on title page. The 112-page LP-size book includes reproduction of scores, original posters and programs, diagrams, letters and testimonies by among others George Maciunas, John Cage, The Living Theatre, Carolee Schneemann, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Charlotte Moorman, Wolf Vostell, Emmett Williams, Tone Roads, Zaj, Alison Knowles, La Monte Young, Jackson Mac Low, Malcolm Goldstein and Max Neuhaus!"

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In the mid-1970s Anton Bruhin was surely at the peak of his tape manipulation works. Always using poor techniques and equipment he sculpted everyday-life sonic objects turning them into very accomplished and yet totally experimental music artifacts. The works presented here surely are among the most accomplished results of his expanded creativity.

"InOut", a masterpiece for tuning whistle, mouth harps, flutes, toy and party gag instruments, percussion, bells, electric razor, model ship engine with propeller, birdcall whistles, CH-Phon, feedback speaker-microphone, siren, double shawm, falling down spoon, jew's harp (only two short notes), tearing scotch tape from the spool, ocarina, hair dryer and other noise makers plus occasionally radio tuner was recorded in Zurich between May 17th and May 22nd, 1981, on a Sanyo M7300L stereo radio cassette recorder with both integrated and external microphone. The recorder is in the recording standby position, both "RECORD" and "PAUSE" buttons are pushed. Then, Bruhin sings or plays a tone into the microphone. During this tone he releases the "PAUSE" button by pushing it. Subsequently he presses the "PAUSE" button again within a fraction of a second. Now the first short note is recorded. In InOut thousands of very short notes were added this way, like a patchwork, like an acoustic quilt with geometric irregularities and varied patterns.

"Rotomotor", subtitled "ein motorische Idiotikon", is a 28-minute long reading representing one of Bruhin's major works. Written in Zurich between 1976 and 1977, then recorded in August 1978 at Etienne Conod's Sunrise Studio. "Rotomotor" is a poetic Idiotikon of the Swiss-German dialect where, instead of the straight alphabetical order, the words are organized according to the similarities of their letters (each word differ from the previous one by just one letter). For this reading a delay equipment which repeated the signal after 0.6 seconds was used and each word is superimposed to the echo of the preceding one. On one hand this echo generates the rhythm of the performance, on the other it supports the acoustic metamorphosis of the words.

Anton Bruhin in the 1960s began organizing happenings and performances, creating sound works, designing and typesetting his own books, drawing, and writing poetry. Anton Bruhin was a member of the first class to study at the F+F School with Serge Stauffer, famous art teacher and specialist in Marcel Duchamp, where he came into contact with concrete poetry, Fluxus, and experimental music.

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Alga Marghen presents Water Angels, an LP with previously unreleased tracks by Katalin Ladik, following the monumental Phonopoetics from 2019 (VOCSON 157LP). Issued in collaboration with acb Gallery, Budapest. "Water Angel", the title track, is a side-long work from 1989. It began its life containing a splice of "O Fortuna" from Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana": and was first staged in an artificial fog on a lake at the 1989 Spoleto Festival in Italy. The texts include fragments of her own lyrics mixed with parts from James Joyce and Lewis Carroll in a kind of sonic-textual collage of processed sounds superimposed to environmental field recordings. One can also hear the composer Erno Király, her first husband, playing his self-built instrument called "zitherphone", a 58-stringed huge engine of sounds assembling five zithers in a single body, with pick-ups placed on some of the strings. The first part of "Water Angel" was used as a starting point for "Three Orphans", another composition juxtaposing electronically modified voice with recordings of folk songs, this time Hungarian. It's a kind of "adaptation of a Hungarian folk ballad", utilizing recordings done in Transylvania in 1940, registered with a wax cylinder phonograph and gathered by Radio Novi Sad. Thanks to the collaboration with Boris Kovač, the sound engineer for this project, the quality of Katalin Ladik's screams, whispers, chants, laughter, giggles is now significantly improved, and in some ways the subtle nuances of her virtuoso interpretation find here their most powerful rendition. Also presented on this record are three and never before issued works created by Katalin Ladik in collaboration with the composer Svetlana Marasch at the Electronic Studio of Radio Belgrade in 2019: "Electric Bird", "White Bird" and "Ice Bird". Combining extended vocal techniques, processing and modular synthesis, these tracks confirm the artist's radical temperaments that helped to define her work during the '60s and '70s, while pushing it further into new territories thus revealing an artist with almost no peer in the experimental landscape today. Edition of 300.

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Alga Marghen presents the uncompromising El Artilugio, a previously unreleased sonic assault presented in 1968 under the auspices of Walter Marchetti's Zaj in Madrid. Manuel Calvo was a forerunner and a protagonist of geometric abstract painting in Spain between the '50s and the '60s. His personal poetic research was close to that of other artists developing the principles of an analytical art in opposition to the main currents of informal art and lyrical abstraction. Experiences that projected Calvo in a more international dimension, especially through the short but significant collaboration with Galerie Denise René in Paris, a leading European art gallery in that period and catalyst for artists producing geometric abstraction, kinetic art and optical art. The end of the collaboration with Denis René, as well as a short stay in Brazil at the beginning of the military dictatorship, led Calvo on one hand to a critical vision of the established art system and its dynamics, and on the other hand to the radicalization of his libertarian ideas and the upturning of his artistic strategies. Back in Spain, in 1966 and 1967 he decided to become independent from the art system by opening a studio in Calle Alcantara in Madrid and transform it into a taller-exposición, or a laboratory where he could held a permanent exhibition of his works. A space open to public with no temporal limits aiming to reverse the functional paradigm of a standard exhibition space. Calvo was attracted by the idea of using light and movement as materials for his work, a principle originated from kinetic art which he discovered while in Paris some years earlier, and at the same time he wanted to criticize the mechanistic, repetitive and predictable process of cause and effect as the only factor activating people's perception in front of these kinetic artworks. With these premises Calvo created for this space El Artilugio, a participatory permanent installation where the effects of light variations were randomly activated through simple buttons by a no-longer passive audience. This way the installation not only became an open structure with unlimited possibilities of random variations, but through the use of a reel-to-reel recording machine and a pre-recorded magnetic tape it also introduced a sound element, activated during the process, something that represented an absolutely new element within that cultural specific context. The idea came after finding an old electric engine at the Rastro, the ancient flea market in Madrid. A young Catalan anarchist who worked as electrician and who was passing by the taller-exposición in Calle Alcantara managed to repair it and make it work. Once the engine had been started through a process similar to the one used for the lights, Calvo recorded its parasitic noises which he would then reproduce through the reel-to-reel machine during the participatory installation. To this first sonic component of the tape he associated, by contrast, a second part with the recording of an Austrian soprano singer reading out phonems, alliterations of single words, tongue twisters and texts in different languages, repeated in an obsessive way in a style similar to sound poetry. The tape ends with a coda of parasitic noises from the engine, still manipulated with push-buttons, fading out in a glissando. Gatefold sleeve; includes LP-size, eight-page booklet with exclusive photos from the installation as well as a text by Gabriele Bonomo; edition of 250.

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Capturing the four soundtracks conceived in 1975 for the multimedia/audiovisual performances at Galiéra Museum in Paris, the previously unreleased Labyrinthe de Violence stretching across two LPs represents a peek into Luc Ferrari's creations connected to his Atelier de Libération de la Musique experiences. Luc Ferrari was always keen to disrupt habits and engrained practices, to open his mind to new ways of apprehending the world of art, considering it not so much as a separate realm but as an inroad into society. In keeping with the spirit of 1968, he advocated taking part in daily life, casting a critical, but amazed, eye on the world around us, and always questioning the meaning of the occupations and preoccupations the world imposes. From the 1970s, Luc also wished to shed the solitary status of the artist, and to truly communicate with society. He thus gathered around him a group of people from different backgrounds with an aim to create, together, new ways of working and new forms of expression that would address unusual audiences rather than traditional concert audience. Having created his Studio Billig in Paris in 1973, Luc wanted to make the most of that place to promote exchanges with other artists, to share, think, and improvise together. This is what gave rise to the Atelier de Liberation de la Musique workshops, whose objective was to "Liberate music from the constraints of style and esthetics." The idea was precisely to free the artist from abstraction, leading him to perform accessible and intelligible actions; to promote the imagination; to use the dramatic dynamism of sound and image to trigger ideas; to ignore the sensational and instead to observe our social environment and daily life with an intuitive eye-ear; to invite the visitor to come up with their own analysis. This craving for collaboration led Luc Ferrari to create, in 1975, a collective of musicians with Martin Davorin Jagodic, Philippe Besombes, Alain Petit and David Jisse. That year, they worked at Labyrinthe de Violence, a looped audiovisual labyrinth which evoked the violence of contemporary society, and was a reaction to the political situation of the time. It was a multimedia work, spread across four rooms, on the following themes: Power/Profit/Violence/Pollution. Each side of this 2LP set reproduces the sonorization of one of the four rooms in the Museum, automatically mixing in the central space. The same recordings focus on questions of utopia through many of the same themes. As in the rest of his work, pleasure was also at the heart of these pieces. First press limited to 500 numbered copies; gatefold sleeve.

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Alga Marghen in collaboration with Expanded Media Editions present the final issue of Soft Need, a publication centered on the work of William Burroughs and expanding its deep influences into contemporary consciousness. Founded by Udo Breger in 1973 as a reaction to the aftermath of a three weeks' stay across Xmas and New Year's with Gysin and Burroughs, Soft Need had its roots in the underground press of the previous two decades and at the same time became a prototype for the forthcoming fanzine scene. Even if only three numbers were issued in the '70s (SN#8 in 1973 followed by SN#9 in 1976 and SN#17 The Brion Gysin Special in 1977, all in print-runs of 300 to 500 copies) it quickly became a legendary publication for both Burroughs fans and those interested in counterculture experimental poetry artists' editions. Almost half a century later, the last edition Soft Need 23 is now issued including exclusive material by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin as well as multi-media contributions by eighty international authors and artists. Issued in an edition limited to 431 copies Soft Need 23 is a 260-page art book reflecting on the contemporary relevance of historical works by Burroughs and Gysin within the frame of the Beat Generation. Dedicated to Ian Sommerville, the English electronic technician and computer programmer who was collaborating with Brion Gysin to development of the early Dreammachine and programmed the computer-generated random sequences that the poet used in his early cut-ups, the book present 190 illustrations, literary essays, photographs, poetry, visual art, caricature, memories and a vast array of ephemera by William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Allen Ginsberg, Louise Landes Levi, Gregory Corso, Jean-Jacques Lebel, John Armleder, Paul-Armand Gette, Peter Weibel (director of ZKM Karlsruhe and curator with Udo Breger of The Name Is Burroughs show in 2012), Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Sonic Boom, Papiro, James Grauerholz, Robert Wilson, and many others. A large format (32x24cm) book printed in 4/4-color and featuring a thread-sewn visible binding. 950 grams. 260-page book edition of 431 copies.

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Planam present the first 7" edition issued in its catalog, the split-single with consonant musicians Sonic Boom and Papiro. Originally produced as contribution for Soft Need 23, a book on Burroughs/Gysin edited by Udo Breger, this 7" is hereby available in its shiny and beautifully repackaged edition. Former Spacemen 3 mastermind and alchemist producer Sonic Boom (aka Pete Kember, E.A.R., Spectrum) offers an unreleased instrumental version of "Just a Little Piece of Me", an overture for West-Coast-Style synthesizer and harp, starring a repeating ardent theme. Papiro, who was also responsible for the vivid cover artwork, engraves his side with the electronic lullaby "Dream Journal (for Udo)", written purposely for Breger, as the title suggests, and released exclusively for this single. Papiro and Kember are known for their gallant trips between experimental and meditative abstract worlds. This single shows their ability to touch the soul during these ventures. Edition of 200 copies in glossy full-color sleeve.