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R 090CD
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February 9th 2021 was the 80th birthday of composer Charlie Morrow. To celebrate the occasion, Recital announce Chanter, a new album collecting his voice works over the past 60+ years. Chanter features guests such as Annea Lockwood, The Western Wind Vocal Ensemble (who worked with Philip Glass), Carole Weber, etc. 80 minutes of voice for 80 years of Charlie's life. While Morrow's previous two albums on Recital Toot! Too (2017) and America Lament (R 081LP, 2020) focused on chamber and electronic compositions, Chanter covers over 60 years of vocal explorations. Spanning from Charlie's first ever tape recording Ella (1960) to two intimate chanting improvisations made in 2021 for this CD. Curated by Sean McCann, the dozen tracks which comprise the album include pieces like "Drum Chant" (1971), a roaring percussive crescendo with chanter hyperventilation; "A Chant With Watches" (1974), a spatial work of watches placed on top of microphones across the stereo field, oscillating in octaves. Composer Annea Lockwood appears on the album playing a glass water jar over the telephone at a 1984 New York concert where Charlie dialed in performers from around the world to collaborate with him on stage. A central portion of the album is the large-scale shamanic opera "Spirit Voices" (1971), based on concepts from Siberian shamanism. With tape playback of Charlie's handmade electronics and amplified chanting voices, the 1987 staging also included fire artists, metal sculptors, brass ensemble, saw player, and dance troupe. Elements of sound poetry are fused with minimalist drone and sometimes violent electronics. Two beautiful choral works are included: "Hymn Transformations" (1983), a style of composition that mutates Sacred Harp music with numerical repetitions based on geographical coordinates, here sung by The Western Wind vocal ensemble who famously performed works by Philip Glass. A euphonious passage from "Genesis Song" (1968), a Māori poem translated by Jerome Rothenberg, taken from Morrow's The Light Opera (1982), which included Min Tanaka's Butoh dancers and a trio of jack hammers. Silver-leaf foil printed CD, with 16-page booklet.
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R 092CD
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Mother of Pearl is the first duo album from composers Sarah Davachi and Sean McCann. Two people, a couple, recording together at home. A slow, autumnal album made with no preconceptions or planning. Intimate, intended for only Sarah and Sean. Sessions were captured simultaneously in two ways to build the shared space of perception. Sculpted hesitations made late at night. Short statements of melody are left space to rest and repose. The presence of room tone and the air are characters in all of these recordings -- weaving freely within the music. Four-handed piano, two electric pianos, two guitars, viola, bells, tape. Golden hour, late night. The first recording sessions bookend the album, made in an afternoon in 2020. Recorded at home in Glendale, California and at a farmhouse on Sean's birthday, nearby goats and wine and a supersonic jet launch. Take refuge in pleasure. Gatefold CD wallet with gold foil printing; includes 12-page booklet; includes 30 mins of additional music (Red Sky EP), available only on the CD.
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R 026LP
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Mary Mazzacane's son Loren Connors writes: "These recordings, no matter how rough the sound quality, capture the essence of the art of bel canto soprano Mary Mazzacane. Born in an Italian American neighborhood (Fairhaven) near Yale, she was one of the first women to graduate from the Yale School of Music. Ms. Mazzacane, who was active on the opera stage from 1947 through the 1970s, playing leading roles in Madame Butterfly, Tosca, Amahl and the Night Visitors and other works, left no commercial recordings. All we have is a shoebox full of muddy practice sessions and live performance recordings on barely playable cassette tapes, along with a few radio broadcast acetates... Throughout these pieces, her voice has a unique inner warmth and a beautifully clear tone, the closest I know to the pure clarity of bells."
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R 088CD
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Alex Twomey's Days Off, the second full-length album under his own name, pronounces his evolving compositional approach. Following The Entertainer (R 058LP, 2019), this album features a more intimate ensemble of piano, strings, bass, and guitar. Written between 2019 and 2021, the arrangements resemble pop-structured songs within the margins of sedate orchestral music. Twomey's use of electric guitar is also unique; more as a blurred harmonic brush propelling rhythmic cycles and key changes. The influence of Michael Nyman, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and other English-minimalists is present -- but Twomey as one-man composer, performer, and producer delivers a rare intimacy, a sardonic view of days better spent. We're transported to a restful couch in Alex's living room. His cats sleeping around you like gods in relief as the album echoes from his studio in the next room. With repeating chords of matched exuberance and melancholy, Days Off evokes a familiarity both optimistic and sentimental.
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R 085LP
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The first vinyl LP release from Fluxus pioneer Alison Knowles (b. 1933). Sounds from the Book of Bean is an assemblage of noises and texts related to "The Book of Bean" (1982), Knowles' eight-foot tall walk-in book constructed at Franklin Furnace in New York. This recording, the sounds of making the big book, was continually played back inside of the installation. Echoes of Yoshi Wada hammering together the circular spine of the book, other collaborators mixing ink, feeding a horse, the flowing waters of the Hudson Valley... all superimposed with texts and poems read by Knowles and her daughter Jessica Higgins. On the second side of the album, the piece "Essential Divisions" features Knowles performing with red, black, and white beans. Recorded in Annea Lockwood's underground studio, Knowles sounds the beans in glass, ceramics, wood, as well as in her mouth. Further bean histories and sound poems are recited, concluding with "Popular Bean Soup" -- an ancient recipe translated by George Brecht. Knowles' big books are, as she describes them, transvironments: a transformationally experienced environment. The phenomenological nature of her book is distilled aurally in the case of this record. As Knowles describes the end of her book, "the reader leaves via a ladder or out the window and through a muslin panel printed with contradictory wisdom concerning beans and dreaming... one can begin again either by going on or turning back." Originally published as a cassette in 1982 on the New Wilderness Audiographics label, this remastered edition has been transferred from original tapes. An expansive 20-page booklet is included, holding graphics and writings from Alison Knowles, George Quasha, and Charlie Morrow. Recorded by Alison Knowles, 1980. Produced by Alison Knowles, Sean McCann, and Charlie Morrow. Design by Alison Knowles, cover image courtesy George Quasha. Jessica Higgins also adds voice to tracks 1, 3, 4, 5.
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R 087BK
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Wildweeds is the first art book by musician Loren Connors. Following a series of LPs on Recital showcasing Loren's haunting guitar playing, Recital present a proper collection of his Wildweed drawings. Connors' visual art has occasionally been included as little prints and pamphlets inside his LPs and CDs; though, always explored in a shade, an appendage to his music. Combusted bulbs of purple and yellow flower heads over wild grey stems, as fragile and beautiful as his music. As Loren explains the Wildweeds; "The way they move and say something, they're all separate and they're all the same." Foreword by Sean McCann and an essay by Jay Sanders. 9"x12" perfect soft bound; 120 pages; first edition of 150; hand-numbered.
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R 089CD
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Dans le Sable is the first new album in over 40 years by composer, pianist, and digital audio pioneer Loren Rush (b. 1935). Active in the Bay Area new music scene since the late 1950s alongside composers such as Robert Erickson and Pauline Oliveros, he also co-founded the Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in 1975. His music has been performed by the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra amongst others.
The title piece "Dans le Sable" (1967-68, 70) covers the first side of the record, of which Charles Shere in the Oakland Tribune (1972) writes: "A surreal opera scene. A narrator dwells on the significance of passing time. A soprano sings Barbarina's cabaletta from Figaro, which describes her distraught search in the sand for a lost pin. The chamber orchestra -- mostly solo instruments -- plays soft, half-forgotten tunes reminiscent of the Parisian music hall. If Marcel Duchamp wanted to put painting once more at the service of the mind, so did Rush seem to want to make a composition that speaks directly to that thing behind the mind -- the point where it connects with the soul. And he succeeded. But only because the work is so brilliantly constructed, so careful in its structure and the timing of its phrases, so well balanced in the disposition of its parts that it quite overcomes the audience."
The second piece on the album "Song and Dance" begins with the watery held tones of "Song". Melancholy phrases are deconstructed and stretched in different retellings, invoking a harmonic fog. We are then thrust into "Dance", one of the first orchestral pieces to employ computer-generated digital synthesis. A hypnotic and percussive march is propelled into a storm of early computer-processed cannonades. Recital now illuminate the overlooked composer Loren Rush, whose meticulous attention to detail has perhaps kept his toiled-upon works in the shadows these past decades. CD version includes eight-page insert; edition of 250.
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R 089LP
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LP version. Includes double-sided insert; edition of 500. Dans le Sable is the first new album in over 40 years by composer, pianist, and digital audio pioneer Loren Rush (b. 1935). Active in the Bay Area new music scene since the late 1950s alongside composers such as Robert Erickson and Pauline Oliveros, he also co-founded the Stanford University's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in 1975. His music has been performed by the Boston Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra amongst others.
The title piece "Dans le Sable" (1967-68, 70) covers the first side of the record, of which Charles Shere in the Oakland Tribune (1972) writes: "A surreal opera scene. A narrator dwells on the significance of passing time. A soprano sings Barbarina's cabaletta from Figaro, which describes her distraught search in the sand for a lost pin. The chamber orchestra -- mostly solo instruments -- plays soft, half-forgotten tunes reminiscent of the Parisian music hall. If Marcel Duchamp wanted to put painting once more at the service of the mind, so did Rush seem to want to make a composition that speaks directly to that thing behind the mind -- the point where it connects with the soul. And he succeeded. But only because the work is so brilliantly constructed, so careful in its structure and the timing of its phrases, so well balanced in the disposition of its parts that it quite overcomes the audience."
The second piece on the album "Song and Dance" begins with the watery held tones of "Song". Melancholy phrases are deconstructed and stretched in different retellings, invoking a harmonic fog. We are then thrust into "Dance", one of the first orchestral pieces to employ computer-generated digital synthesis. A hypnotic and percussive march is propelled into a storm of early computer-processed cannonades. Recital now illuminate the overlooked composer Loren Rush, whose meticulous attention to detail has perhaps kept his toiled-upon works in the shadows these past decades.
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R 086CD
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"Das Jahr 2020 is the first published recording of Molly McCann, my older sister of two-and-a-half years. After encouraging my sister to record her piano playing for years, she embarked on her first recording project with Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel's Das Jahr ("The Year", 1841), a groundbreaking cycle of twelve thematically and harmonically interlocked character pieces depicting the twelve months of the year. Putting aside her usual toil for perfection, Molly embraced a larger conceptual experience, both personal and musical in nature: to learn and perform each piece of the cycle in the corresponding calendar month, knowing the accelerated timeline would push her outside of her comfort zone and require a renewed approach to and understanding of time. With a creaky, slightly out-of-tune upright piano and her cellphone's built-in microphone, the monthly self-recordings began in January of 2020." --Sean McCann
"And so we try to ornament and prettify our lives -- that is the advantage of artists, that they can strew such beautifications about, for those nearby to take an interest in." --Fanny Hensel on composing Das Jahr, Letter to August Elsasser, Nov. 11, 1841
Includes eight-page insert with program notes; edition of 200.
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R 084LP
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Recital exhibit the new album by Swedish composer Kajsa Lindgren (b.1990). Typically working with field recordings and electroacoustic sounds, Momentary Harmony expresses her more emotive and lucent instrumental compositions. The music has taken a step away from her previous works, using only flickers of field recordings, instead tracing back to Kajsa's childhood classical music roots: voice, violin, and piano. A warm tide grows and recedes through her album. Breathing in miniature lute ornaments and exhaling large choral plateaus. This polarity rests in narcotic limbo. The delicate arrangements remind one of Vikki Jackman or blurred Björk B-sides. Mixing instrument stems like clusters of field recordings, Lindgren laces harmonic gradients across the plain of this LP. Choirs clasp with cello overtones and piano washes. Alongside Kajsa Lindgren, the album has recurring topiary appearances by Vilhelm Bromander (bass), Maxwell August Croy (koto, voice, guitar), Åsa Forsberg (cello), Pär Lindgren (lute), Sean McCann (piano and voice), and Jörgen Pettersson (saxophone). Includes set of five postcards made for the album; also includes download coupon; edition of 250.
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R 025LP
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2021 LP edition. 180 gram vinyl; includes 18"x24" folded color poster (blueprint); edition of 200. Emily Martin and Derek Baron on St. Francis (Feb. 2021): "What does it mean to pray? To address someone, to plead for something, to welcome humiliation and failure: Please, let me forget about the China Chalet parties, please let there be no countries and no war, please let me love you. Is prayer iteration, or just repetition: My god, my god, my god, my god... To know spleen you just have to be down to be humiliated. But do we know for sure that we are miserable? How do we know? This is how it has to go. We listened to this for the first time together in May 2017, while driving from Chicago to New York along the I-80 in Pennsylvania, stopping at the rest area that I later mistook for the famous picture of American 'culture.' We stayed at a hotel and may have ordered a pizza. Content first, then, content again. Went inside and drank wine in relative silence, burping. Recognizing the sacredness in the plot of Friends. A choral melisma representative of holy Joy. The dreams of moving through a convoluted space of passages, staircases, open courtyards, rooms just glimpsed past a door. It doesn't seem possible that you can get from one place to the next but according to the logic of the dream you do. I think this has to do with how each little unit of 'content' happens at a different distance from your ear. The holiness of the periphery. That you can catch a shard of history if you only find the right distance to stand from the painting. But prayer is also like the magic language we were talking about -- faith that words do something more than just mean -- they have the capacity to effect change in the world, and not just in the like, 'words change ppl's minds' kind of way, but in that the words themselves actually have agency. Form: sing-along."
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R 082CD
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Nour Mobarak's Sphere Studies and Subterranean Bounce is the catalog for her sculpture and audio installation, which adorned the steep hillside of Los Angeles's Hakuna Matata sculpture garden in the Fall of 2020. Eli Diner's press release reads; "Up on the hill, Mobarak presents two related bodies of work. The six Sphere Studies are part of her ongoing examination of the material and metaphoric possibilities of mycelium. Growing through a substrate in a rhizomatic system of hyphae, mycelium has its own kind of intelligence, one that opens the possibility of personal relationship. As a material it is versatile and malleable; only for those who understand it, however, will it work, assuming the ternary role of material, subject and studio assistant. Then there is a *five-channel sound installation emanating from the bowels of the earth. Subterranean Bounce is built from recordings of the movements of spheres of various sizes and densities [*a stereo mix is presented on the audio-CD in the back of the book]." An essay of gentle wit and fantasy by Hakuna Matata's Eli Diner -- along with a selection of Mobarak's poems --rotate the axis of this highly faceted art book. All enriched by the 40-minute spherical CD. This is the second edition of Mobarak's on Recital, the other being Father Fugue (R 066LP), her first LP published in 2019. Book: 102 pages, perfect bound 6″x6″ book, hand numbered. Limited edition of 80.
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R 083LP
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Captain Rip Hayman (b.1951, New Mexico) has come ashore again, bearing fresh cargo. A student of John Cage, Ravi Shankar, and Philip Corner, Rip was a founding editor of the revered Ear Magazine (1975-1991), and since 1977 has run New York's oldest bar, the Ear Inn. The focused minimalism of his new LP Waves: Real and Imagined varies from the collaged spectacle of his first Recital LP, Dreams of India & China (2019). This oceanic dish holds two side-long works: "Waves for Flutes," a multi-tracked flute composition recorded by the artist in 1977. "Angelic", "Grave", and "Sad" modes overlap an effect of medieval choral organum, as shifting patterns evoke water and wind variations of the shore and vast sea beyond. An enchanting and arresting piece. The second side holds "Seascapes," which was recorded on the Pacific Ocean in February and March of 2020 -- through calm seas and tempestuous storms. The ship as the instrument played by the sea. We feel both lost and saved when at sea, the landfall feared or longed for. The album is dedicated to all those whose souls have been lost and found at sea amidst the waves, for each sea wave is a child of Oceanus & Tethys, Greek gods of the sea, every one sent on their way to play... Includes download coupon; includes folded 11″ x 17″ insert with liner notes; edition of 300.
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R 081LP
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America Lament is a panoramic musical survey of legendary experimental composer/event-maker Charlie Morrow's eclectic works. At just over 40-minutes, America Lament is mysterious, beguiling, and jubilant, comprised of pieces employing everything from hand-made electronics to Irish lap pipes, ecstatic jazz to Schubert recompositions, ambient flutes, and a string quartet. Charlie Morrow and Recital's Sean McCann excavated 50 years of Morrow's bottomless archive, from 1970 to 2020, to present this follow-up to 2018's Recital release Toot! Too (R 041LP). Charlie Morrow (b. 1942 in Newark, NJ) is a composer, sound artist, performer, and innovator. With concert performances and ad jingles (including Hefty trash bags -- "Hefty, Hefty, Hefty! Wimpy, wimpy, wimpy!"), city-wide events and film soundtracks, museum sound installations and hospital sound environments, Morrow's work has been experienced by a wider audience than most creative artists can claim. Charlie's music has a melody and depth to it that is absent from a lot of avant-garde music. His keen interest in all musical styles seem to inform this harmony. Charlie's drive to interconnect people and ideas is contagious and affirming. 20-page booklet with program notes, scores, and an interview between Morrow and McCann; edition of 300.
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R 079LP
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New Philip Corner LP on Recital. Voice recordings from a small performance in Italy, early in 2020 -- Homages to/from George Maciunas (1931-1978). Corner's piano meditative playthroughs of Couperin's The Mysterious Barricades (1717), from 1989 and 1992. These two elements (voice and piano) superimposed by Sean McCann, edited during the first month of the pandemic. Manic exaltation, distorted harmony things. Album cover is a few PC scores soaked in olive oil and held in-front of the sun through my kitchen window. Booklet features passionate writings on the Couperin piece and its meaning by Corner. Philip wrote a new reflection for this LP edition, "The Mesure of the Mystery". This album is built from the finest ingredients: beautiful piano with stomach-clenching voice stretches. Edition of 250; 12-page pamphlet of scores and an essay by Corner.
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R 078LP
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Derek Baron is a composer, musician, and artist. Curtain is a diary. Both in musical and non-musical situations, they attribute a filmic quality to their journal-like aural self-documentation. Dreams turn real then dissolve. Single phrases and events arrive and leave, abruptly. Yet, the overall sense of place that Baron creates is understood. Opening Curtain is the eponymous piece. A 21-minute live chamber work for quintet recorded in 2018. A musical assemblage of glued-together fragments and scraps of sheet music from Baron's past. Compositions wrote in the small margins and folds of paper; illustrated in the art booklet included with the LP. The flute, violin, guitar, keyboard, and bass clarinet phrases saunter at a pre-sleep pace, until a subdued, yet ecstatic Mass theme ushers in periodically. Delivering the warmth of life... it is a slow beauty. It brings me such happiness listening to this piece. Its continuity is cut with scissors and pasted about oddly... all soaked in a certain malaise; a resigned grace. The next piece and other side of the LP, "Chancel," is rather different. An audio journal flipped through, dropped on the ground, picked up and opened to another page. A confusing montage of world-ized musical snatches: car radios, church choirs emanating to the streets, moldy organs, domestic piano recordings. Similarly, machine vibrations, bodega conversations, and other environmental observations segue the harmony and disharmony of this listening experience. Here are some of Derek's notes from the booklet: "Co-opting new achievements / Thank you for this incredible demonstration / This theatre of procedures / This consoling play of recognitions / No theatre but "what's that", / Nowhere for the silver ball to roll to. / How are we so in love." 16-page color pamphlet of artwork & text by Baron; edition of 150.
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R 070CD
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The second album by the American Gamelan composer and instrument builder, Daniel Schmidt, following In My Arms, Many Flowers (R 017CD), his majestic debut on Recital. Abies Firma lies next chronologically, collecting works from 1976 to 1991, considered the second phase of his compositional form. "We were like children playing with new toys," Daniel recalls of the early days of American Gamelan music. "Though, as we moved into the 1980s, I moved away from Javanese traditional formalism completely, no longer using a constant stream of notes." Daniel became a father twice over in the early '80s, transforming his compositional voice, finding himself open to new affects. Notably, the Sierra fir species, 'abies firma' -- "These trees gave me a sense of rising and rising, all their branches reaching toward sun and sky. Looking at them across open spaces, I felt myself part of their upward striving. The tall mountain trees became rising themes and arpeggios, sometimes even sweeping across the six octaves of the gamelan." This album holds a variety of recordings including an especially immersive tape-delay piece for the rebab, a bowed Javanese instrument. A sort of Eastern Frippertronics weaving the stereo field. Another standout is a semi-improvised flute and gamelan work, ebbing in slowly like a night's wind. "Accumulation" and "Abies Magnifica", the spirited opening pieces, exemplify the precision and dexterity of Daniel's group, The Berkeley Gamelan, who at this time were constantly performing around North America. Two pieces on the album were co-composed by Schmidt and the late Lou Harrison, who helped conceive of the American style of gamelan and enjoyed a similarly long and varied musical career. "Unempins to Sociseknum" is based on arranging Harrison's social security number against Schmidt's unemployment insurance number. A window into the cooperative spirit and experimentation of the late 70s. LP comes with a CD including the additional piece "One White Crow," a three-part tapestry of melodic fragments which epitomizes the second phase of Schmidt's composing; a divergence from both Javanese and European music. Daniel states, "William James once said that one white crow would suffice to overturn science's assertion that all crows are black. I felt myself to be 'one white crow' amidst the prominent, established musical styles." Includes 20-page booklet holding program notes, scores, and a new essay on American Gamelan by Jay Arms. Includes bonus track "Cypress", recorded in 1987.
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R 073LP
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Repress forthcoming 2022... Recital label head Sean McCann on the record (2020): "A spellbinding tribute from one multi-faceted artist to another. New York-based artist Aki Onda (b. 1967) conjured a transduction to the Korean multi-media pioneer Nam June Paik (1932-2006). Aki himself describes the project: 'Nam June's Spirit Was Speaking To Me occurred purely by chance. In 2010, I was spending four days at Nam June Paik Art Center in South Korea for a series of performances and had plenty of free time to wander . . . I have always felt a close kinship with him as an artist, and so it was a great opportunity to immerse myself in his works and ephemera. It was that night I made the first contact, via a hand-held radio in a hotel room in Seoul . . . Scanning through the stations, I stumbled upon what sounded like a submerged voice and I began to record it in fascination. I concluded this was Paik's spirit reaching out to me. The project continued to grow organically as I kept channeling Paik's spirit over long distance and receiving cryptic broadcasts/messages. The series of séances, conducted in different cities across the globe, began in Seoul in 2010, and continued in Köln, Germany in 2012, Wrocław, Poland in 2013, and Lewisburg, USA in 2014. The original recordings were captured by the same radio which has a tape recorder, with almost no editing, save for some minimal slicing and mastering. Paik is known for his association with shamanism, a practice that constantly surfaces in his works all through his career. In an interview, he stated 'In Korea, diverse forms of shamanism are strongly remained. Even though I have created my work unconsciously, the most inspiring thing in my work came from Korean female shaman Mudang.' . . . These recordings also became a way for me to explore the mythic form of radio -- a medium which is full of mysteries. The transmissions captured may be 'secret broadcasts' on anonymous radio stations. There are in fact hundreds of those stations around the world, although the numbers dwindle as clandestine messages can now be sent via encrypted digital channels...' Nam June's Spirit is a beautifully formed homage, I cannot think of any other like it. An intimate, flickering language discovered through the air." Includes 20-page art booklet including rare photographs of Nam June Paik from the set of Michael Snow's film Rameau's Nephew (1974), two essays on radio-wave phenomenon (by Onda and Marcus Gammel), and a remembrance of Paik by Yuji Agematsu. Edition of 250.
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R 071CD
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Malcolm Green (b. 1952) is a British artist, dancer, and publisher. His eccentric, liquid ideas seem to come with a smile. Or is it a wry grin? His colorful paintings, usually adorned with phrases, are little riddled plaques. Luckily, Malcolm is of the ilk of visual artists who also records audio works (this multiplicity is always interesting). Green's own label Seedy CDs/Sieh Dies issued a number of CDrs between 2000 and 2005, including many of his own works, along those by friends Jan Voss and a CDr reissue of Dieter Roth's classic Die Radio Sonate (2006). Green is, in fact, a member of the Dieter Roth Academy -- and furthermore gracefully ropes the pillars of Roth into his own artistic process. When Recital head Sean McCann approached Malcolm about republishing an album, Electric Landlady excited both of them immediately. It is the sound of an Epson 90-dot matrix printer running sheets of the score for John Cage's 4'33". It is piercing, though a world of ricocheting meaning can be uncovered in between the lines. Green says, "this particular rendering of Cage's handwritten score is in fact somewhat contrary to Cage's intentions, because every performance on the Epson 90 will be more or less identical. For this reason I have titled it differently: Electric Landlady -- in honor of a felicitous misprint of the famous Hendrix record I once encountered in Italy." The subsequent tracks are beautiful, harmonic re-renderings of the printer's voice, "played live without post-editing, with the (accidental) addition of a booming guitar sound that came with the PC program I was using." Electric Landlady concludes with a jaw dropping DJ-remix of the printer, with airplanes and dogs flying high above a field of beats. Includes four-page pamphlet holding program notes by Green; Edition of 150.
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R 075BK
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2022 limited reprint. Sean McCann, Recital label head, on Papers (April 2020): "In addition to the musical objects she creates, Sarah Davachi is also immersed in the theoretical issues that surround her practice. This twin engagement began in her youth in Canada, studying philosophy and music, and working at a specialized musical instrument museum. Her compositional ambitions led to the doorstep of Mills College, fertile with history. Accompanied by a thesis for pipe organ and electronics, she also wrote a tangential document that ties experimentalism and phenomenology and the concept of the 'irreal.' A few years passed as Davachi continued to research and write with an extensive content development project for the museum in Canada. Since 2017, she has been working toward her PhD in musicology at UCLA, with a dissertation on critical organology (the study of musical instruments) and texture in early music, popular music, and experimental music. Papers positions historical and technological conclusions to face their philosophical underpinnings. Illuminating the mysteries of temperament and character in harmony, placing medievalism into the present, giving a narrative of studio recording as world making, and musing on her revered theories about art. Two of the essays dissect sympathetic compositions: Natura Morta by Walter Marchetti and In A Large, Open Space by James Tenney. Fingerprints bordering pathos. The book concludes with six artifact studies: an Italian virginal, a Bösendorfer piano, the Novachord, the Mellotron, the modern harp, and the OSCar synthesizer. Comprehensive details of their development, mechanisms, and cultural significance are laid to bare. I walked downstairs a few weeks ago and Sarah was tuning her harpsichord with a hammer given to us by our friend James Rushford, who had accidentally bought the wrong type a few years back. I sat on the chair beside her; she was setting the instrument to a quarter-comma meantone temperament (from roughly the late 1400s). With only a laymen's understanding of tuning, Sarah demonstrated for me an explanation so simple and beautiful that it made me smile continually. The unique identity of each triad, in this early form, became tangible that afternoon. I could hear how one interval sounded apart from the same in another key. The book elucidates similar experiences. When I read Papers, I admire Sarah's ability to frame the tableau of history with an elegant open end."
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CD
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R 072CD
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Sean McCann on the release (January 2020): "Ten Impressions dates from the fall of 2010, when I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I was contemplating starting Recital at this time, envisioning the first release to be a double-LP of my ambient, slow works. Amassing violin and piano fragments over the next months, I ended up with over four hours of recorded material. Well, then... I sat and looked at the files on my computer and lost all interest. An odd gapping period overtook me and I stopped working on music. Twiddling my time, my listening interest in classical and art-y avant grade music flourished. A year later, or so, I waded back to the pool of strings and keys and thought, 'oh, well, some of these still feel nice.' So, I opened the chest again. I knew this would be the last 'ambient' record I would make for the foreseeable future (still mostly true). I sculpted them lightly, to a sort of pastoral sadness. Working again on these pieces was familiar and easy. This was just before the obsessive editing microscope was glued above my eye (trying to rip it off, now, though). Ten Impressions is available as a clean CD now. I appreciate the confidence from Root Strata (who originally published this as an LP in 2015). So, thank you Maxwell August Croy and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. This is my most Eno/Budd effort, and I feel the recordings stand well ten years later... Not as an Eno/Budd record, but as a taste of what was before and, if I never got into Fluxus and sound poetry, what could have continued to happen." Four-page pamphlet holding program notes; gatefold wallet; Edition of 200.
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LP
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R 074LP
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Saturday Night is the debut LP by old friends and collaborators Alex Twomey, Matthew Sullivan, and Sean McCann. Recorded over numerous evenings at the artists' homes, and completed just before the birth of Matthew's daughter, Flora. The album became an excuse to spend time with one another as well as perform. As the trio ordered take-out, drank scotch, smoked on patios, laughing off the weight of reality -- they stumbled into moments of musical focus. This album has a prism of fidelities. High and low resolutions press together as the environment blows through the instruments. The woozy, side-long titular track of hesitant cello and pianos opens the record. Quiet music with blemishes and inebriated pauses, breathing an alleviated air. Phrases with failing propellers, teetering between melodic and apathetic. The true speed of their Saturday nights. Side two opens with "London On My Mind." Reflecting the other pole, manic cassette treatments duel over Twomey's placid keyboard, ultimately breaking into a little joke on the piano. "Collection" features guitar by Sullivan, remembered for his thick fog of work under the alias Earn. With Sullivan's return to the instrument, he is joined by Twomey on upright piano and McCann processing the room in real-time. The brief final work, "Bird," recalls the style of the group's private press cassettes, The Bird and Charlotte's Office: poorly-played pleasant-hearted music. In 2019, two practice sessions were filmed by Sullivan on VHS, the audio has been isolated for this cassette. Includes 20-page color photo of stills documenting the recording process booklet; Edition of 225.
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LP+CD
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R 067LP
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"Ionisation is the first LP by Italian poet Adriano Spatola. Born in Yugoslavia in 1941, by the age of 23 he became a major force in the Italian avant-garde. 'Towards Total Poetry,' Spatola's critical study on the state of modern poetry, spells out his position: 'to become a total medium, to escape all limitations to include theater, photography, music, painting, typography, cinematographic techniques, and every other aspect of culture, in a utopian ambition to return to origins.' Graphic poetry (cut-up zeroglyphs), volatile and beautiful prose (particularly his books The Porthole and Majakovskiiiiiiij), and of course sound poetry, represented here for the first time. Spatola was the editor of many underground publications: Baobab (a legendary audio-cassette magazine), Tam Tam, and Edition Geiger. Each of his pursuits spread the margins of the format, all done with a relentless, piercing curatorial eye. Spatola has dark, drunken wit in spades. In his sound poems, an even more saturated persona is conjured. A desperate humor sneers through this LP, a humor that has surrendered to the severe joke of life long ago -- lashing out on syllables and ingrown word games. Particularly, his classic 'Aviation/Aviateur' (akin to his 'Seduction/Seducteur', 'Violacion/Violateur' etc.) Read by lesser performers, these pieces would falter and float by in the trough, though Spatola's bull-like confidence tears through. 'Poker Foundation' features the poet hysterically singing 'the play of the words' over a classical radio piece, mocking and squawking against the string swells. Steve Lacy plays scissors, knife, and saxophone on 'Hommage à Eric Satie,' a piece originally recorded for the luxurious Cramps LP boxset Futura. Collaborators Gian Paolo Roffi and Paul Vangelisti are also featured across the collection. The LP concludes with the titular work 'Ionisation,' recorded just days before his premature death in 1988. Feeling his sinking health, his belly in the quicksand, he prefaces the piece, 'a funeral march for my body.' He proceeds to scrape and pound the microphone on his chest, face, and clothing . . . I was born the day after Adriano died, which has some poetic meaning to me, naturally. I am indebted to him, his sickly sweet manner. The opportunity to publish these largely unknown sound works is an honor which brings a warmth to my torso. Much appreciation goes to Giovanni Fontana (poet and dear friend of Adriano), who helped produce this edition with me." --Sean McCann, January 2020 Includes CD and 20-page color booklet with essays by Giovanni Fontana and Adriano Spatola; edition of 250.
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2CD
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R 065CD
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"The Crying Space holds music and sounds to spawn tears. This double-CD is comprised of two sound pieces by the Fluxus artist Eric Andersen (b. Denmark, 1940). The first CD, Le Chemin Des Larmes, is a sound collage made for French radio broadcast in 1990. Fragile narrations in French and English by the artist and other voice actors, played over a streaming assemblage of tragic classical music. The sound crying, that of a professional Karelian mourner, is infused periodically. The texts describe the social and scientific nature of tears, in the context of Andersen's worldwide 'Crying Space' installations, which the artist describes in detail: 'The first Crying Spaces were made in Holland, England and Scandinavia in 1959/60. They were made quite simple by drawing a circle on the ground and to step inside to Cry. Crying is the only means of human communication that cannot be decoded and interpreted with certainty. You can observe a person Crying but can never determine why without additional information. It could be sadness, joy, pain, exhaustion, pleasure, relief or a particle of dust in the eye. However, if you analyze the hormones and crystals in each tear, you can with scientific certainty declare the specific reason for that particular Crying session. After innumerable Crying Spaces all over the world I had an offer to work with the famous marble from the notorious town of Guilietta and Romeo, Verona, Italy. The Verona Rosso. The editor Francesco Conz from Verona offered to publish an edition in Verona Rosso. Here, I found the opportunity to materialize the old Greek saying that the most fragile and ephemeral part of the human body, The Tears, eventually will change and shape the most solid parts of the world. The Crying Stone saw the light of the Day. Unfortunately not in an edition of seven billions (one for each inhabitant of Earth) but in a number of 19. For each stone a most elegant wooden box in mahogany was made. In this way you could travel with your Crying Stone and have it handy for all occasions.' The second CD, The Crying Place, is the soundtrack to installations at Emily Harvey Foundation in 1990 and Galerie J & J Donguy in 1991. Scarce cassette editions were made for these exhibitions. This is a 30-minute complete recording of a professional mourner as they cry and holler in sympathetic pain. The crying becomes songlike, as the weeping modulates and ebbs." --Sean McCann, January 2020 Gatefold packaging with insert of program notes; edition of 200.
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LP
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R 069LP
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Sean McCann on Puck (September 2019): "Puck is here. Music For Public Ensemble (R 022LP), my previous album, was released three years ago. And three years before that was Private Ensemble. Puck is both public and private in nature. A smear of chamber works from Stockholm, Moscow, New York, and Kansas. Three aged personal recordings from 2008, 2009, and 2010 are also poured in the batter: a bedroom violin trio, ambient music, and a sad plucked guitar piece. A marbled blend of new chamber works and older, boisterous recordings from the late-2000s. The first side is subtitled 'Folded Portraits' -- a three-part suite: 'Nightfall', 'Broth', and 'Damals': German for 'back then' (or Remember When: the lowest form of conversation). The spine of it is an informal rehearsal session of Portraits of Friars (2018). Recorded at the fabled Fylkingen in Stockholm, the ten-person text and chamber piece grows and shrinks. False starts and stops and tests are outlined with the black ink of editing. Little moments become big moments. Nailed above that spine is Folded Rose (2018), a piece for piano and humming. A dainty march out of context, immersed in recordings of me gagging and yowling in my car. Sound artist Lia Mazzari shared the titular spoken piece with me. 'Puck,' a duet for dialogue about eggs and jewelry, premiered at Café OTO in 2018. I recorded my text in a dark bathtub in Toronto on my 30th birthday last year. The text is a mold growing on top of a quintet I wrote called Vilon (2017), sweetly performed by the Russian Kymatic Ensemble. Jackson Graham, skilled American percussionist, is a rod bolted through the album. He commissioned a work by me called Violet Fat (2017), which is spliced across both sides, hammered and bent to fit in place. A fusion of jubilation and gut clenching, Puck balances on the rooftop, tipping side to side in the fog." Includes 12-page "Puck" pamphlet and two art cards with program notes and recollections. Edition of 500.
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