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LP
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NMN 162LP
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$25.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 2/25/2022
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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LP
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NMN 165LP
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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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7"
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PLANAM 323EP
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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.
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2LP
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NMN 164LP
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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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Book
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SOFTNEED 023
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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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3CD BOX
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NMN 160CD
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It's hard to overstate the importance of Philip Corner. For more than half a century he has been a cornerstone of the American musical avant-garde. Once a student of Otto Leuning, Henry Cowell, Olivier Messiaen, and Dorothy Taubman. A founding member of Fluxus, Corner made waves fast, creating a body of singular work, both on his own and within ensembles like Gamelan Son of Lion and Tone Roads, founded with Malcolm Goldstein and James Tenney, which has cut its way across the decades. Among Corner's most fascinating works are those created between 1962 and 1964, during the period when he was resident composer at the Judson Dance Theatre, one the great occurrences in the emergence of avant-garde dance, movement, Happenings, and performance art. Even today, it stands among the most important examples of collaborate create exchange in the history the American arts. Alga Marghen present a three-CD box, issued in early 2000s by and now out of print, gathering much of the work created during these important years in Corner's career, signed by the composer himself. Alga Marghen's triple box gathers On Tape From the Judson Years, and More from The Judson Years (Early 60s) Instrumental and Vocal Works Volumes 1 and 2, bringing you to heart of Philip Corner's brilliant practice and mind. Across the first disc Corner's tape works -- complex textures and sonority coming to life. The second disc is of an entirely different sort, featuring works created with a great many of Corner's closest collaborators and friends. Recorded at Judson, 1965, the disc features a knock-out cast of Ayo, David Behrman, Philip Corner, Malcolm Goldstein, Dick Higgins, Joe Jones, Alison Knowles, Jackson Mac Low, Charlotte Moorman, Nam June Paik, and Chieko Shiomi, and more. The third disc takes the ear further afield, with "Everything Max Has" (1964), a performance of Max Neuhaus solo recorded at the ONCE Festival (1965), captures the composer and percussionist taking down an overwhelming amount of equipment. It also includes Big Trombone (1963), with Jim Fulkerson improvising over tape collage, "Homage to Revere" (1962) a work for an ensemble of copper-bottom kitchen utensils, and "Punkt" (1961) for an ensemble of staccato sounds, and a number of other astounding works from the era. As a totality, Alga Marghen's three-CD set of Corner's years spent at the Judson Theatre, are a mind-boggling entry into an overwhelmingly exciting moment in time. Edition of 200, signed and numbered.
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LP
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VOCSON 157LP
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Phonopoetics is the first ever survey of seminal Hungarian artist Katalin Ladik's sonic efforts. A thing of beauty, drawing from the period between 1968 and 1993, its two stunning sides shatter the lines between performance, the spoken word, fine art, and experimental music, offering the terms to rethink how each is understood. Born in 1942, Katalin Ladik has lived a wild and multifaceted creative life -- beginning primarily as a poet of the written word, expanding into experimental theatre during the mid-1970s, and ultimately becoming an artist whose practice also incorporates sound and visual poetry, performance art, experimental music, audio plays, happenings, mail art, collage, and photography, built around visual and vocal expression, as well as movement and gesture. Phonopoetics, Alga Marghen's remarkably diverse survey of Ladik's audio work, is a refracting lens into this dense and dynamic world -- a totem which belongs to a sprawling puzzle of highly nuanced personal, social, political, and existential themes, springing from the feminist and gender neutral concerns of Eastern Europe during the 1960s and '70s. The totality of Ladik's practice, particularly as it unfolds across the two sides of Phonopoetics, can be understood as a radical rethinking of the potential, manifestation, and application of poetry, as well as the fundamentals of vocalization. Delving toward the very origins of consciously created sound -- spoken or otherwise, her efforts unseat the divisions placed between literary, musical, theatrical, and visual disciplines, joining them through the fundamental need and right to express. With the excepting of two works, "Shaman Song / Sámánének" (1968), and "Ufo-Nopoetica" (1976-1993), the featured body of work was created between 1974 and 1979, a prolific period which also witnessed her working within the Novi Sad Theatre and Radio Novi Sad. Primal and poetic, with shamanic overtones and therapeutic mechanisms of liberation, capturing the image of an almost entirely unheard history within the field of feminist expression developed by pioneering figures like Simone Forti and Joan La Barbara. In the words of visionary sound poet Henri Chopin, Ladik is "a great, magical voice." Alga Marghen's issue of Phonopoetics places this little heard, and profoundly important artist into the center of your consciousness where she will no doubt remain. A vital entry in the field of sound art, historic Eastern European experimental practice, and sound poetry. Introduction by Henri Chopin. Edition of 300.
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LP
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ALGA 029LP
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Alga Marghen presents the new edition of Eliane Radigue's "Jouet Electronique" (1967) for feedback on magnetic tape and "Elemental I" (1968) for feedback of natural sounds on magnetic tape. This LP was first issued in 2010, and it's now presented for the first time with its own specific artwork and layout. Both works were recorded at Pierre Henry's Studio Apsome in Paris. Between 1967 and 1968, Radigue was Henry's assistant, mainly for the editing of L'Apocalypse de Jean (1969). Henry also put her in charge of organizing his sound archive; Radigue enjoyed doing this work, even if it took a long time. She decided to set the machines of the studio to do some work of her own. "Jouet Electronique" and "Elemental I" were born this way during her time as an assistant; working with feedback is something that Radigue learned through Henry. Do you remember Henry's Voyage (1969)? There's that fluid part which is made of feedback constructed with a microphone. Everything had to be set at a precise distance from the loudspeakers because that is the specific problem with feedback; one has to be at the right distance. Afterwards, these high tone recordings were slowed down in order to discover the deeper character of their color. This work with feedback was in the end quite limited and the composer preferred working with two reel tape machines to produce sounds. The first was set on the recording mode while the other was playing and it was the accidents happening in this phase that made the feedback richer. Fine-tuning could yield beautiful results: low pulsations, high-pitched sounds (sometimes both at the same time), or long sounds. All of these could be slowed down or accelerated, which gave beautiful source material. With "Jouet Electronique", Radigue had a lot of fun, hence the title. As far as "Elemental I" is concerned, it was the first attempt at something which was important to her based on the theme of the basic elements: water, fire, air and earth. Eliane had the chance to record in open air thanks to a small Stella Vox that Arman gave her in the beginning of the 1960s. Using it, Radigue built a minimal sound library, consisting of not more than ten reel tapes. This was the starting point; in 1968 she used these recordings for her work with two reel tape machines. New edition of 200, with liners by Radigue and portrait photos by Arman.
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LP
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TES 159LP
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One afternoon in 1975, friend and fellow music traveler, Harold Schroeder, showed up at Poo-Bah Record Shop where Tom Recchion worked selling records and experimental music to people, forcing them to buy albums that he swore would change their lives. Harold asked if Tom wanted to share in a studio space close to the shop. After seeing it Tom immediately said "YES!". They moved in and divided the space in half. On Tom's half he made drawings, paintings, performances, video, sculptures, installations, and music. Harold had his all set up for music with his newly acquired Steiner-Parker synth and guitars and things. At the beginning they played under the name The Two Who Do Duets. Soon the late-night jam sessions that took place in the back of Poo-Bah moved over to the fourth floor of 35 South Raymond. It was pretty beat up and derelict, the way one imagines an artist's studio to look. They could make all the noise they wanted. No one else was on their floor. The music heard on this LP has remained unheard since it was recorded and was created just before and right after the inaugural concert by the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) groups Le Forte Four, Doo-Dooettes, and Ace & Duce. That concert took place in late January 1976. The sessions on this release feature members of the newly formed and expanded Doo-Dooettes, which now included Dennis Duck, Juan Gomez, Harold Schroeder, and Tom Recchion, as well as Ju Suk Reet Meate from Smegma and Ace, of Ace & Duce. 35 S. Raymond eventually became a sort of LAFMS headquarters, with Chip Chapman of Le Forte Four, artist and future Extended Organ vocalist/guitarist Paul McCarthy, and soon to become singer for Nervous Gender, punk/folk artist Phranc, who along with many other artists and musicians, moved into the building. 35 S. Raymond allowed for free expression and explorations of all sorts. Some wild parties ensued, not to mention the luxury of endless hours of experimentation. Parking was free and so was the art and music. Ace found the tapes for side one ("Tom's Studio") in his archive and Ju Suk Reet Meate found the tapes for side two ("50 Of Every American Are Machines") and edited them both for this release. No overdubs or remixing was employed. Luxury gatefold sleeve; Edition of 200.
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LP
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TES 158LP
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New primitive-suburban-folk music from Temple City and Pasadena, CA, circa 1973-4. This new edition is culled from the original unissued Smegma tape vaults of Ju Suk Reet Meate and represents the most pure expression of the insular sound-world that was spontaneously discovered as a group. Unlike 2017's Look'n For Ya (TES 154LP) no song forms are ever used, instead fearless group improvisational vocals take you on a strange shape-shifting journey through operatic show tunes, spirit visions and visits to a delirium motel room. The only exception is the title track "Abacus Incognito" that features poetry by Dennis Duck (Human Hands, Dream Syndicate, LAFMS...) with accompaniment by the family stereo console record player/radio unit and utilizing conventional instruments creating a strangely unique non-jamming sound. Except for the first track, all sounds were recorded casually in various band-members parents' houses while they were away... they would have been horrified! The final track is possibly one of the strangest concepts ever recorded, inspired by both the Lord Dunsany story The Three Infernal Jokes and the most popular record of 100 years ago, The O.K. Laughing Record (or OKeh), there is The Smegma: Laughing to Death Record. Edition of 200 (numbered).
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LP
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ALGA 043-2LP
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Restocked; produced in collaboration with the legendary Jac Berrocal's label d'Avantage, More Intra Musique is the second LP in Alga Marghen's series dedicated to previously unreleased recording by the drummer and experimentalist Jacques Thollot. While the furious Intra Musique free jazz first LP (ALGA 043LP, 2017) was centered on a live recording with Michel Portal, Eddie Gaumont, and Mimi Lorenzini at the Faculty of Law in Paris, on an evening in 1969, it is an unexpected Jacques Thollot that you encounter on this second LP, vivid and blazing even more than you might have already known. Jacques Thollot was a major force in the French free jazz scene, collaborating with artists at the level of Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, Sonny Sharrock, Joachim Kühn as well as with French pioneers Jef Gilson and Barney Wilen. Starting from 1971 he released Quand Le Son Devient Aigu, Jeter La Giraffe A La Mer or Watch Devil Go on Futura and Palm Records, or some of the most relevant and revolutionary sonic masterpieces in France. More Intra Musique is free improvisations of course, but also synthetic jitters, musique concrete, and loop experiments, sketched pop songs, minimalist trances with African accents, or simply the promiscuity of a lullaby or the voice of a child posed like a bird in a Norman garden. These long-lost visionary recordings featuring Eddie Gaumont on prepared piano and Jacques Thollot on drums, piano, prepared piano, synth, and tapes are an absolute revelation which make you rethink everything you know about French free improvisation. Tape manipulation created as a potential background for a live set... Bursting rehearsal with Eddie Gaumont... Is the piano well prepared? Besides the stingy mention Intra Musique sticked on the reel, nothing is known of this recording. Edition of 350 copies.
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LP
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NMN 156LP
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Repressed. Alga Marghen present recordings from Luc Ferrari's Atelier De Libération De La Musique, a collective he created together with Martin Davorin Jagodic, Philippe Besombes, and Alain Petit in 1975 for a series of performances at the Galliera Museum in Paris. It was in those years that Luc Ferrari investigated open forms and created some of the most experimental and elusive works of his entire catalog. "Exercices D'improvisation", first recorded by Brunhild Ferrari with GOL, issued on PLANAM in 2010; but specially "Ou Donc Est-T-On?", a very complex piece forthcoming on Alga Marghen including both "Dance", issued on Alga Marghen on the occasion of the presentations at Centre Pompidou in 2009 and "Ephemere", issued on CD by Alga Marghen in 2010, as well as the "Labyrinthe De La Violence", an audio-visual permanent labyrinth for which Ferrari created four fantastic electronic music pieces forthcoming on Alga Marghen. After these experiences the composer decided to discontinue these open practices for a more controlled work in the studio. And within the "Labyrinthe De La Violence" installation Luc Ferrari conceived a series of electro-visual concerts to be performed by the newly created Atelier De Libération De La Musique. The collective included some of the most creative artists of the time: together with Luc Ferrari playing the electric organ you find on electric piano Martin Davoric Jagodic (whose masterpiece of electronic music titled Tempo Furioso was issued on Cramps in Italy that same year), on synthesizer Philippe Besombes (of Pole fame) and on sax, flute, and clarinet, Alain Petit (who was at the time collaborating with Besombes at the wonderful Besombes / Rizet double LP). These four artists met in February and March of 1975, rehearsing for a series of concerts to take place within the audio-visual labyrinth. It is the previously unheard recordings from these wild rehearsals which make up this incredible LP. The sound of Atelier De Libération De La Musique is a thrilling and overwhelming ride. Rattling, difficult polyrhythms play against droning, pulsing and simmering sonorities. These recordings are human and open, wild and incredibly ahead of their time. Obi strip; Edition of 500 (numbered).
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LP
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NMN 152LP
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2022 restock. Alga Marghen introduce Music With Memory, a new record LP by David Behrman focused on his '70s work with new small, inexpensive devices then known as "microcomputers" equipped with "memory" to be used in live performances and installations. Side A presents "Interspecies Smalltalk" with Takehisa Kosugi (violin) and David Behrman (electronics). A wild intertwining of two worlds of resonance, structure, and tonality, decades ahead of its time. Commissioned by John Cage and Merce Cunningham as music for the 1984 Cunningham Company dance titled "Pictures", it was made to be performed by Takehisa Kosugi playing violin in his uniquely personal style. Side B includes "Circling Six", an earlier version of a more extended piece titled "Leapday Night". "Circling Six" had six looping synthesizer phrases which could be played along with by the acoustic instrumentalist, on this recording by Werner Durand on saxophone. "Interspecies Smalltalk" and "Circling Six" were pieces for instrumental performers and a small computer-controlled music system that Behrman assembled during the 1980s. The electronic gear consisted of pitch sensors ("ears" with which it listened to the performing musicians), various music synthesizers (some homemade), a video display, and a personal computer. The pieces were made with computer programs governing interaction between performers and the electronics. The software created situations rather than set pieces. The performers had options rather than instructions, and the exploration of each situation as it unfolded was up to them. Also on side B is a short track titled "All Thumbs" for two electrified mbiras (African instruments of ancient origin also known as thumb pianos, kalimbas, or zanzas). This piece grew out of a collaborative sound and video installation that George Lewis and David Behrman made for the opening of the Paris science museum La Villette in the spring of 1986. The metal tines of the mbiras were linked to sensors and to a computer music system. In this concert version, played together with Fast Forward, the piece was in several sections. All the sounds in "All Thumbs" were electronically generated. Includes liner notes by David Behrman and photos of the performances, as well as original programs of the Music With Memory Festival. Edition of 400.
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3CD
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NMN 151CD
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Alga Marghen introduce a historical event, the publication of The Lower Depths, a three-CD set of previously unreleased unique piano sonorities by Charlemagne Palestine. In 1977, Charlemagne Palestine was regularly performing in his red and gold loft on North Moore Street in Tribeca, down the street from Magoos bar where all the local artists hung out back then. He was working on a trilogy called The Lower Depths, a work conceived during the crucial moment when he experienced one of the peaks of his creative power. The trilogy takes its name from the potentials of his Bösendorfer weapon which had lower notes than any other piano. The first section starts in the middle of the piano keyboard and the second section two octaves below, while the third section arrives till the very bottom of the instrument. It's a deep, thunderous, rumbling world that we experience. An extreme immersion in the depths of the dark side of strumming music. The Lower Depths is a central work within the history of musical minimalism, stretching and expanding what is understood and expected of an already singular voice. Edition of 300 (numbered).
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LP
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ALGA 043LP
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There are records that stimulate curiosity to the extreme, records that make you want to dissolve yourself into the intense and beautiful surprise this music will bring. It is undeniable to the delighted ear that this exhumed document contains all the assets of the historical output, of the record that one would dream of waiting for long if one had known it existed. This rough edit, done within urgency by Jacques Thollot, testifies of a unique experience: the concert of Intra Musique at the Faculty of Law in Paris, an uncertain evening of 1969. The devastating gab of the two acolytes Jacques Thollot and Eddie Gaumont made the concert take place, on the ploughed earth of May '68, in the same faculty where so much was discussed and, thanks to the success of the previous concerts of the association of students, that allowed the risk of hiring the thundering dream team. Unique because there will never be another replica of what Jacques Thollot called "a movement", involving Michel Portal (tenor sax), Mimi Lorenzini (guitar), the rare Daniel Laloux (tambour), Jacques Thollot (drums and tapes of recorded experiments, those that would build the skeleton of the magnificent Quand Le Son Devient Aigu Jeter La Girafe À La Mer LP on Futura (1971)), and Eddie Gaumont (guitar, piano), the instigators of this journey. Captain Eddie Gaumont will capsize shortly after, sunk by a too intensely dark life; sad coda putting an end to the project. There is also the undeniable whirling of the mentors and companions' spirits of Jacques Thollot, such as Don Cherry, Steve Lacy, Bernard Vitet, and Jean-François Jenny Clark, and the hard to describe succession of precious moments: that oblique spiritual-jazz, that other staggering ballad, or that primitive fever of essential nervous flights, that almost psychedelic proto rock; alternations of radical free music to those magnificently classic, overwhelming achievements. Jacques Thollot is not just one of the greatest abandoned jazz composers: he is the one who abandons himself to all its forms. Co-produced with Jac Berrocal's historical d'Avantage label. Comes in a full-color gatefold sleeve; Edition of 350.
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LP
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VOCSON 155LP
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In 1974, Ileana Sonnabend commissioned Charlemagne Palestine to create a limited edition, double LP in conjunction with a performance to celebrate the opening of her new Soho gallery at 420 West Broadway. Charlemagne made several recording attempts, first at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania where they had a Bösendorfer Imperial Piano in their theater. He recorded "Bösendorfer + Voice", "Voice Piece" as well as some Bösendorfer tests, with Mayo Thompson as producer and Kurt Munkacsi as sound engineer. These ecstatic Swarthmore recordings, recorded late at night in the big empty theater space, represented the original elements on which Charlemagne Palestine later created the piano pieces for Four Manifestations on Six Elements (ALGAMARS 004LP, MAGNE 008LP). For more than 40 years since these recordings were made, Palestine never went back to listen to them, but recently on re-listening to these Swarthmore recordings with Alga Marghen, he found several blissful, arpeggiated piano and falsetto voice studies which he feels now deserve to be heard. Included in the Alga Marghen VocSon series, this LP of two previously unreleased 1974 recordings finally see the light of day. Edition of 405.
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TES 154LP
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2021 restock. In 1973, when Smegma (the band) was born they had only one rule: No Musicians! That way they could re-invent the musical wheel with a new primitive, suburban, anti-hippie approach. 44 years later perhaps the world is ready for the first full LP of this original, uncompromising sound. At the time, it seemed they thought they were on a solitary journey, but shortly after these recordings, it was discovered that there was another local group, The Los Angeles Free Music Society, that they shortly became a part of, and are a part of, to this day. Originally recorded in 1973-75 at the house in Pasadena they all lived in, these previously unreleased tracks feature vocals of a different kind. It includes the 1960s L.A. freak and street singer Wild Man Fischer reprising his dance tune "The Taster", a straightforward Memphis/rockabilly slow dance ballad "Red Cadillac And A Black Moustache", and examples of their unique "group singing" style that has to be heard to be believed. Opening and closing the LP are vocals by someone they had never met, a local C.B. radio operator whose handle was "Turkey Mon" and had such a hi-power transmitter that his signal was picked-up by the tape-head as they recorded! Several of these same folks (Dennis Duck, Ace Farren Ford, Ju Suk Reet Meate) are in the Smegma touring band as of 2017.
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TES 153LP
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Sidestepping all normal expectations on this album, Ju Suk Reet Meate (founding member of Smegma) directly goes about casting musical spells, utilizing primitive "inner mind" techniques on hammered dulcimer, tape loops, thrift store records, a homemade synthesizer, electric guitar, saxophone, mouth sounds, and manipulated christian radio broadcasts. Recorded in Portland, Oregon, these previously unreleased recordings reflect a similar "inner-mind over limited technique matter" aesthetic as the acclaimed but seldom heard classic Solo 1978-1979, originally released on Pigface Records in 1980.
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LP BOX/BOOK
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VOCSON 099LP
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A killer reading of José Luis Castillejo's TLALAATALA book by Fernando Millan, recorded in Madrid in 2001. Modern or advanced writing is a direct and independent medium, i.e. it realizes and gives presence to a set of relationships without the need of further dependence (as it happened till now in literature) on other media. Words, syllables, stories, sounds, psychology, music, etc., are no longer needed: advanced writing can do without intermediate elements. Modern writing is neither symbolic nor descriptive. Its purpose is the purpose of all modern art: to reduce necessity. The freedom achieved by writing (as a "medium") may perhaps become an inspiration (a "metaphor") of what could be achieved elsewhere (in the "reality"), independently and without imitation. Writing, perhaps the art more subdued to avidity and ambition, an instrument of subjection since it was invented by priests and legislators, has been the last of the arts to seek for its liberation. Writing itself created the worst of our servitudes that still rules and dominates the world: literality. Because without literality, any servitude to being of metaphorical and reflexive freedom would be impossible. Servitude exists and grows within the bureaucratic and technocratic literality which dominates the world with its laws, rules, and mechanisms. Freedom of comprehension, and therefore the liberation of writing, can be accomplished through the restoration of the metaphorical character of the so-called "reality", through the destruction of textual literality and the restoration of all the imaginary figures and persons of the psyche in front of the divination of the soul or the spirit. As proved by TLALAATALA, the liberation of writing must go through the elaboration of vacuous structures that should be perceived without being captured, without being fixed through numbers and signs. It goes through a writing where you can no longer state that "the written, written is", since it establishes an imaginary and metaphorical reflection of the vacuity and of the mutual relation of processes and phenomena. Comes in cardboard box with stamp; Includes the original-2001-press 400-page-creative-book with the same title; Edition of 80.
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2LP
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NMN 150LP
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A reissue of Antibarbarus, issued as a compact disc in 1998, was the first edition Walter Marchetti released on Alga Marghen. The Antibarbarus cycle of five pieces makes use of original tapes coming from the same recording sessions that originated some of Marchetti's major musical works realized in the '80s, collected in his two CDs: 1989's Vandalia (NMN 076-4CD/NMN 083-5LP) and 1984's Per La Sete Dell'orecchio (NMN 083-3LP). This former series of works presented some homogeneous and untouched sound sources in the "concrete" status of their inner - and necessarily chaotic - level of entropy. Nevertheless this operative and only in appearance "neutral" premise introduces an implicit mimetic transposition. This link between the "iconic" threshold of the acoustical material and its transposition literally deconstructs the prerogatives and the ideological categories of music composition. In Antibarbarus, the temporal continuum restores the mimesis of the phenomenal regression of musical time, crystallized in a framed-length which gets estranged from subjective domain. But the transfiguration of sound sources now deliberately intends to de-signify the analytical prerogatives of hearing. The sensorial perception is in such a way inhibited from an immediate comprehension of the acoustic reality so reproduced: canis reversus ad vomitum suum. In the late 1950s, Marchetti was able both to formalize a more critical aim towards the established lingua franca and absolutist ideology of musical avant-gardism and to expand the sense of artistic praxis, in line with an ethical and subtly political evaluation of aesthetic experience. Marchetti was inspired by Cage's poetics of indeterminacy and subsequently created, through a close and indissoluble association with Juan Hidalgo and José Luis Castillejo, an original and de-ritualized form of action-music which led in 1964 to the birth of ZAJ group. Marchetti's work relays, in its procedural level, upon a resolute de-functioning of the musical codes and impose this act as a reversed mimesis of the methodological statute of music composing. Namely, not a "degré zero de l'écriture", but its "reversal"; not a "denial of style", but "style of denial". In this perspective, Walter Marchetti's oeuvre condenses one of the rare examples of aesthetic radicalism consciously extended to music poetics. Comes in full color gatefold sleeve; Includes printed inner sleeves (with photos of "Musica da camera n. 182", London, Raven Row, 1989/2011 and "Music in secca", Milano, Fondazione Mudima, 2003); Liner notes by Gabriele Bonomo in English and Italian.
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CD/BOOK
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VOCSON 095CD
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Key figure in Mexican conceptual art, Ulises Carrión was an artist, editor, curator, and theorist of the post-1960s international artistic avant-garde. Dear Reader. Don't Read, an A4-size, 272-page book with CD, issued in collaboration with the Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid within the context of Carrion large retrospective, is focused on Ulises Carrión's personal and groundbreaking approach, managing to illustrate all aspects of his artistic and intellectual work. This includes books, magazines, videos, films, sound pieces, mail art, public projects, and performances, along with Carrión's initiatives as curator, editor, distributor, lecturer, archivist, art theorist, and writer. It is a significant body of original work structured to place a spotlight on every facet of his production. Without losing sight of the unclassifiable nature of his oeuvre, this book emphasizes Ulises Carrión's constant search for new cultural strategies and the extent to which his projects were determined by two fundamental themes: structure and language. These represent artistic guidelines influenced by a literary education, which he invariably struggled against, and are pervasive in his work. This duality corresponds to the exhibition title Dear Reader. Don't Read which illustrates his ambiguous relation to literature, a recurring theme in his work. Due to his interest in new art forms and innovative trends, Carrión actively participated in most of the artistic disciplines of his time. He co-founded the independent artist-run space In-Out Center in Amsterdam and founded the legendary bookshop-gallery Other Books and So (1975-79), the first of its kind dedicated to the presentation, production, and distribution of publications that were no longer literary texts nor about art, but rather books that were art or, as Carrión himself called them, "non-books, anti-books, pseudo books, quasi books, concrete books, visual books, conceptual books, structural books, project books, statement books, instruction books". Along with his artistic activities, Ulises Carrión developed a wide range of theoretical work having a great influence on young visual artists. It is fascinating to see that Ulises Carrión's theories are seemingly precursors to more recent art theories of the twenty-first-century digital world. During his most creative artistic period, he participated in the international mail art network which Carrión considered a kind of guerilla strategy.
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LP
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VOCSON 098LP
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Previously un-issued recordings from the Porn Art Movement (1980-1982), including five performances recorded live on Ipanema Beach in 1982, as well as a selection of previously unheard studio recordings of Eduardo Kac yell-poems. Kac fused existing coarse and curse words with parts of words, neologisms, salacious buffoonery, the anti-normative scribblings of toilet-wall graffiti, commonplaces, blasphemy, expletives, agrammatisms, incorrect orthography, slangy expressions, lexical exorbitance, general obscenities, the gross and the grotesque, into a new whole. His use of stigmatizing words in these Porn-poems transformed them from denigrating to empowering, through political critique and defiance. The LP also includes the "Manifesto Pornô" (1980) and four recordings of "Flatographic Poems" from 1982, in which Kac uses the flatus as a compositional unit and the mellifluous flow as material. "Flatographic Poems" have visual scores - one of which can be seen on the cover - for metabolic performances that combine meticulous precision with gaseous explosiveness of scatological resonance. Demanding a high level of self-mastery on the part of the performer, this anal poetry was the only series of works produced in the movement to literally explore the internal side of the body. Includes an LP-size 40-page full-color book with full documentation on the Porn Art Movement. Edition of 270.
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LP BOX
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ALGAMARS 009LP
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"Edition limited to 30 copies. Art edition of PoorManMusic, a classic Fluxus work by Philip Corner from 1966 and first released by alga marghen in 2015. Edition limited to 30 copies. Including: A signed and numbered LP sleeve with hand-drawn calligraphy on front and hand-drawn score on the back, a signed and numbered black-vinyl LP record with hand-written labels, a signed and numbered print with hand-made graphic interventions, a signed and numbered score print, a signed and numbered 4-page printed text with graphics, dry leaves, a wooden comb, a metal ring, a piece of black and white fabric, four plastic bottle caps in different colors, two ropes, a date pit, a cherry pit. The whole magnificently presented in a luxury linen box. Homemade noise made by, among others, Philip Corner, Max Neuhaus, Steve Reich, James Tenney, Malcolm Goldstein, Jackson Mac Low, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Carolee Schneemann, Jerome Rothenberg... the Technicians of the Sacred. Gift Event III: A Celebration for poets, musicians, and dancers, based on the orders of the Seneca Indian Eagle Dance and performed at the Judson Dance Theatre, Judson Memorial Church, New York City, March 21 and 22, 1967."
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CD
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NMN 100-2CD
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The Concerto For The Left Hand In One Movement, for piano, is the last unpublished composition of Walter Marchetti to be performed in public before the death of the author on May 12, 2015. This performance by Reinier van Houdt was recorded on April 29, 2015, at Onder De Linden in Valthermond, Netherlands, and is presented with liner notes by Gabriele Bonomo, translated from the Italian by Philip Corner. Composed in 1994, the Concerto For The Left Hand belongs to an ongoing series of works written between 1994 and 1997 -- along with "Con vista sui suoni," "Eight or Nine Movements for String Quartet," and "La perdita del tempo" -- which develop from a preceding composition titled "Canonic Variations for Orchestra on Prolapsed Time From Development to Hiccup of Black Cherry Jam." In these works Marchetti made a systematic and assertive return to conventional music notation, while also not excluding performance and installation practices and the use of pre-recorded "concrète" sounds which, since the '60s, had been his privileged field of action (a modality shared principally within the exquisitely iconoclast and desecratory activities of the ZAJ group). What was particularly interesting to Marchetti in this recourse to musical writing was the weakening of the meaning of the rigid normative apparatus of a musical score with the purpose of annihilating the factual potential of his system of prescriptions. The title alone is used to hide a paradox in which the notes to the performer intervene to subvert the following paradigm: "The pianist is obliged to hold a black umbrella opened over his head in his left hand during the whole performance of this concerto." From here the performer is confronted with two conceptually convergent possibilities in de-potentializing the apparatus of signs in the score: on the one hand, the restrictive imposition of the paradox by which the music cannot manifest itself while respecting the letter of the enunciation, which leads to the impossibility of the music's "existence" (i.e. the obligation of holding an open black umbrella in the same hand) or, on the other hand, the transgression of this encumbrance in favor of the implicit possibility of playing the score with the right hand, leaving the music subjected to its own manifestation no longer be able to coincide with its own realization -- "a magic made free from the lie of being truth." Limited edition of 300. Digipak with full-color booklet containing photos and the liner notes.
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LP
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NMN 100LP
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LP version. The Concerto For The Left Hand In One Movement, for piano, is the last unpublished composition of Walter Marchetti to be performed in public before the death of the author on May 12, 2015. This performance by Reinier van Houdt was recorded on April 29, 2015, at Onder De Linden in Valthermond, Netherlands, and is presented with liner notes by Gabriele Bonomo, translated from the Italian by Philip Corner. Composed in 1994, the Concerto For The Left Hand belongs to a series of works written between 1994 and 1997 -- along with "Con vista sui suoni," "Eight or Nine Movements for String Quartet," and "La perdita del tempo" -- which develop from a preceding composition titled "Canonic Variations for Orchestra on Prolapsed Time From Development to Hiccup of Black Cherry Jam." In these works Marchetti made a systematic and assertive return to conventional music notation, while also not excluding performance and installation practices and the use of pre-recorded "concrète" sounds, which, since the '60s, had been his privileged field of action (a modality shared principally within the exquisitely iconoclastic and desecratory activities of the ZAJ group). What was particularly interesting to Marchetti in this recourse to musical writing was the weakening of the meaning of the rigid normative apparatus of a musical score with the purpose of annihilating the factual potential of his system of prescriptions. The title alone is used to hide a paradox in which the notes to the performer intervene to subvert the following paradigm: "The pianist is obliged to hold a black umbrella opened over his head in his left hand during the whole performance of this concerto." From here the performer is confronted with two conceptually convergent possibilities in de-potentializing the apparatus of signs in the score: on the one hand, the restrictive imposition of the paradox by which the music cannot manifest itself while respecting the letter of the enunciation, which leads to the impossibility of the music's "existence" (i.e. the obligation of holding an open black umbrella in the same hand) or, on the other hand, the transgression of this encumbrance in favor of the implicit possibility of playing the score with the right hand, leaving the music subjected to its own manifestation no longer able to coincide with its own realization -- "a magic made free from the lie of being truth." Limited edition of 300. Full-color sleeve with printed inner sleeve bearing photos and the liner notes.
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