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V.A. (VARIOUS ARTISTS) (COMPILATIONS) - Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music Vol. 2

Format: do-CD
Label & Cat.Number: SUB ROSA SR200
Release Year: 2003
Note: plus 40pp booklet / re-press
Price (incl. 19% VAT): €20.00


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“ This 2nd volume explores the early days of pre-electronic music (Percy Grainger, Johanna M. Beyer...) and proposes some rares or unpublished pieces by main composers of electronic music (Wladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, Tod Dockstader, Morton Subotnick, Hugh Davies, Luc Ferrari) as well as unreleased tracks by musicians who are cornerstones of the 90's electronic scene (Autechre, Aphex Twin, Scanner, Kim CasconeYoshihiro Hanno...), acid movement (Woody McBride, Choose) or industrial (Laibach, SPK). Without forgetting some free-jazz (Sun Ra) or rare stuff from Captain Beefheart, Daphne Oram, Alan R. Splet...
slow explorations of the past and the present
Given the present system of production there are reasons, some of them identifiable, why only a few names emerge in each period.
There may also be a preference for concentrating information rather than letting it pile up in disordered fashion. Over the past 40 years the same ten electronic music composers get mentioned again and
again (including in music dictionaries and histories). Yet behind them are many other names. Who are they? Second-raters? Not necessarily. For we then need to define the concept of top-rate (rated by who, and on what criteria?) and second-rate or minor
artist. Great pleasure can be derived from the works of minor artists. The case of Tod Dockstader is instructive: when "for lack of academic qualifications" he was denied access to the electronic music facilities he needed, was there not great beauty in the pieces he nevertheless created and in his determination to make music without those facilities? His name was never seen on the labels of top record companies. But he influenced quite a few people - Richard James quoted him, and others then referred to his work. Some of his records were reissued, and what one could call
the rehabilitation process continues. The same applies to many other composers. All such stories spell a passion for music, and weave myth.

historical axes
At the turn of the century there were efforts to find new sources of sound - a number of machines were exhibited, including Thaddeus Cahiel's Telharmonium in 1887 and the Dynamophone presented to the New York public in 1906; they generally played well-known
romantic or post-romantic pieces. After a few flamboyant skirmishes described in the previous volume, the postwar period saw the arrival in 1951, of Wladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening in New York's Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center.
When audiences of the 50's and 60's first heard Varèse, Pousseur, Stockhausen, Berio, Ussachevsky, Yuasa, Dockstader and Mumma, what did they feel? Perhaps a sort of break, an epistemological break, like it must have been for the first audience of Monteverdi's
Orfeo (in Mantua, Italy on 24 February 1607). They left the auditorium completely stunned,because they had never heard anything like it.
WHAT CONTAINS THIS SECOND EDITION ?
CD 1
Wladimir Ussachevsky + Otto Luening > Incantation for Tape * 1953 02:35
Luc Ferrari > Visage V * 1958-59 10:33
Tod Dockstader - Aerial > Song * 2002 12:56
Johanna M. Beyer > Music of the Spheres * 1938 05:59
Morton Subotnick > Mandolin * 1962 07:02
Daphne Oram > Four Aspects * 1960 08:05
Robin Rimbaud / Scanner > Emily * 2003 04:46
Hugh Davies > Quintet * 1967-68 12:05
Alan R. Splet > Space Travel w/ Changing Choral Textures 04:02
Kim Cascone > Zephirum Scan * 2002 04:58
CD 2
Autechre > Bronchus One.1 * 1991 06:01
Yoshihiro Hanno > On/Off Edit * 2001 09 :12
Meira Asher > Torture/Bodyparts * 2001 03'40
Woody McBride > Pulp * 1993 06:07
Lasse Steen / Choose > Purzuit ov Noize * 1994 05 :36
Arcane Devices > Lathe * 1988 05:54
Laibach > Industrial Ambients * 1980-82 09:54
SPK > Slogun * 1979 06:20
Percy Grainger > Free Music #1 (for four theremins) * 1936 01:22
Sun Ra > Imagination * 1965 02:04
Captain Beefheart > She's too much for my miror / My human gets me blues * 1969 05:32 “ [press-release]