xenakis

R

Rambler

Awanturnik
blissblogger said:
avant-classical massif:
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Hello!

1/ certain records go real cheap i've found -- certain Varese albums, Cage's HPSCHD (nonesuch) -- whereas certain titles by stockhausen or xenakis are selling for 50 dollars plus in Other Music, up on the wall.
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One reason might be that Stockhausen recordings from his own label are stupidly expensive in the first place - I know that his CDs go for £40-50rrp. Price proportional to ego. There's also more of a cult market outside pure avant classical circles for Stockhausen and Xenakis (I bet the same goes for early Glass vinyl, say) than there is for giant 'happenings' like HPSCHD. Varese is just easy and cheap to buy anywhere - you can get the complete works for about £20 on CD in any HMV.


4/ what do we reckon on Meredith Monk then?
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Love love love love love. Atlas is one of my favourite recordings, although they chopped out a couple of the nicest bits from it. Try to find things that are purely vocal - she and her group do amazing things with their voices, but when she puts a keyboard or instrumental backing to it, it can sound a bit naff. Her voice stuff is stunning, a lot of it comes out of group improvisation with different effects, but her instrumental writing is really simplistic - you just have to listen past it.

Eastern Bloc post=war composers.... i quite like the covers but stuff that's avant but uses conventional orchestras seems like the worst of both worlds, somehow
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I'd happily find a home for all that ;) Some of it is poor, but there's a lot of forgotten music in there.

Which brings me to a question. Where are the best places in London to find the sort of vinyl Simon's talking about here? I was in Camden the other day and tried MVE there but it was rubbish. The classical CD market is a) too expensive and b) doesn't bother reissuing most of this sort of stuff.
 
I

iueke

Active member
i think thats about right price wise.

it's a reissue compilation, all the pieces were released previously (Erato, BAM) so no collector interest. whats importent here is the quality of the pressing - and sadly i can't remember.

anyway - masterful comps.

my current fave electroacoustic composers:
Almuro
Ivo malec
Paul Boisselet
Pietro Grossi
 
R

Rambler

Awanturnik
Annea Lockwood - New Zealand composer. She's done a lot of work with sound art type things. Most of her electronic pieces use source sounds as they are, rather than processed, and they often use sounds of the body - heart beats, orgasms, etc. I heard a recording of Sound Map of the Hudson River a while ago (might have been on Resonance), which was put together from the sounds of ships. Very evocative, and it was more than just a field recording - I think things had been carefully tweaked so that it sounded composed, but also sounded as though it could actually happen, as though all these foghorns really did sound in regular rhythms, kind of magic realism.

Most of what she does is electroacoustic, but some pieces from the 1990s were for conventional ensembles. I don't know what any of these are like though.
 
B

blissblogger

Well-known member
ta massif

thanks for all the tips and hints, people

annea lockwood -- my mate paul oldfield had the world of glass one back in the 80s, music from the sonorities of glass being struck and scraped .... forgot about her altogether until the Billboard Book of Progressive Music came into my life and she's got several CDs listed in there, including Sound Map of the Hudson Riverir -- the guy doing that Bilboard guide has a thing for environmental recordings and spatial ambience type stuff, which he counts as part of the progressive canon on acoucnt of groups like floyd etc using real-world sounds -- lots of unheard-of artists he cites doing this stuff through the 80s and 90s

jwd, talking about kicking oneself for not picking up stuff. when it was cheap.. back in the 80s all this stuff was way dirt cheap, i really kick myself for not scooping it up. i can remember jumble sales and oxfams int he 80s with this stuff in, stockhausen etc. i guess people had originally bought it at the time it came out in the idea that it was 'improving' or 'cool' (especially in a city like oxford) and then two decades latter chucked out the only-played-once records... i did pick up some amazing bargains, a 21st siecle silver-cover as Woebot-tributed one by pierre henry (1 pound!!!!!) and, piece de resistance this one, a harry partch record for 75 p that's now worth a couple of hundred at least according to Music and Video Exchange. the only reason i knew who partch was because swordfishtrombones had come out and tom waits had talked about his love of partch.

but there's so much more i could have scooped up, curses curses...

charles wuorinen, i have time's encomium, it's pretty cool, done on a buchla i think. a minor effort utlimately

oh yeah, apart from electronic stuff, the avant-classical things i like the most tend to be vocal based -- like ligeti, not that thats the only stuff he did of course but yeah, that kind of alien chorale thing tears shit up

avant-classical in London
--there's a store on that road that intersects with Berwick Street, i forget the name of the road or the place, it's a big classical vinyl store, in the basement they have a shitload of avant and electronic, but it is priced by people who know what it's worth yagetme

-- the classical specialist M&V excahnge on notting hill has a lot of stuff but they know what it's worth too, but you can always sell your freebies/oldcrap for exchange tokens to dull the pain

one more question -- what do folk think of music that's composed on computers and a/ done with electronics b/ done with orchestras . i've not heard any of this stuff
 
R

Rambler

Awanturnik
A lot of Xenakis' music was composed using a computer - it was the only way he could go through all the probability calculations he wanted to use.

Other than that, there's a string quartet that I've heard that was composed entirely by computer. I think this goes back to the 60s, when these sorts of experiments would go on at Bell Labs and so on. It used a piece of software that was designed to compose like Bach - so it relied a great deal on musicological analysis of Bach's music, which was statistically filtered to create a compositional process. It's obviously very strange, because it sounds sort of like Bach, but not enough so that you really believe it is, and it didn't really have the kind of flow that you'd expect a human composition to have. An interesting experiment, and maybe a good source for new ideas, but as a whole I don't think it really worked.
 
D

Diggedy Derek

Stray Dog
I was lucky enough to see Parmegiani play some of his music at the Autechre-curated All Tomorrows Parties - he was a dapper little geezer in a cardigan who worked the mixing desk in the centre of the upstairs room while the stage was totally empty - v. disorientating, esp. when the music (which was often quite harsh, and fequently sounded like a ball being bounced) was played through the quadrophonic speaker system - Bernie P seemed very aware abt space/volume 'issues' - a magical hour
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That was weird that, we spent an hour trying to figure out if it had actually started.

The MVE classical shop is quite good I reckon, there's loads of interesting looking records, albeit quite highly priced. They are very finickity about quality though, so often if something is marked "fair" it's actually pretty damn spanking new.

I walk through the shop literally every day to clock in, so if anyone wants me to root through the racks it's easy enough.
 
R

Rambler

Awanturnik
I'm just waiting on a couple of cheques, but when they come in I shall hie me over to Notting Hill. Cheers!
 
J

Jazzbo

Member
The classical rec shop in Soho mentioned by blissblogger is called Harold Moores - they now have upstairs Mole Jazz, formerly in Kings Cross, another kind of musty trad institution that cld, back in the day, turn up the odd vinyl gem
 
S

skreeeeeeooooooytttbbbssh

Member
bliss --- HPSCHD was reissued last year by EMF (the same label that issued the xenakis CD) and its a piece for 'amplified' harpischords and machines (sinewave tones) -- it was derived from an statistical analysis of mozart's music (which ties with yr other question) and actually similar to metal machine music, in that there is a minimalist maximalism to the thing (on the CD its divided into exact 10 min tracks vs 16 mins of MMM); it's like 'persepolis' too -- a large event bungled onto disc, its kind of dodgy, in that sense. The notes are ok and it comes in this pack of 16 cards and if you turn it upside and join it up you get the psych-looking poster adv the first performance.

tapes + orchestras - check out some of the pieces like berio's 'laborintus II', cage's 'roaratorio' (irish fiddles instead of orchestra actually but its my fave cage on disc by far), richard barrett's 'opening of the mouth' (Cd wz issued in 2000) which has this track of electronic tape in the middle of it and it works; it propels the ensemble along, sounds like it belongs among the acoustic ensemble...and that's the thing at other times electronics are used it sounds like decoration. I actually prefer Kontakte as a tape piece, I don't think the perc/piano adds much that we didn't already know. When I heard it as a tape only piece the 'moments' and the transitions are felt (whereas in some grime and hip-hop anything acoustic seems to really stand out among the electronic framework).

go to UBU web -- kagel kind of talks abt it in the notes to 'acustica', which you can d/l. Its worth it, i think.

http://www.ubu.com/sound/kagel01.html

there's also: rob ashley's wolfman http://www.ubu.com/sound/ashley.html


re: luigi nono -- there is this old history of classical that I got from my local library and surprise it only goes up to 1920 or something and right at the back there's this essay by cornelius cardew, written in the early 60s, where he covers the current stuff and he basically talks abt boulez, stockhausen and nono which wz a surprise bcz nono isn't really talked abt much these days.

But then he dealt he dealt with opera and electronics (things that ppl who like 'weirdo' avant-garde seem to hate and love) but he radically changed style in the 80s in favour of this morton feldman-esque (its described like that but its not really from the one piece on mantaigne that I have, he still does look at electronics and speaker ambience).

london shops -- I went to that classical shop in berwick street, you could get an ok bargain as they do a sale on certain LPs. also sound 323, they do a second hand list every two weeks; some classical avant-garde among that.
 
mvuent

mvuent

Void Dweller
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
Apparently it's 100 years since Xenakis was born and as a result the Gulbenkian gallery is putting on a couple of free concerts featuring performances of his works... we went there to see the second one on the advice of a friend who saw the first.

The grounds of the Gulbenkian are beautiful in themselves

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The concert hall is amazing with this glass wall at the back

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The concert itself... the drum stuff was cool, the last piece was a mess but in between was a performance of this piece
Which was completely overpowering. The light show was like nothing I've seen, spotlights playing all over the garden and other coloured lights combined with the sounds to make it seem like aliens were landing in the garden and taking over the world. Truly overpowering, like nothing I've explained.
 
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