ANAL MAGIC AND REV. DWIGHT FRIZELL
Beyond the Black Crack
(Paradigm Discs - P06) CD $14.25
Beyond the Black Crack was originally released in mono in an edition of 200 copies (Cavern Custom 1976) in commemoration the First Annual End of the World Celebration, November 18, 1976. This little known classic, one of the most unique listening experiences in modern experimental music, was conceptualized by legendary musician, filmmaker, Doctor of Metaphysics and minister in the Universal Church of Life. Recorded between 1974 and 1976 in locations as diverse as factories and the pyramid opposite Harry Truman's grave site (as well as more "conventional" concert settings), Beyond the Black Crack is a dark, dizzying and exhilarating journey through free jazz, electronics and environmental sound, all shattered by Frizzell's radical tape editing. This CD adds further material to the original LP: a previously unheard suite from 1977 called "The Wandering Madness of Basilea" and more unreleased material from the Black Crack sessions.
Bunhill Row
(Paradigm Discs - PD19) LP $17.50
In 1980, Adam Bohman (Morphogenesis, The Bohman Brothers) made his first recordings using two budget cassette recorders, an ordinary trumpet, and a variety of other acoustic instruments and objects, many of which are still part of the current Bohman armory. Bunhill Row was his first complete album of material, but it and subsequent releases from the time remained in tiny cassette editions made for friends or exchanged through the mail art network. On vinyl for the first time, Paradigm Discs' hand-numbered reissue opens another window into the incredibly fruitful astral alignment that occurred over London at this time. "Beautifully raw, dirty, and mesmerizing," opines Ed Pinsent in Sound Projector, "A genuine masterpiece of grown-in-the-UK genius." Edition of 500.
Debon
(Paradigm Discs - PD07) CD $13.50
Obscure, crazed mantric rock by an underground Japanese group from the mid-’70s and/or ’80s, about whom no information was ever given, and no production date or location is indicated. Long pieces of hypnotic free form rock hysteria with heavily fuzzed electric guitar à la Faust; Damo Suzuki-like vocal gibber; rhythm courtesy of sleigh bells, tambourine, bass drum and other whackadoo; hard-blown harmonica sludge; and plenty of masterful keeko-bleeko: flute, zither, mandolin, acoustic guitar and synth, tape loops, electronics, environmental sounds, backward tapes and the hysterical laughter of Stan Laurel.
Color Him Coma
(Paradigm Discs - PD27) 2xCD $18.50
The guest musicians on this CD set are many and varied, but it’s all put together by Gus Coma, Lepke B’s dwarfish cousin, who renounced show-biz to work as a Heavy Goods Vehicle driver. The kind of strange and experimental that makes a mutant proud to be defective. Expect gigantic tape loop symphonies, sundry plunderphonics, lo-fi Sparks and the voice of JFK, a William Burroughs interview (on one track), and a worn out teach-yourself-English tape. You're probably saying to yourself, "You had me at 'dwarfish'," but read on: The first disc reissues an obscure C60 (It's War Boys 1983), half of which is formed around several mixes of an experimental track, constructed from a room-sized 24-track loop (a different version appeared on The Just Measurers' Flagellation LP (It's War Boys 1983)), the other half of which is a tape collage of mostly unused (and some remixed) excerpts from what became the title track of the Milk From Cheltenham's Triptych of Poisoners LP (It's War Boys 1983 and Alga Marghen 2005); it's a live mixdown of seventeen cassette recordings of locked record grooves, stray radio and an infernal matchbox. The second disc is an alternative version of the tape on disc one; it follows a similar blueprint but also contains some very different music, primitive disco drum programming, and a somewhat more sophisticated sound quality. Two bonus tracks are included, originally intended as working material for the unfinished second Milk From Cheltenham LP. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2011
Day For Night
(Paradigm Discs - PD14) CD $12.00
The foundation of this work consists of location recordings layered with the live or recycled sounds of Eastley's kinetic sculpture, delicate and elegant kinetic sound devices, either motor driven or animated by environmental forces like the wind, streams or the sea. "A brilliant tape-collage suite," says our friend Ed Pinsent from The Sound Collector. " 'Peep Show' mixes a firework display, a marching band, insects buzzing and snatches and samples of music and sound. 'Zero Day to Zero Night' has a bonfire, birdsong and a wild dog.... Peter Cusack is a veteran improviser on stringed instruments, including the guitar and bouzouki, both of which he plays here.... 'Cast' [is] a documentary tape from the factory floor with added layers of droning music. Most sublimely ... 'Arc Light' ... presumably features the electroacoustic monochord - without doubt a device of Eastley manufacture.... 'Shade 1' and 'Shade 2' ... are the most haunting...; both suggest stations on a surreal train-journey worthy of De Chirico."
Episodes at 4 AM
(Paradigm Discs) CD $12.00
Throughout his varied career — including diverse musical activity such as working with the John Barry Seven and playing on Egg’s second LP — this jazz flautist, composer and group leader had his own fluid conceptual group Open Music with principle bass player Barry Guy and drummer Denis Smith. Players that passed through Open Music include Chris Spedding, Kenny Wheeler, Ray Russell, Ian Carr, Henry Lowther, Harry Beckett, Harry Miller, Barre Phillips, John Stevens and many others. After his early ’70s releases on Philips, Vertigo and Music For Pleasure, a series of three privately pressed LPs on his own label Openian explored this more experimental style. Episodes at 4 AM is the second in this series and is by far the strangest of the three. Released in 1974 and commissioned by the Welsh Dance Theatre, its ten short duos are performed by Wendy Benka on zither, dulcimer and small percussion, and Downes on flutes, various percussion and plenty of electronic manipulation. Nearly every sound on this LP was processed using a variety of shimmering delays, controlled feedback, reverb and speed change to create a haunting and delirious mix of musical styles and atmospheres. Taken from the master tapes, this thirty-three-minute LP has been expanded for the CD release with thirty-five minutes of previously unreleased experimental works, mostly from the same period, that cover even more ground than the LP, including one piece made entirely from the sounds of various phone booths on the streets of New York.
Installation Recordings (1973 - 2008)
(Paradigm Discs - PD26) 2xCD $24.00
What is essentially a retrospective of Eastley’s installation work updates and adds many new examples to New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments (split LP with David Toop, Obscure Records 1975). Of the 35 tracks on this, Eastley’s first solo CD, only the last two have guests or “playing” (the most virtuosic moment being George Lewis wailing on a grass blade). All the other pieces are either powered by the natural forces of wind and water, or else motor-driven gallery installations. The ethereal sounds of the Aoelian harps, the haunting Aeolian flutes, and the violent tension of his aerophone installations are hallmark Eastley sounds, which sit, with many others, amid a wide range of acoustic settings, from windy hill tops to quiet brooks, residential street scenes to coastal shores. The range of indoor recordings is no less varied: a rich variety of acoustics and gallery spaces from tiny micro sounds to large-scale amplification. Wood, metal and stone are brought to life with electricity. Although there are many photos in the 20-page booklet, much is left to the imagination; such limited access to the visual pulls the focus toward the musicality of the sounds themselves, reinforced by slow crossfades from indoors to outdoors, forming a series of suites. The recordings mostly date from the mid-’70s, but there are pieces from later decades. Nearly everything was recorded either to Revox or Uher and occasionally to cassette, using what microphones were available at the time. Recent recordings are digital. The varying quality of the recording set-ups across this double-CD adds yet another dimension to the shifting sound fabric of the anthology.
GRAVITY ADJUSTERS EXPANSION BAND
One
(Paradigm Discs) CD $13.50
The GAEB started in 1967 and remains one of the America’s long lost and underestimated groups who explored the areas of free jazz, improvisation and experimental music. Drummer Lee Charlton shifts moods from jazzy phrasing to more abstract sound sculpture; in this world the GAEB mainly reside, using the self-invented percussive and bowed instruments of multimedia artist Richard Waters, many of which incorporate water-filled resonators to bend and tune. Other improvisers at the time — AMM, MEV, Sonde and Taj Mahal Travellers — made extensive use of homemade and adapted instruments, but the GAEB are a very different concern with their own unmistakable identity. Their first LP appeared in 1973 on Nocturne Records, a small Californian label (the first of their two LPs, the second appearing some eight years later). Paradigm Discs’ CD edition contains the entire first LP, plus fifteen minutes of extra material from the time.
Lingual Music
(Paradigm Discs) 2xCD $20.65
Lily Greenham was Danish, spent her childhood in Vienna and after several relocations across Europe settled in London in 1972 with her British husband (musician and poet Peter Greenham), where she lived until her death in 2001. Nearly all of her own writings and compositions date from after her arrival in London, but prior she had been involved in two major European art movements: The Wienner Group in the late 1950s and the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel in 1964. In London she began to record her own text-based compositions that use a mixture of sound poetry techniques, electronics and multi-tracking. “Lingual music” is a term she coined for her compositions and refers to her technique of using tape loops of text to create complex and dense musical structures. This 2xCD set compiles live solo performances, film soundtrack pieces, and many tape pieces. There are also examples of her performing works by Britain’s best known sound poet Bob Cobbing, Rühm and other sound poets, as well as recordings of her work with Bob Downes Open Music. The recordings date from between 1968 and 1984.
Time Drops
(Paradigm Discs - PD13) CD $10.00
Two pieces that explore a broad range of traditional electronic techniques, both subtle and powerful. The title track attempts to poetically correspond infinity, cosmic equilibrium and harmony, with moments of creation in the form of electroacoustic music. "Ab Ovo" (previously released on 5 Composers Second Coming (Fylkingen 1994)), starts with a rather striking impact of breaking an egg, initiating the journey through the imaginary sound world circling around eternity and the inevitable point of disruption in a figure of eight. Composed at the Electroacoustic Music Studio of the University of East Anglia, England.
Alomoni 1985
(Paradigm Discs - PD08) Used CD $15.00 (Out-of-stock)
A Japanese mystery of mind-bending iconoclasm from the mid-'70s and/or '80s. Enthralling Beefheart-like skronkadelia, with loops and tape rhythms, obsessive-compulsive vocals, out-of-control sound effects. Check your shorts for cake.
Dar-As-Sulh Volume I
(Paradigm Discs - PD15) CD $12.00
Pure field recordings, psychoacoustic tone works, and techno-noise by this clinically inclined group with Morphogenesis connections. Sleeve notes contain information on ambisonic recording and at least one track is said to be UHJ encoded, whatever that is. "Fearsomely executed," according to Will Montgomery.
In Streams Vol. 2
(Paradigm Discs - PD17) CD $13.50
Volume two collects four more performances recorded between mid 1997 and mid 2000, when no one surpassed the sextet at draping sprawling, waterlogged tapetum over spiney shoulders of lymph-challengers waving a black flag. Gong-pepper shavings drift down from the sky like fish food in an aquarium, settling on boulevards slick with alien phlegm, and causing a complex chemical reaction that yields light blue denatured pus resembling sapphire pie crust. A map wouldn't even help navigate the plumbing anomalies here, the mess hall assemblies, the monorail prototype demonstrations (pre-kink removal), the arboreal growth spurts, the ultraviolet snowplows, the speculum-induced, big-cat belches, or the freefalls through three-dimensional matrices of snorts, snuffles, blurts and scrapes (with optional rebounds through pinball machines). With human error as the cornerstone of civilization, it's amazing that in a group the size of Morphogenesis, no one fucks it up with bad judgement or prolonged lapses of indulgence. In Streams reveals just a few facets in an ongoing montage that doesn't act like a montage because of the collective discipline of Adam Bohman, Ron Briefel, Clive Graham, Clive Hall, Michael Prime and Roger Sutherland, who improvise with a high degree of coordination on enough home-made and hot-wired gear to fill several wholesale outlets. They selectively deploy prepared instruments, signal processing, purely electronic sources, and non-musical objects; meningiomata, papillomaviruses, and liquidy protrusions you could look up in Diseases Of The Skin get raked across bongo drum terrain, and digital goink meows vault over the corpse of Count Amadeo Avogadro's body as if part of a score derived from migratory lesions of burrowing nematodes and larvae, and it could go on forever, easily. Unless it doesn't. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2001
In Streams Vol. 1
(Paradigm Discs - PD16) CD $13.50
Everything here by this legendary UK free sound conglomerate, working together for well over a decade without ever using laptops or samplers is performed and processed completely live, using varispeed CD player, prerecorded analog tape (manually inched past the playback head), amplified objects, piano, biofeedback, water machine, percussion. Volume one collects performances from the late '90s - two recorded live in London, one in Cologne, and the studio track "Charivari Remnant." Start here unless you've already been frozen in the center of an ice block and thawed by ten-thousand heated centipedes. Otherwise, you'll miss the shrieks of agitated head-footed mollusks transmitted by hacked long-distance telecommunications motherboards. After Morphogenesis have rustled the gag jewelry on your lumbar vertebrae, an elusive ringing does wheelies throughout the central nervous system, with no guarantee that paralysis will assist in reorientation. TEDIUM HOUSE BEST OF 2001.
Electronic Works
(Paradigm Discs) CD $12.00
Three early electronic works from 1965-66 utilizing the techniques of amplifying combination tones and tape repetition (no editing or tape splicing). Twelve sine tone square wave generators connect to an organ keyboard, two line amplifiers, mixer, Hammond spring type reverb and two stereo tape recorders. UK import.
Oramics
(Paradigm Discs) 2xCD $19.50 (Out-of-stock)
Oram is best known for her design of the Oramics system, and for co-founding the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1957, but until now the only easily available piece of music by her on CD has been the eight-minute “Four Aspects.” There was also a 7-inch EP from 1962 on HMV, released as part of the Listen, Move and Dance series specifically designed to help children dance. Oramics is the first survey of nearly all the major pieces she produced since her departure from the BBC in January 1959 until her final tape piece in 1977. The two and a half hours of music here cover the whole range of Oram’s post -BBC output. Everything is electronic with occasional use of real instruments, especially small percussion and piano frame, and a bit of musique concrète techniques. The works fall roughly into the following categories: works for TV and cinema advertising; film soundtracks; music for theatre productions, installations and exhibitions; concert pieces; and studio experiments. There are also a few short pieces that resulted from an experimental music course given by Oram at a high school in Yorkshire in 1967.
Variations
(Paradigm Discs - PD01) CD $13.50
John Wall's abstract "Distil (1)" samples maltreated strings to create post-classical music that sounds more like New Complexity than plunderphonia. Andrew Jacques' "Ronco" pits a microphone against an amplifier for many minutes of glowering electrical crackle-and-drone. Crow's contribution cuts-up and muddies female recitation suprisingly effectively, while Alquimia mixes wordless vocal sighing and chirrupping with ethnic percussion and a sure sense of how to structure these various elements. John Grieve's '"2-4-5-T" loops huge clouds of saxophone drone. Kymatik remix abstract improvisations into a more-electronic sounding swirl, while Adam Bohman, a member of Morphogenesis, wins the special prize for Least Predictable Contribution with a barely edited extract from an audio diary recorded in Brussels.
Variations 3
(Paradigm Discs - PD10) CD $13.50
Wits's quartet piece distills anxiety attacks into religious euphoria (more pleasant and serene once you get the pure stuff uncut with rat poison and drain declogger). Phil Durrant's "Depths," originally composed for a performance of Salomé, strides confidently into the arms of electronic skreedlings and big bellied yormp. Voltage's uptight music with rock instrumentation feels more overworked than the stockboy at an organic produce market. It flirts with typical theatrical swooping, grandness of effort, showiness of gesture, but succeeds mainly because spontaneous departures that originate as stumbles quickly materialize into ergonomic improvisations. After an underwhelming duet for airbrush and locust swarm intro, Clive Graham's "Time Spool" gives the status an extended leave of absence while he packs the court with processed king-of-the-jungle purrs and mercurial wedding bells, tape manipulation whamola, deflating pipe organs, peels of feedback and diagonal electro-blip. Other highlights include: Bob Cobbing, who some would call a poet, others a wild old man who's so used to yelling at cars that he's forgotten how to say anything lasting longer than 1.4 seconds; Syngen Brown's motorized shimmers and electronic skidmarks across the forehead of a Teflon inlaid portrait of the Prince of Tibet; and Hasting's Of Malawi's contribution, more of an archival piece, consisting of found voices (all these one-time Nurse With Wound collaborators could "find" back in 1980, apparently, was an example of preschool "Let's Sing" mind control and the English time lady).
I.D. Art #2
(Paradigm Discs - PD23) CD $14.25
The second LP on the LAFMS label (right between Le Forte Four's Bikini Tennis Shoes and the double-LP Live at the Brand by Le Forte Four and The Doo-Dooettes) was released in 1976 in an edition of 200 copies, most of which went to the contributors (tracks were paid for by contributors at a rate of eight dollars per minute in exchange for four copies of the album), who were, by and large, students at Otis Art Institute in L.A., and many of these tracks are the only recordings ever made by some artists. Among the known names from the LAFMS scene are: Le Forte Four, Joe Potts, Fredrick Nilsen, Mr Foon, Ace & Duce, Dennis Mehaffey, and, of course, Smegma, who contribute six tracks. Other artists include painter Miles Forst, violinist Josie Roth, filmmakers Doug Henry and Gary Beydler, mail artist and dog portrait painter Irene Dogmatic, Otis librarian Joan Hugo, graphic designer Kathe Schreyer and many other creative artists and designers at the start of their careers.
Machine
(Paradigm Discs) CD $17.00
Completed in 1971, before Journey Into Space (but released after), Machine is the first major work by Trevor Wishart. It was composed at York University and was originally issued on vinyl as three sides of Electronic Music From York 3xLP in 1973. Like Journey Into Space, Machine makes use of a large number of volunteer contributors, mostly from the student body at York. With this recording, however, no instruments are used. Instead, it is entirely made up of spoken text and carefully directed improvising choirs that take their lead from prerecorded factory sounds. These are extensively mixed and edited with yet more collected machine sounds and other sources of musique concrète, as well as occasional use of basic electronic sources. The scale of this work, and the degree of preparation involved in scoring it, seem to have more resonance with the world of theater or film rather than tape composition. Much of Wishart's early work involved the use of musicians and artists being directed to perform in new ways, outside of their usual remit. A combination of late ’60s openness, detailed scores that provide frameworks for improvisation and slavish editing yield this incomparable sound work. With a continuous playing time of one hour, the wild and previously unexplored terrain covered by this pioneering example of British experimental music moves through oceanic calm to earsplitting factory mayhem.
Journey Into Space
(Paradigm Discs) CD $13.50
Composed between 1970 and ’72 at York University (in one of the UK’s first ever electronic music studios), Journey Into Space was Wishart’s first release. Privately pressed as two separate LPs in 1973, the album credits forty-eight different participants with junk and toys, bike bells, squeeze horns, bottles, metal tubes, combs, flute and brass sections, everyday field recordings, scraps of NASA Apollo transmissions, multitracking, editing, vocal acrobatics and musique concrète. Griddle-fried immediacy for fans of LAFMS-style communal yip.