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PRICE: $20.00
LOW STOCK LEVEL
1-2 Weeks
ARTIST
TITLE
The Electric Harpsichord
FORMAT
CD/BOOK

LABEL
CATALOG #
DSART 010CDDSART 010CD
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
10/26/2010


Restocked; 2nd pressing with lower pricing. After the limited art edition quickly sold out, The Electric Harpsichord is now reprinted -- in its complete form -- in a new elegant white boxed edition. Known to the very few, The Electric Harpsichord is possibly THE obscure masterpiece of early American minimalism. Recorded live in 1976 after many years of study under the guidance of Pandit Pran Nath and La Monte Young, it has finally found the perfect home in the Die Schachtel catalog, now in an elegant white boxed 56-page book+CD edition, that gives the work the space and merit it deserves as a unique work of art, complete with two poems by La Monte Young especially written for this edition, and an extensive essay by Henry Flynt. An improvisation performed on just intonation-tuned keyboards put through time-lag accumulators similar to those used by Terry Riley, Hennix has produced one of the most remarkable pieces of music to emerge from the La Monte Young school of minimalism. A Sweden-born composer, who studied in the tradition of Xenakis and Stockhausen in the 1960s, Hennix met La Monte Young and Hindustani raga master Pandit Pran Nath at the Nuits du Fondation Maeght festival in 1970, and pursued studies with both men during the 1970s. While the use of the time-lag in Riley's works such as "A Rainbow In Curved Air" results in an experience of blissful, focused, samadhi-like calm, Hennix's drone work has more in common with the chaotic fluxes of psychedelic experience or the mandalas of Tibetan Buddhism. This is a moving eternity, a pulsating, shifting-something like a raga perhaps, insofar as a raga is a specific deity invoked into sound, fluttering inside the matrix of the drone. Catherine Christer Hennix: keyboard and custom sine wave generators. Recorded live at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.