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LP
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FKR 119LP
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Carving an unlikely and elaborate niche in the stoney academic landscape which she once shared with the likes of Phill Niblock, John Cage, and Sorel Hayes, the excitable proto-punk poèmes sonores of the linguistic loose cannon known as Beth Anderson first rolled through New York in the mid-1970s (from Kentucky via San Francisco) like a jumbled tumbleweed of lost Letterism, face paint and threadbare drummy funk to astonish gallery floors, lecture theatres and loft apartment stages. One thousand leagues under the radar of the commercial music industry, with a sense of humor that elevated way above her highbrow peer group, the music of Beth Anderson has successfully evaded the pressing plant for most of her creative career, and not unlike fellow New York gallery actionist Suzanne Ciani, it has taken decades to successfully collect and contextualize these early recordings -- expanding her elusive discography beyond the rare and mysterious solo single entry in the process. In 1980, the 45rpm single "I Can't Stand It" combusted into the consciousness of adventurous participants with its deep rhythmic backbeat (courtesy of future Sonic Youth/Dinosaur Jr producer Wharton Tiers, member of the new wave band Theoretical Girls), climaxing with two colorful and commanding linguistic tantrums before disappearing in a puff of smoke leaving would-be fans dumbstruck without so much as a label name or distribution contact to explain what they had just heard. For those who have spent the subsequent years on the edge of that same seat, it might come as some comfort knowing that somewhere out there is also a contrasting world of gallery patrons and experimental sound poetry enthusiasts that similarly didn't know that their regular performance poet Beth Anderson even made the ambitious pop record. For the uninitiated, the enigmatic Beth Anderson has straddled both sides of the art/rock fence placed between two equally niche pastures. Hopefully this first-ever vinyl compendium will succeed in joining the dots, loops, yelps, squeaks, beats and repeats!
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CD
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NW 80610CD
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"Beth Anderson (b. 1950) writes chamber music of great beauty, generally simple tonality, and luminous textures. She's adopted a deceptively unmilitant motto -- 'To make something beautiful is revolutionary' -- and describes herself oxymoronically on her web page as a 'neo-romantic, avant-garde composer', words that wouldn't fit together for any other composer. Her chamber music betrays its twentieth-century roots in its pervasive use of collage. Her preferred form, and one she invented herself, is the swale: a term for a meadow or marsh in which a lot of plants grow together, and by extension a musical piece in which diverse musical ideas and even styles grow side by side. In Anderson's swales, then -- five of which are on this recording -- different themes, styles, moods pop up and succeed each other with cheery disregard for linear development-though, as in any field, the same plants recur amongst each other, giving the disparate collections a family unity. Thus she has evolved a music that seems texturally and tonally conventional measure-by-measure, but whose succession of styles -- modal, nineteenth-century, Bartókian, bluegrass -- chart out radical postmodern territory indeed. Yet, unlike the collage techniques of Cage, Stockhausen, and John Zorn, Anderson is never abrupt or mechanical, but smooths her swale elements together in an intuitively convincing stream of consciousness."
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