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LP
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BLUME 003LP
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Peter Cusack's debut long-player from 1977 is a peek into one of the most varied and experimental musical scrapbooks one is likely to hear. Infused with natural sounds and a healthy dose of musical abstraction, this record defies categorization. A solo album of guitar and environmental sounds; a montage filled with montages where references to and resonances of varied, often disparate soundworlds spill in every direction. The music manages to be both blatant and covert at the same time; it's clearly, acutely disjointed and polyvocal yet strangely out of focus in regard to intent. But that's the thing about montages: by having nothing lead causally, conventionally to the next, a radical, imaginary simultaneity occurs; one continues to experience the presence of each previous section (even though they're no longer audible) even as a new one abruptly presents itself -- all this without the actual physical interference that happens with visual collage. After Being In Holland For Two Years is presented here for the first time since its initial pressing as a green LP in a Nagaoka anti-static record sleeve contained within a full-color sleeve with obi strip and fold-up tri-panel inner sleeve. This edition includes extensive new liner notes by Toronto-based composer-performer Martin Arnold -- writing that complements the utterly singular notes Cusack provided for the initial release, which are reproduced here as well. Peter Cusack is an improvising guitarist, field recording artist, and occasional whistler. He founded Bead Records in 1974 to release the only LP by A Touch Of The Sun, his short-lived duo with clarinetist Simon Mayo, but the label went on to become a collectively run initiative that produced more than 30 albums of improvised music. The following year he was among those who founded both the journal Musics and the London Musicians Collective, both of which were important focal points for London's nascent improvising community. Cusack was a member of the eclectic freeform group Alterations with Steve Beresford, Terry Day, and David Toop, as well as their irreverent seaside covers spin-off The Promenaders. He formed significant musical relationships with instrument builder Max Eastley, multi-wind instrumentalist Clive Bell, vocalist Vivienne Corringham, and sampling trombone player and composer Nicholas Collins.
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2CD/BOOK
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RER PC3
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"Two remarkable and important CDs of very diverse site recordings, made in Chernobyl (occupying the whole of CD1), the Caspian Oilfields around Baku (Azerbaijan), and in various UK sites, including Lakenheath, Dungeness, Sellafield, Snowdonia &c. (CD2). The CDs are accompanied by a beautifully made 90 page hardback book filled with a huge number of original colour photographs, background information, interviews and detailed documentation of the recordings, their collection, the history of the environments recorded and the curious and inadvertent inverse relation between human hazard and broader environmental recovery. This is an essential and unusual document. Peter Cusack is best-known as a member of the avant garde musical quartet, Alterations (1978-1986; with Steve Beresford, David Toop and Terry Day), and as the creator of field and wildlife recording-based albums."
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CD
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RER PC2
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Subtitled: Spring 2003. "Over the last thirty years Peter Cusack has built a reputation as an improvising musician, and is often to be found plucking an array of string instruments, including guitar and balalaika, while simultaneously triggering live electronics. Peter had known for some time about the extraordinary Lake Baikal, a 600 kilometre long lake in Siberia. It is thought to be the world's oldest and deepest lake and holds one fifth of the earth's fresh water. It was only recently, however, that he came across a reference on the internet to the mysterious noises made by the ice, which covers the lake from autumn to spring to the depth of a meter. The sounds are most spectacular when the ice melts and breaks up, and the lake transforms itself back into water. This album is a document of Peter's journey, on a mission to record these sounds. There are humorous incidents, as when a telephone engineer unexpectedly falls through the ice while Peter is recording (he made it out to safety!), or when the local children take over the village's PA system. There are haunting vignettes; a young girl burst into song on the train, on the small branch of the Trans-Siberian railway part of which runs along the shore of the lake; an accomplice of Peter's performs bell-like angular music on the broken metal fountain which they find in the town of Angarsk. But centre stage belongs to the sounds of the ice break-up itself, as ghostly creaks and agonising groans emerge from the tinkling, sparkling flow. Baikal Ice is comparable to Chris Watson's pristine sound recordings, to be found on the Touch label."
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CD
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RER PC1
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"Guitarist Peter Cusak has been active in the UK improvising scene since the early 1970s and has recorded with Clive Bell, Nicolas Collins, Max Eastly and Thomas Koner, among others. He is curating The Week Of Small Miracles, a multimedia millennium project on the river Lee in North London, to run in the year 2000. Where Is The Green Parrot is not really an album, but more of a series of locations. The roaming microphone is like a camera, recording events, ambiences and interactions, with music merely one part of the fabric. Peter reprocesses the sounds, adding electronics and samples, and some of the soundscapes are also then laced with bazouki and guitar improvisations."
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