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CD
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R 090CD
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February 9th 2021 was the 80th birthday of composer Charlie Morrow. To celebrate the occasion, Recital announce Chanter, a new album collecting his voice works over the past 60+ years. Chanter features guests such as Annea Lockwood, The Western Wind Vocal Ensemble (who worked with Philip Glass), Carole Weber, etc. 80 minutes of voice for 80 years of Charlie's life. While Morrow's previous two albums on Recital Toot! Too (2017) and America Lament (R 081LP, 2020) focused on chamber and electronic compositions, Chanter covers over 60 years of vocal explorations. Spanning from Charlie's first ever tape recording Ella (1960) to two intimate chanting improvisations made in 2021 for this CD. Curated by Sean McCann, the dozen tracks which comprise the album include pieces like "Drum Chant" (1971), a roaring percussive crescendo with chanter hyperventilation; "A Chant With Watches" (1974), a spatial work of watches placed on top of microphones across the stereo field, oscillating in octaves. Composer Annea Lockwood appears on the album playing a glass water jar over the telephone at a 1984 New York concert where Charlie dialed in performers from around the world to collaborate with him on stage. A central portion of the album is the large-scale shamanic opera "Spirit Voices" (1971), based on concepts from Siberian shamanism. With tape playback of Charlie's handmade electronics and amplified chanting voices, the 1987 staging also included fire artists, metal sculptors, brass ensemble, saw player, and dance troupe. Elements of sound poetry are fused with minimalist drone and sometimes violent electronics. Two beautiful choral works are included: "Hymn Transformations" (1983), a style of composition that mutates Sacred Harp music with numerical repetitions based on geographical coordinates, here sung by The Western Wind vocal ensemble who famously performed works by Philip Glass. A euphonious passage from "Genesis Song" (1968), a Māori poem translated by Jerome Rothenberg, taken from Morrow's The Light Opera (1982), which included Min Tanaka's Butoh dancers and a trio of jack hammers. Silver-leaf foil printed CD, with 16-page booklet.
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LP
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R 081LP
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America Lament is a panoramic musical survey of legendary experimental composer/event-maker Charlie Morrow's eclectic works. At just over 40-minutes, America Lament is mysterious, beguiling, and jubilant, comprised of pieces employing everything from hand-made electronics to Irish lap pipes, ecstatic jazz to Schubert recompositions, ambient flutes, and a string quartet. Charlie Morrow and Recital's Sean McCann excavated 50 years of Morrow's bottomless archive, from 1970 to 2020, to present this follow-up to 2018's Recital release Toot! Too (R 041LP). Charlie Morrow (b. 1942 in Newark, NJ) is a composer, sound artist, performer, and innovator. With concert performances and ad jingles (including Hefty trash bags -- "Hefty, Hefty, Hefty! Wimpy, wimpy, wimpy!"), city-wide events and film soundtracks, museum sound installations and hospital sound environments, Morrow's work has been experienced by a wider audience than most creative artists can claim. Charlie's music has a melody and depth to it that is absent from a lot of avant-garde music. His keen interest in all musical styles seem to inform this harmony. Charlie's drive to interconnect people and ideas is contagious and affirming. 20-page booklet with program notes, scores, and an interview between Morrow and McCann; edition of 300.
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Book
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R 061BK
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"The Book of Numbers and Spells is multi-hatted composer and inventor Charlie Morrow's first book. Number and letter games bejewel the pages of this anthology (pulling pieces and writings from 1974 to 2019). These works are largely text scores. It wasn't until I saw Charlie perform 'Ten the Long Way' with a room full of participants that the performative power became clear to me. Chanting numbers: the meditative, transparent, and unifying joy that swept across the room was beautiful. Charlie, a born networker of people and ideas, has naturally included two close friends in the book. Jerome Rothenberg provides a poetic essay, 'A Gematria Sampler', along with a compelling article written by composer Tom Johnson. These supplements embolden the scope and richness of Morrow's transparent systems." --Sean McCann, June 2019
"The range of Charlie Morrow's work if laid out end to end would show him clearly -- though never completely -- as a protean and transformational composer and performer. He is, from where I see him, both the leading proponent of an active ethnopoetics in avant-garde musical performance and a master of new technologies as they come into contemporary practice. It's this dynamic of old and new that a gathering like this again makes plain. The effect, all in all, is cumulative, the power in the ensemble, the full range of his explorations: shamanic-inspired dream chants, animal language events, performance pieces based on modern signal codes and ancient numerologies, soundscapes derived from the new wilderness of urban spaces and the old wilderness of arctic tundras, recompositions of familiar repertory works and of long neglected or forgotten chants and hymns, works for multiple massed single instruments (ocarinas, tubas, cellos, harps), international radio events in celebration of winter and summer solstices, and an extraordinary range of massive public spectacles. Now after fifty years of active engagement, the work, as serious and deeply rooted as it gets, is conceived and played out with a boundless energy and good humor -- in a style as distinctive as his familiar and ever present bowler hat." Jerome Rothenberg, 2019
130 pages; 6x9" perfect bound. Limited edition of 100; hand numbered in red ink.
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LP
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R 041LP
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Recital present the first vinyl LP by composer/event-maker Charlie Morrow. Toot! Too culls performance recordings from 1970 to 2014. It focuses on his "Wave Music" series, which are compositions based around swarms of like-instruments; i.e. sixty clarinets, conch choruses, and army of drums and bugle horns, etc. The 1978 piece, "100 Musicians With Lights", was performed at dusk in Central Park. One hundred players (brass, reeds, percussion) congregate and march in spiral formations, playing their instrument with penlights attached to them. The piece dissipates and ends as each player marches through the park to their respective homes. The sound is fascinating; a tape recording made by an audience member swirling and dancing through the performance. Charlie is an organizer: one of instruments, with the pieces that landed on this LP and dozens more; one of events, through decades of public solstice celebrations across the world; one of publications, including New Wilderness Audiographics and EAR Magazine; and, one of friendships as Charlie has kindly introduced me to many fascinating players in this quirky game of ours. He views networking as an art form, always connecting friends with other friends, building a larger web for everyone to dance throughout. Label owner Sean McCann on the release: "In working on this LP over the past years, Charlie Morrow and I have become close. It has been a joy to have him in my life. At the age of 73, he is determined and creative and as positive as ever. Each time we speak, new projects arise -- like a mysterious soup boiling up fresh aromas. One of my favorite memories with Charlie was us staying up 'til the wee small hours of the morning drinking a bottle of sweet potato shochu, me listening to him tell funny and poignant remembrances. I am happy to share these lovely recordings, just a pinky toe in his artistic footprint, but wow, such a gorgeous toe!" Includes 20-page, 8.5x11" color booklet with scores, writings, and photographs; Includes download coupon; Edition of 500.
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3CD
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XI 135CD
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2011 release. Charlie Morrow (b. 1942) is a sound artist, composer, sound poet, event maker. Charlie Morrow is a conceptualist whose music- and sound-work explores many styles and forms, from events for media and public spaces to commercial soundtracks, new media productions, museum installations and programming for broadcast and festivals. Assembling expert project groups, Morrow employs a collaborative style that fuses arts, artists, and environment. Charlie Morrow, for an artist who has been making music for over 50 years, has been vastly underrepresented on recordings. This three-CD retrospective set attempts to rectify that situation to some degree. The 15 works on these discs span the years from 1957-2007 and include: Morrow's first major work, Very Slow Gabrieli, a super slow motion performance of G. Gabrieli's Sonata Pian e Forte for double brass ensemble; Book of Hours of Catherine of Cleves, a beautiful polychromatic, almost tactile collage where chattering sparrows and mellifluous songbirds join the measured undulations of devotional voices. Brass rings out over cradles of bells, doves coo, gulls mew and the wash of the tide ushers in the late medieval intricacies of dulcimer, recorder and viol. You can experience the sound made by herds of instruments through the two instances of Wave Music included in this set. As well as environmental works, chanting pieces, audio collages, and so much more.
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