BLUME - Forced Exposure

$28.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 10/11/2024

Marking its first decade of activity, Blume returns with the first ever vinyl reissue of the seminal New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, from 1977, the third and final instalment in a suite of releases that includes James Tenney's Postal Pieces (BLUME 022LP) and Ben Vida's Vocal Trio (BLUME 024LP). Unquestionably among the most important collections of experimental music to emerge during the 20th Century, New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media is the original feminist presentation in its context, releasing the work of Johanna M. Beyer, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Megan Roberts, Ruth Anderson, and Laurie Anderson under its collective banner. Includes newly commissioned liner notes by Jennifer Lucy Allen and Bradford Bailey. New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media can be understood within two simple frameworks. On one hand, it is an astounding document of the landscape of experimental music toward the end of the 1970s. On the other, it is a historically significant feminist statement, being the first collection of experimental music entirely dedicated to female composers, a number of whom were grossly under-celebrated at the time, but have since gone on to be regarded as among the most important composers of their generation. The eight pieces gathered by New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media might be regarded as the first cohesive vision of alternate proximity or expression of experimental music to what has always been a frustratingly male dominated environment, and to the tropes, temperaments, and sensibilities that have been historically perceived to define it. It is an expanded vision of truth. While its historical significance and groundbreaking nature cannot be debated in its totality, nearly half a century on New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media remains compelling in both its musicality and the palpable sense of its lasting influence. Every composition across the album's two sides is not only engrossing and deeply compelling -- feeling as fresh and relevant as the day it was laid to tape -- but clearly tangible in their lasting influence. Absolutely seminal and not to be missed.

$28.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 10/11/2024

Since its founding back in 2014, Blume has carved a unique place in cultural landscape, issuing free-standing works, spanning the historical and contemporary, that represent singular gestures of creativity within the field of experimental sound. Joining their broad efforts in building networks of context and understanding, Blume returns with the first ever vinyl release to attend to James Tenney's legendary Postal Pieces. This marks the first ever appearance of five of the suite's works -- "Maximusic, for Max Neuhaus" (1965), "Having Never Written a Note for Percussion, for John Bergamo" (1971), "FFor Percussion Perhaps, or... [Night], for Harold Budd" (1971), "Cellogram, for Joel Krosnick" (1971), and "Beast, for Buell Neidlinger" (1971) -- on vinyl, drawing upon recordings made in 2003, by the Amsterdam based ensemble, The Barton Workshop, under the direction of James Fulkerson. Among the most important and highly regarded efforts in Tenney's canon of compositions, as well as within the history of 20th Century music, these five pieces represent a crucial bridge between Fluxus-oriented conceptualism, minimalism, and the microtonal complexities that would emerge in their wakes. A student of composition under Carl Ruggles, John Cage, Harry Partch, and Edgard Varèse, as well as acoustics, information theory, and tape music composition under Lejaren Hiller, James Tenney carved a wide path within the contexts of experimental and avant-garde music during the second half of the 20th Century. A suite of eleven compositions, The Postal Pieces, stands among Tenney's well known and celebrated compositions, and illuminates the dualities embraced by the composer, notably his use of sound to develop consciousness in and of others, and his willingness to draw on elements and observations of everyday life; citing his strong dislike of writing letters as being the primary inspiration for their inception. The suite is composed around three themes: Tenney's concept of swell form (utilizing repetition and progressing through a structurally symmetrical arch), intonation, and the desire to produce "meditative perceptual states." A hugely important addition to Blume's ever-expanding efforts in context building and networks of creative practice, James Tenney's Post Pieces is issued in a highly limited vinyl edition of 300 copies, which includes an exact replica of the original postcard graphic scores, and features newly commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey.

$28.00 PREORDER RELEASE DATE: 9/27/2024

Since its founding back in 2014, Blume has carved a unique place in cultural landscape, issuing free-standing works, spanning the historical and contemporary, that represent singular gestures of creativity within the field of experimental sound. Joining their broad efforts in building networks of context and understanding, the label is now offering a brand new, ambitious work by the American composer Ben Vida, entitled Vocal Trio, conceived, performed, and recorded in Bremen, Germany, during the Spring of 2022. A truly stunning work of compositional conceptualism, combining the ideas of systems based synthesis with real-time vocal collaboration -- issued in a highly limited vinyl edition of 200 copies mastered by Stephan Mathieu, featuring specially commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey and a leporello insert offering the piece visual score -- it's a landmark in contemporary experimental practice and arguably the most forward-thinking and exciting piece by one of the most exciting American artists working today. Vocal Trio is a work that encounters Vida composing for the human voice with the ideas that allow for synthesis -- transferring the underlying concepts and structures of both subtractive and additive synthesis to the acoustic realm -- without using a synthesizer. During the Spring of 2022 Vida was in Bremen, Germany, collaborating on a dance piece with the choreographer Fay Driscoll, when the production fell into delays. Finding himself with time on his hands, a space at his disposal, and the company of two dancers -- Amy Gernux and Lotte Rudhart -- he set out to utilize the larynx as audio paths (multi-harmonic or harmonically pure) while conceptualizing each person's mouth as a filter to sculpt the timbre and resonance of a given tone. Considering how typographical scores might be developed into a non-linguistic social framework, Vida drafted a single page of text -- what became the score for Vocal Trio -- accompanied by a set of harmonic suggestion and loose parameters, seeking a core meaning from each word's phonic make-up by each of the three singers (Vida, Gernux and Rudhart) singing as slowly as possible. At the core of the pulsing vocal drones -- intoxicating, harmonically rich long-tones -- that make up the duration abstraction of Vocal Trio, is Vida's regard for music as a social space. It is an experiment that seeks liberation through the act of collective music making, by challenging the terms through which the act of composing is perceived and then relinquishing control.

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After remaining out of print and hotly pursued for five years, Blume Editions returns with a brand-new edition of their 2018 release of Julius Eastman's The N****r Series. Comprising three of his most politically and creatively radical works -- "Evil N****r" (1979) "Gay Guerilla" (1980) and "Crazy N****r" (1980) -- each a shimmering and complex work of post-minimalist piano, this brand new deluxe edition is housed in a beautiful, handmade wooden box, which contains two vinyl LPs, a 12-page booklet with the original liner notes by Mary Jane Leach and Bradford Bailey, a brand new 2500-word essay by Bailey, as well as new unseen pictures courtesy of Roberto Laneri, and a poster. Over the last decade and a half, it's been incredible to witness the ascending star of the composer Julius Eastman. A celebrated figure within the New York experimental music scene during the 1970s and '80s, over the years following his untimely death in 1990 he and his work drifted into sinful neglect. Largely thanks to a series of archival releases attending to his work, and a handful of new renderings by Apartment House, Wild Up, So Percussion, Kukuruz Quartet, and number of ensembles, attention has finally come his way, placing him at the center of the consciousness of a new generation of listeners. During his tragically brief life, Julius Eastman burned like a wild fire. A brilliant composer, pianist, and vocalist who, with contemporaries like Arthur Russell, Arnold Dreyblatt, Ellen Fullman, Rhys Chatham, Glenn Branca, and numerous others, pioneered the development of post-minimal music, he was among only a handful African American artists at the center of New York's experimental music scene during the 1970s and '80s. Contentious, confrontational, and brash, he was also among the first artists to draw the subjects of ethnicity and queer identity into the conceptual sphere of that scene; interventions that rarely went down well within a context that was dominantly middle-class, heteronormative, and white. Sadly, this led to attacks upon him by prominent composers like John Cage, a factor that contributed to the long-lasting degradation of his legacy that has only just begun to be repaired. While none of the works within The N****r Series explicitly state they must be executed on piano -- being composed by Eastman "for any number of similar instruments" -- since their debut by the composer on piano in 1980, they have almost always featured the same instrumentation. The recordings featured within are the earliest known -- dating from around 1980 -- and are the only to have been realized during the composer's lifetime. Collectively, these three works -- unquestionably among the most politically and creatively radical in Eastman's entire body of work -- generate sprawling soundscapes through adamantly restated patterns and interlocking canons, not fragmenting, but preaching urgent truths. Double-LP on violet vinyl, audiophile pressing, housed in Nagaoka anti-static record sleeves.

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Limited repress! Blume Editions announce the long-awaited first-time vinyl pressing of the New York based composer Phill Niblock's seminal Four Full Flutes, restoring the album to the format for which it was originally conceived. Created in collaboration with the flutists Petr Kotik, Susan Stenger, and Eberhard Blum toward the end of the 1970s, the album's four compositions belong to Niblock's radical rethinking of the possibilities and terms of tape music and microtonalism, the effects of which continue to ripple across the field of experimental to this day. Created in full collaboration with the composer with newly commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey, David First, few artifacts of minimalism's second wave have proven to have had such an enduring effect. Niblock's third full-length dates from the same era of compositions as its predecessors, but found Niblock's attitude toward the potential activated by home playback moderately changed. Four Full Flutes comprises four works, roughly 20 minutes each, composed for flute by Niblock toward the end of the '70s and early '80s. Each deploys the compositional system within which he has worked for the better part of his career; combining sustained tones of specific durations, rigorously produced at microtonal intervals by the respective musicians, before arriving at their final form through meticulous work with magnetic tape on the part of the composer. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Deluxe wooden box with velvet lining; red vinyl, audiophile pressing, housed in Nagaoka anti-static record sleeves; includes an original LP-sized extensive booklet and a 60x90cm iconic poster designed by Bruno Stucchi/Dinamomilano; edition of 300.

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"This is the fulfillment of a dream for a new kind of music. There is nothing like Vespers in the literature of music. It is a completely new way of defining what music is, and the definition is given to us in a purely realized form." --Robert Ashley

Alvin Lucier is among the most important, influential, and radical of the second generation of the post-war avant-garde composers. First released as Lucier's contribution to the Sonic Arts Union's lone LP, Electronic Sound (1972), Vespers is a work generated by two equal actors: the performers and the space that they occupy. Conceived following a chance encounter with hand-held echolocation technology "the Sondol", a pulse oscillator that emits short, sharp pulses at variable repetition speeds, producing echoes from the reflecting walls of a space to register relative location and orientation. Written as a poetic "prose score", for the realization of Vespers, each performer is equipped with a "Sondol" and asked to move blindfolded within a defined space, moving from one point to the next using only echolocation, taking what Lucier describes as "sound photographs" that reveal discrete details of the given area. Despite the radical leap it presented within the history of the sonic arts, Vespers was not the first of Lucier's works that began to specifically address the relation between sound, perception, and space. Chambers, composed the year before in 1968 and embedded with the wry humor which lingers below much of the composer's output, explored the theme on a brilliantly miniature scale. As a total work, Chambers contends with the relationship between the knowing and understanding of what we hear, our perception of the source of a sound, and its relation to space. When viewed in the immediate context of Vespers, it presents as an unexpected inversion of what was to come. While it plays on the relation of sight and the sonic actor, what is seen and unseen takes on a dynamically different role. For the realization of Chambers, battery-operated radios, tape recorders, and various kinds of electric toys are hidden in paper bags, shoes, kettles, a suitcase, and other small resonant spaces, which not only limit the perception of these object to their sounds alone, but take on the role of acoustic actors on the sounds within, each space becoming as individual and distinct as the object it contains. Newly designed obi-strip/insert with an introduction by Robert Ashley, liner notes by Bradford Bailey and Gaia Martino. 160 gram, dark blue vinyl; edition of 300.

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Last copies of 2019 repress. Very limited double-LP bundled version of the two individual LPs, 180 gram color vinyl. Includes printed inner, Nagaoka anti-static record sleeve, plus and Obi-style insert in a fold-out outer sleeve. Only a handful of years ago, the name Julius Eastman would have been met by a unanimous blank look. The legacy of this once-darling of the New York post-minimal avant-garde had, since his untimely death at the age of 49, in 1990, been almost entirely lost. Eastman's story is as fascinating as they come: black, angry, and queer in an all too polite, straight white musical world. A prodigy and genius whose music took him to astounding heights, whose unwillingness to conform and play by the rules took him down the path of drug abuse and homelessness, as well as the loss of his scores. Even before his death, he was already a forgotten name. Eastman belongs to a generation of composers who inherited the mantel left by minimalism, but despite being highly respected by his peers, he was given few chances to record his work, relegating most of his talent as a singer and pianist to the realization of others' work. It was Eastman who conducted the iconic recording of Arthur Russell's Tower of Meaning, and whose piano cuts its way across the 1976 recording of Morton Feldman's For Frank O'Hara. It's likely that Eastman's work would have been entirely lost, had it not been for rigorous efforts of a few close friends, the most persistent of whom was the composer, Mary Jane Leach, who spent years tracking down his lost scores. These efforts eventually led to the comprehensive CD collection, Unjust Malaise (2005). It was the beginning of a turning tide, and over the 13 years since, Eastman's singular voice has slowly returned to the audience he always deserved. It also represented the recorded debut of some his most thrilling and controversial work, three compositions for piano from what he called the N*gger Series: Gay Guerrilla, Evil N*gger, and Crazy N*gger. The three pieces are now issued across two LPs in their first-ever vinyl release with extensive liner notes by Leach and Bradford Bailey. These three seminal works by one of the most important, but neglected, American composers of the 1970s and '80s, return to the light once more. Not only are they an entire rethinking of musical minimalism, but they ferociously blow the doors off of what classical music can be. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. All three compositions on these 2 LPs are for piano quartet: Performed by: Frank Ferko, Janet Kattas, Julius Eastman, Patricia Martin. Recorded 1979/80.

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Blume present the first ever reissue of Winfried Mühlum-Pyrápheros's Musica Nova Contemplativa, originally released in 1970. This stunning artifact of its era has, until now, remained among the rarest artifacts in the field of cross-disciplinary efforts known as the Artist Record: sonic adventures embarked on by artists primarily dedicated to the visual realm. Creatively challenging, ahead of its time, and unquestionably beautiful, its rare musicality sets the stage for alternate understandings of what minimalism was and came from, during its early years. Droning and tense, subtle melodic elements underpin sheets of tone and atonality, sculpting an incongruous sense of spatial ambience; the concept of Musica Nova Contemplativa drew on a unique, unfixed compositional system created by combining traditional musical notation with mobile and variable elements, expressed graphically as a system of coordinates which leave variation, interpretation, and improvisation up to the performer. Captured as eleven distinct movements, the work, in hindsight, can now be understood as a lost, freestanding work of musical minimalism, echoing idiomatic roots in Fluxus and the raw temperaments of artists like Tony Conrad and Henry Flynt, threaded with touchstones in the work of Eliane Radigue, Giacinto Scelsi, and Jani Christou. Born in Germany during 1941 and educated in philosophy and psychology, over the last half century the bulk of Winfried Mühlum-Pyrápheros's artistic output has been largely oriented around painting, sculpture, and installation, each focused on the experiences of phenomena, environment, and light. Musica Nova Contemplativa was composed in 1964 as a graphic score, then it was interpreted and recorded by Mühlum-Pyrápheros on violin and Johann Georg Ickler on organ three years later in a Franciscan church in Bensheim as is a logical extension of the artists broader concerns: seeking further territories of inclusive and expansive environments of experience. Intended as acoustic extensions of his paintings, the collective contents of the album are a metaphysical and esoteric rising in sound. Out-of-print for almost 50 years, this edition represents its first ever reissue in any form, complete with an interview between Winfried Mühlum-Pyrápheros and Stefan Bremer conducted for the occasion of this reissue, and newly commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey. Includes printed inner sleeve and an original insert that functions as obi; Edition of 300.

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Blume present the first vinyl reissue of Alvin Curran's Canti Illuminati, originally released in 1982. Between diverse polarities of experimental practice, from free improvisation and modern classical composition, to primitivism, electronic music, and extended techniques, for more than half a century Alvin Curran has stood as beacon in the landscape of organized sound. From his efforts within Musica Elettronica Viva, the collective which he helped found in 1966 with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, to those as a solo-performer and composer, his sounds and ideas have effected immeasurable change. Canti Illuminati, composed and recorded between 1973 and 1977, stands as one of the great documents from the golden era of Curran's singular brand of creative radicalism -- combining a deep sense of social and political consciousness, with creative humanism and visionary compositional ideas. A bridge between the American and European traditions of experimental music, Canti Illuminati is Curran's tribute to the human voice, "the most natural source of music", and it delves toward the very origins of music itself. In lyrical and poetic form, it rethinks the possibilities and potential of organized sound, seeking something fundamentally human. Standing apart from canonical definition, it contributes to a more complex and nuanced understanding of minimalism. Consciously conceived by Curran for the format of the LP, the album takes form as a single work in two parts: "Canti Illuminati [For Choir, Synthesizer, Piano And Tape]", a structured choral improvisation, built from the contributions and voices of Alessandro Bruno, Antonella Talamonti, Antonio Cesareni, David Thorner, Elisabetta Bordes-Page, Giorgio Caruano, Luca Miti, Manuela Garroni, Nicola Bernardini, Pierluigi Castellano, and Sista Carandini; and "Canti Illuminati [For Voice, Synthesizer, Tape]", which Curran realized as a solo performer with his own voice, tape-delayed feedback, and a Serge synthesizer and sequencer. Sinfully under celebrated and all too rarely heard since its initial release, Canti Illuminati remains a profoundly compelling and moving body of sound. a landscape of sustained tone, rippling texture, and structural intervention. Necessity stripped to the elemental, while challenging, endlessly surprising, and complex. Brand new, expanded liner text written by Bradford Bailey. Fully remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

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Sold out, future repress... It's little wonder that Julius Eastman (who died in 1990 under unexplained circumstances), remained the supreme underground composer. He was Afro-American and gay, a composer who rocked the cerebral world of process music with his explosions of free improvisation. Crazy Nigger is the first time any of Eastman's music has been available on vinyl, and is one of three extended pieces for four pianos, along with Gay Guerrilla and Evil Nigger, written and performed around 1980. All three works generate their epic soundscapes through adamantly restated patterns and interlocking canons, not fragmenting, but preaching urgent truths. To quote the brilliant Mary Jane Leach liners: "He wrote what can be categorized as minimal music, but also wrote 'post-minimal' music -- before minimal music was fully established." His pieces straddle both styles of minimal music; rhythmic/pulse-driven music (Steve Reich and Philip Glass) and spectral drone music (La Monte Young and Phill Niblock). There is a flexibility that lends an organic feel to his music, a muscularity missing in a lot of other music from that time; with the re-emergence of this powerful music, a missing gap in the history of contemporary music has been filled. Not released commercially upon their recording, they were instead shared on cassettes, copied and passed from one admirer to another. Unlike today's instant access to music, at that time each new copy represented a time commitment, since it took as long to copy as its playing time, while also removing itself further from the original recording with a resultant deterioration in sound quality. The three pieces occupy a high point in Eastman's oeuvre, the culmination of his mature style. Crazy Nigger is a sprawling sonic study, the last section exploring canonic form both harmonically and rhythmically, using the same process as James Tenney's Spectral Canon, but notated in a more intuitive way. Offering extensive liner notes by Leach and Bradford Bailey, this is a seminal work by one of the most important, but neglected, American composers of the 1970s and '80s, returning to the light once more. Not only is Crazy Nigger an entire rethinking of minimalism, but it ferociously blows the doors of what classical music can be seen to be. Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi. Includes printed inner sleeve housing a Nagaoka anti-static record sleeve, plus obi-style original insert in a fold-out outer sleeve. 180 gram, color vinyl.

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Sold out, future repress... Julius Eastman's seminal classics are now reissued on vinyl for the first time ever. Gay Guerrilla and Evil Nigger, both composed in 1979 with a third work Crazy Nigger, make up what Eastman called The Nigger Series. Some of the most challenging and beautiful works composed for piano during their era, they double as a window into the intricate thought process and contentiousness of their creator. When the composer was asked to perform the series at Northwestern University in 1980, due to protests by African American students, their titles were censored in the event's program. His response was a flamboyant foreshadowing of the sentiments toward bigoted language which later arose within hip-hop culture -- to publicly take back these words, assert ownership of them, and deploy their power for positive change. What Eastman was early to recognize, was that there is a fundamental difference in what happens when these words are spoken by white people toward people of color, and when people of color deploy them toward a white audience. The balance of power shifts. Eastman's audience was largely heterosexual and white. He knew exactly what he was doing, and to whom he spoke. The object in your hands contains some of the most striking and important music composed during the later decades of the 20th century -- music which remained lost and unheard for years, not because of what it is, but because of who its composer was. It is music, doubling as the voice of a man, which, because it refused to be oppressed, was suppressed or ignored. Eastman's work is a conscious act of intervention, plowing into a context defined by heterosexual whiteness, attacking its unjust demands from within. It is Christ-like -- metaphor and beauty which is impossible to separate from the evils of the world. It is a music which carries the body of a man. As it speaks to our hearts, as it offers a glimpse of the freedoms implied by the sublime, a shackle is bound -- a consciousness of our complicity with unforgivable sin. Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi. Includes printed inner sleeve housing a Nagaoka anti-static record sleeve, plus an original insert that functions as obi; Housed in a fold-out outer sleeve. 180 gram, color vinyl.

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Repressed. Through a remarkable and singular body of work, over the course of the last decade, the composer and percussionist Sarah Hennies has slowly emerged as one of the definitive voices of her generation. Initially coming to focus as a member of Austin's experimental music scene during the early 2000s, before relocating to upstate New York, with a delicate, clattering grace, she has continuously offered vision, conceptual armature, crucial understanding for the contemporary proximity of avant-garde, and experimental practice. Entirely of her moment, she defies what we know and expect, owing allegiance to none. Hennies has been darting around the edges of modern composition for years, but that world has never been an entirely comfortable fit, nor is it the best framework and context within which to approach her work. She is better understood in the proximity of figures like Jim O'Rourke, a creator of a countercultural music, which incorporates everything, while owing loyalty to none. Hennies could equally be framed with composers like Steve Reich, Arthur Russell, Julius Eastman, and Mary Jane Leach, all of whom struggled to create more inclusive musical hybrids, attacking the institutions as they stood. As these figures once were, Hennies's position within the contemporary landscape is challenging and requires work to understand. Her music isn't always what it seems. What is unquestionable is that it is entirely of this moment and not a product of appropriation or pastiche. Comprised of two site-specific compositions -- "Foragers" and "Embedded Environments" -- recorded in a silo in Buffalo, New York, these recordings are a crowning moment within the long arc of Hennies's practice. Each work is composed for a quartet of percussionists -- Jason Bauers, Tim Feeney, and Bob Fullex, with Hennies contributing on vibraphone and percussion. While "Foragers" and "Embedded Environments" are products of Hennies's quest for elemental meaning and relationships within sound -- those which lay beyond traditional understandings of structure, beat, and tone, here there is a third and unfamiliar actor in play: the space itself. Activated by the silo for which they were composed, Hennies's broken, staggering rhythms and resonances are offered new freedom through a seductive Trojan horse, pushing them toward even more complex and jarring depths. "Foragers" and "Embedded Environments" delves into a realm of ideas, proximity, and place, offering a new vision for our sonic present, and what may be to come. Edition of 300.

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Milan based imprint Blume offer two incredible archival works from the 1980s American composer Mary Jane Leach, never before released. Mary Jane Leach is a definitive model of the American avant-garde and experimental composer -- creatively brilliant, tragically underrecognized, yet always there, rigorously plumbing the depths, issuing challenges, venturing toward the unknown. Leach's creative practice began at the crossroads of the modern and post-modern -- with the death of the American dream, its hegemonic point of view, and with the irreconcilable reductive legacies of their predecessors, the minimalists. Leach pursued the physicality of sound and acoustic phenomena -- investigating their properties, and interactions with space. Despite being incredibly active, during the 1970s and '80s Leach failed to offer a single commercial release. She instead instigated a singular body of work which is conceptually centered around live acoustic phenomena and performance. In effect, there are two dynamic components of her work -- the notes, structures, and relationships which make up a composition, and a secondary series of difference, combination, and interference tones, generated by a work's relationship to the space in which it is conceived and performed. Pipe Dreams represents a turning of the tide -- a means through which to offer the composer the attention she has always righty deserved. Comprised of two incredible works -- "4BC" and "Pipe Dreams" -- this LP is a brilliant entry point into Mary Jane Leach's sprawling body of composition and investigatory work. Like all of her efforts, they are temporal snapshots, incapable of being fully reproduced. They are singular and unique. "4BC" is a work for four bass clarinets, recorded during 1984. It is part of Leach's large body of compositions which employs long tones (drone) within a constrained tonal palette. "Pipe Dreams", written for, and recorded on, the organ in St. Peter's in Köln, Germany, during 1989, was realized by, and as a direct response to, the unique environment for which it was made. St. Peter's organ has two sets of pipes at opposite ends of the church, each having separate sounds and stops that can generate microtonal intervals. The work is a structured improvisation, exploring antiphony and the specific sounds of that organ, extra-musical as well as musical. These pieces help illuminate Leach as one of the most important voices in her generation.

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The Milan based imprint Blume present an incredible seven cassette box set comprised of archival recordings made by Stefan Weisser (Z'EV) during one his most fruitful periods, stretching between the mid-1970s to the early '80s. A marvel in sonic creativity, these works offer a long overdue insight into the foundations of late 20th century sound-art, poetics, punk, industrial music, and noise. Wordworks is the first survey of Weisser's output from the '70s and early '80s to appear on an analog format. The set begins with "Book Of Love Being Written As They Touched" (1975), an hour-long work recorded in 1975 for eight female voices, built from the 40,320 spoken permutations of its title. A definitive work of conceptual art, it premiered as part of the Second Generation Show at the Museum of Conceptual Art in San Francisco. Recorded two months later, the second cassette presents "Dark Pastimes Duet" (1975), a recording made with Roberta Friedman on tape accompaniment, at University Of California, Santa Barbara. Brilliant on every count, it is a reimagining of the decaying potentials of conversation, at a moment witnessing the utopian ideals of modernism coming to an end. The third work "Instill" (1976), is an effort for four voices and tape replay, and encounters this sense of loss further progressed. Its contributors' utterances are reduced to inaudible mumbling, whispers, and hiss, pushing toward abstraction and slippery rhythmic pulse. "So Called" and "As Is As", both from 1976, push these tactile themes even further, while "Spatial Poetics", a live mix for taped voices presented at The First West Coast International Festival of Sound Poetry in San Francisco during 1977, increasingly reveals direct intervention and the folding of environmental sound. "Oomoonoon: Dancing On The Brink Of The Word" (1978) started its life as a three-hour tape installation. It begins with three three-minute loops of three voices -- their ambience recorded, looped, and then replaced every 45 minutes, collectively rising to a total progressive accumulation of nine, to 15, to 27, and then 51 voices. Profoundly ambitious in assembly and content, the set present some of the 20th century's most radical heights in sound poetry and art. A crucial look at a largely unrecognized body of work, offering Stefan Weisser/Z'EV the attention, appraisal, and place in history he has always deserved. All seven tapes come in wooden box; Includes several zines and a poster; Edition of 80 (no repress).

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Blume present a reissue of Bruce Nauman's Soundtrack From First Violin Film, originally released in 1969. Since the mid-1960s, Nauman has laid the groundwork -- in thought, context, practice, and materiality -- for nearly every fine-artist that has followed in his wake. Even those who do not directly draw on the ground he gained, must contended with a world in his image. Initially issued by Tanglewood Press in 1969 -- a component of the art multiples edition 7 Objects/69 (also including David Bradshaw, Eva Hesse, Stephen Kaltenbach, Alan Saret, Richard Serra, and Keith Sonnier) -- Soundtrack From First Violin Film is a crucial element in Nauman's diverse the canon of contributions; It bridges the emerging practices of performance, video, and sound. Blume's release -- along with the Die Schachtel's 2016 reissue (DSART 013LP) -- marks the first time this seminal work has been available to a broader audience, making it a historic event. Soundtrack From First Violin Film, while resembling music, is one of the earliest gestures of sound art as it has come to be understood. It falls within Nauman's larger body of solitary actions and performances. In 1968, the artist moved briefly to New York, occupying Jasper Johns's then vacant studio in the Hamptons, beginning to build the body of work for his first solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery, documenting them in what became the very first works of video art. Within the larger body of effort, emerged a series of works featuring him playing the violin. It is from this world, that the LP Soundtrack From First Violin Film, with its disembodied sounds, grew. Nauman's violin works, as they exist in the world, are only distant cousins of performance and compositions. They are objects, doubling the signifiers of music and the body back upon themselves. Rather seeking entirely new and liberated sonic realms, they employ conceptual practice, instrument, and rhythm to strike direct confrontation. They could be understood as a conceptual inversion of recordings by John Cage or of musique concrète. Rather than seeking to utilize non-instrumental sources to create music, Nauman used instrumental sounds and references to make something which is not music at all, highlighting the dimensional possibilities of meaning, and the elasticity of language. Comes in full-color cover with printed inner sleeve housing a Nagaoka anti-static record sleeve; Includes an original insert that functions as Obi; Yellow-colored vinyl; Edition of 300.

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Blume present the first vinyl issue of John Butcher's Resonant Spaces, originally released on CD in 2008. More than a half century into its development, free improvisation remains nearly impossible to define. Of course there are concrete definitions, canons, and well-trod paths -- familiar idioms, structures, relationships, textures, and tones, but by its very nature -- something free, when practiced with faith, it is elusive, constantly shifting, and reforming in the hands of those who call the art form their own. Of the improvisers emerging from the remarkable European contexts over the last four decades, few demand the respect, or have plumbed the depths of the English saxophonist John Butcher. An entirely singular voice, since appearing on the scene during the late 1970s and early '80s, Butcher has continuously defied and shattered standing presumptions of his form. Exemplifying this, there may be no better example than a series of solo performances recorded on a lonely tour of remote areas of Scotland with Akio Susuki during 2006. Entitled Resonant Spaces, the album stands as one of his most ambitious, radical, and revelatory bodies of work. Across the '80s and '90s, he performed with the lion's share of Britain's leading lights: Derek Bailey, Phil Minton, John Russell, Phil Durrant, Steve Beresford, and countless others. It was during this period that he began to develop the trajectories for which he is often most recognized: solo performances, capitalizing on resonance, overtone, and space. Resonant Spaces is the fruit born of decades of work; a rare product of artistry, seeming to have simply appeared -- an organic disembodied form. Astounding on nearly every count -- miles from the social unrest from which this idiom was born -- an uncharted meditative realm -- a towering body of creativity and tone. Recorded in the wilds of Scotland against Neolithic standing stones, within an emptied oil storage tank, and caves, like all free improvisations, Resonant Spaces is a conversation, but one unlike others before. Where musicians working in ensembles and groups, shift, adapt, and respond to those with whom they share the stage, Butcher's conversation is with the unexpected responses of a given space and the returned transmogrified body of his creative self. A shimmering world of resonance, ambience, structure, and craft. Comes in full-color cover with printed inner sleeve housing a Nagaoka anti-static record sleeve; Includes original insert that functions as Obi; Blue-colored vinyl; Edition of 250.

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Alessandra Novaga delivers a stunning LP, a compelling investigation of her resonantly spacious guitar playing that dismantles the instrument's unique properties through relentlessness. Movimenti Lunari speaks of the relentlessness of natural forces. Something that seems to have no development, but instead advances inexorably. A form developing out of a memory progressively coming into focus; never still, constantly pulsating and vibrating with new elements. Beyond any rational, analytic thought, a sound that belongs to remembrance. Sandro Mussida's "In Memoria" questions this relationship between movement and stillness in the form of a piece of music. The piece is a meditation on memory, technology, and sound; the repeating theme recalls bells chiming over and over, drawn out into lines as long as the horizon. Francesco Gagliardi's "Untitled, January" speaks of a sound evoked by an image. A photograph. A foggy landscape seen from a train. Accompanied by a single instruction: "A drone, or drones. Any duration." Simultaneously timely and timeless, Movimenti Lunari has the feel of artistic invention, a canvas of delicacy melding into intense streams of sound. Includes obi strip.

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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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Reinhold Friedl and Dirk Dresselhaus come from really different backgrounds: Dirk Dresselhaus has released several experimental-electronic freak-pop recordings as Schneider TM since the late '90s. He started making music in the late '80s and developed his personal approach to sound and structure as an autodidact, starting with guitar effect devices and four-track home-recording. Reinhold Friedl studied mathematics and music, won scholarships and international commissions, and built up the ensemble Zeitkratzer, disrespecting all musical frontiers. So it's not astonishing that both met for the first time when Zeitkratzer performed Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music: Dirk Dresselhaus was enthusiastic about this unrestrained contemporary music group which devoted itself to the instrumentation of purely tuned guitar feedback. Dresselhaus and Friedl started their collaboration, which happened over the years in studios only, to address the question of what happens if you put those strange inside-piano sounds -- another domain where Friedl has set standards -- or those powerful, huge piano-drones into Schneider TM's electronic devices, modulating them with an incredibly complex feedback system and recursive effect-settings. Sometimes violent, sometimes subtle, mostly large-scale sound-fields that concentrate on only one sound or noise, developing an overwhelming impact. Reinhold Friedl plays pianoforte, harmonics, horse hair, metal sheet, fishing line, metal tube, inside-piano, extended piano; Dirk Dresselhaus plays oscillator, spring reverb, isolator, memory man, digital delay, mixing desk, lfo, noise generator, vibrator/time machine, pitch shifter, ring modulator.

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Going back to his early musical inspirations in the early '70s, Werner Durand was fascinated with the multiple saxophone sounds coming from Terry Riley's "Poppy Nogood" and "Happy Ending," Dickie Landry's "Fifteen Saxophones" and Ariel Kalma's "Reternelle." His participation in the Parisian saxophone ensemble Urban Sax in 1976/1977 became a starting point for his own musical endeavors. The two saxophone pieces presented here were composed and recorded roughly 10 years apart and document his move from free microtonality towards just intonation, to which he was turned onto as a member of Arnold Dreyblatt & the Orchestra of Excited Strings from 1990 to 1997. The two hemispheres represent the two parts of the brain, associated with the intuitive (right) and rational (left) part. "Right Hemisphere" for soprano sax was composed in 1990 for a festival in Berlin, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the invention of the saxophone. The main idea for this piece was to make one forget what instrument one is listening to as well as to feature various unorthodox techniques like loose embouchure, false fingerings, or circular breathing, and a free microtonality. It was inspired by certain composers of microtonal music like Giacinto Scelsi, Phill Niblock, Lois V. Vierk, and Mary Jane Leach. The original version of "Left Hemisphere" was developed between 1995 and 2000. Dreaming of a certain ratio and intervals during a summer holiday in England in 1995, the piece slowly evolved over the next years. This version was recorded in 2000. The piece uses just intervals derived from the third and seventh harmonics played over a sax drone. All music composed, performed, recorded, and mixed by Werner Durand.