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viewing 1 To 9 of 9 items
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LP
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IDL 019LP
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Linien II 1948-49 presents the earliest known Danish works of sound art. Five works from 1948-49 created by the visual artists Richard Winther (1926-2007), Hans "Bamse" Kragh-Jacobsen (1913-92), Niels Macholm (1915-1997), Ib Geertsen (1919-2009) and Gunnar Aagaard Andersen (1919-1982), all of whom were part of the artist group Linien II. The story of Linien II's sound experiments is a story about how a handful of young, idealistic, self-aggrandizing and silly Danish artist dandies in 1948 by a detour invented their own concrete sound art, almost exactly at the same time as radio technician and composer Pierre Schaeffer worked on developing his musique concréte in Paris -- and even presented their concrete sound works to the public at an exhibition in Copenhagen before Schaeffer's first and landmark musique concréte work "Cinq études de bruits" was premiered on French radio. The release presents five experimental sound works that in different ways represent the artists' attempts at finding new solutions to a set of formal aesthetic concerns in relation to concrete art by transposing them into the medium of sound. It is a story that hasn't been told before, as the works until now have only existed in two sets of copies on the original fragile lacquer records, both of which have been locked deep inside museum archives. Now the historical sound works can finally be heard when the Institute for Danish Sound Archeology are releasing them on LP almost 75 years after their recording. Accompanying the release, a comprehensive art historical text knits together the story about the creation and context of the experimental sound works. The release is made in collaboration with SMK National Gallery of Denmark, Museum Jorn, and with the support and invaluable help of the heirs of the artists. "This isn't music; it is painters making noise paintings" --Richard Winther "One ought to be able to make a line that is free of the canvas, standing straight in the air . . . one ought to be able to do that with sounds" --Gunnar Aagaard Andersen
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LP
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IDL 005LP
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2018 release. This release presents a selection of sound experiments made by Danish tape amateurs during the period of 1959-1976. The pieces included on the record are all contributions, which have been submitted to Danish tape amateur contests, but none of the works have been released before. The compilation represents a fragment of a previously overlooked and forgotten piece of Danish sound and music history, where people experimented with the tape recorder in their spare time, creating sound collages and electronic music. Features Jesper Hendze, Mads-Erik Michaelsen, Ole Steen Petersen, Benny Jensen, Kaj Ellermann Christensen, Carsten Elbro, Arne Juul Jacobsen, Peter Henriksen & Carsten Elbro, Anders Møller, Poul Otto Udsen, Holger Sindbæk, and Arne Juul Jacobsen. Includes extensive essay by composer Jonas Olesen.
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LP
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IDL 015LP
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2019 release. Reissue, originally released in 1987. Bent Lorentzen is widely considered one of the key figures and pioneers of early Danish electronic music and he was one of a few classically trained composers seeking out the possibilities of the new technology in the 1960s. Lorentzen composed a fairly large number of electronic works, -- mainly in the '60s and '70s. Furthermore, he developed a significant educational practice in and around electronic music, conducted workshops, taught at courses, and published articles in both national and international journals, while also producing several educational records on electronic music. Electronic Music was originally released in 1987 as a retrospective album, collecting three of Bent Lorentzen's electronic works from the '70s. The three works clearly demonstrate Lorentzen's close familiarity with his equipment and his great technical proficiency regarding the creation and manipulation of all sorts of electronic and recorded acoustic sounds -- typically in the form of speed changes, reversed sounds, and reverb and filter effects. The music is often quite dramatic with distinct narratives and multiple dynamic layers of sound, but still with a clear sense of disposition and restraint, possibly stemming from Lorentzen's experience with classical instrumentation, and orchestration. "The Bottomless Pit" (originally Afgrundens brønd) on side A was composed as the musical score for a ballet by the Norwegian dance company Høvik Ballett, commissioned by NOMUS (Nordic Music Commitee) and staged at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in Oslo during the Nordic Music Days festival in 1972. The piece was originally composed for four channels, but mixed down to stereo for the 1987 release. Side B's "Visions" (originally Visione) and "Cloud-Drift" (originally NUBES) were also both composed as four-channel works. The back of the original LP-sleeve contains small prints of graphic notations accompanying the two compositions, here reproduced in enlarged versions for better readability. The music on the record has been carefully remastered for this reissue. "The Bottomless Pit" and "Visions" are new stereo mixes made from four-channel versions obtained from Gunner Møller Pedersen's private archive. These versions had much more clarity, detail, and depth than other masters we were able to find. The mix from four channels to stereo has been done with careful regard to how the stereo versions appear on the original record. "Cloud-Drift" was not to be found in its four-channel version, but comes from the master tape for the 1987 release from OH Musik / Point Records. This piece appears a bit rougher and with less detail in the higher frequencies, but it is the exact same version, as the one on the original release from 1987.
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2LP
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IDL 017LP
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2020 release. Two of Henning Christiansen's tape works from the 1980s, Peter der Große op. 174 (1986) and Gudbrandsdal op. 178 (1987), are now released for the first time by the Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology. Originally composed for different contexts -- "Peter der Große" as the score for a German radio feature and "Gudbrandsdal" for a performance in collaboration with Joseph Beuys and later Bjørn Nørgaard -- the two works stand out in Christansen's extensive and many-faceted oeuvre by employing almost entirely electronic sounds. "Peter der Große" involves electronic instruments like synthesizer and a crackle box, while "Gudbrandsdal" employs a more minimal approach and aesthetics through the heavy use of echo effects and manipulation of the tape speed. Both of the tape works carry a heavy atmospheric tone and are set in a largely electronic sound world. Two absolutely enthralling and immersive pieces of tape music, now available for the first time.
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2LP
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IDL 001LP
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2017 release. Institute For Danish Sound Archaeology present a reissue that documents Knud Viktor's only two releases on record -- Images and Ambiances -- both released in 1972 on the French label L'Oiseau Musicien. These records have long been out of print and are hereby made available again, gathering the two separate albums on this double-release. The utmost care has gone into creating a reproduction that is as faithful as possible to the original works. These have been transferred from the original analog master tapes and have not been remastered to any other extent than to prepare them for the vinyl reproduction. Thus, Knud Viktor's pieces appear with the same degree of tape hiss, hum, and other "artifacts" related to his aesthetics, compositional process, and tools. Knud Viktor (1924-2013, born in Copenhagen) was a Danish recordist and sound artist. Viktor was a pioneer of phonography and sound ecology. Formerly a painter but also a photographer and a film maker, Viktor wanted to picture the landscape by capturing the impact of the intense light and sounds upon animals. He spent most of his life trying to capture the tiny sound of animals and the sound of erosion on the rocks of Régalon (Lubéron, France) where he lived for almost 40 years. Viktor considered the rural landscape of Lubéron as an open territory with its own idiosyncratic acoustic signature. Viktor's methodology of work involved long periods of deep listening before placing his microphones at the right point of ear. Knud on his process: "I don't pretend to make music, even if what I hear in nature is produced by forces that seek harmony. I see what I do as a continuation of the painting, surveying sounds that organizes sonic intensities most unattendedly, contrastingly, modulated, and dissonant. I try to create an enhanced sensation via the sounds, the air, the light, the wind, the rain, the rocks, the vegetation, the smells of Lubéron." Transfer from analog master tapes by Jean C. Roché.
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7"
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IDL 012EP
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"Le Petit Duc" (The Little Scops Owl) is a sound work by Danish artist Knud Viktor, made between 1978 and 1983. Viktor was classically trained as a painter at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the 1950s. In 1961 he moved to France to live and work, but was overwhelmed by the sounds of the wildlife in Provence, and instead of painting began listening to and recording his surroundings. With these recordings, he composed what he called sound images -- images sonores -- and throughout the rest of his career, sound was his main medium. "Le Petit Duc" is primarily composed of recordings Viktor made of an owl's nest in the spring and summer of 1978. Narrated by Viktor himself and put together from recordings throughout a whole nesting season, "Le Petit Duc" tells the story of an owl family. The piece speaks to children and adults alike. Knud Viktor originally made the piece to fit on a 7" record, but it has not been released before. The booklet includes Danish and English translations of Knud Viktor's original spoken text in French, and it is illustrated with a series of Viktor's own photographs of the owls. The download includes a dubbed version in Danish by Mei Bao.
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LP
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IDL 011LP
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2019 release. The lost masterpiece Les Éphémères by the self-labeled "sound painter" Knud Viktor (1924-2013). First ever release, 40 years after it was conceived. Viktor's pioneering work -- his "Images Sonores" -- are composed of field recordings of insects, animals, and his surroundings. A finished master tape and even a complete cover layout for Les Éphémères was found in Viktor's archives after he passed away in 2013. The phenomenal piece was originally commissioned by the French radio station France Musique in 1977. The twenty short "sound images" of Les Éphémères were originally broadcast as vignettes in-between other radio programs. From the middle of the 1970s Viktor began composing almost exclusively for four channels. He invented his own intuitive quadraphonic mixer -- the Tetramix -- to realize his spatial visions for his Image VI -- The Lubéron Symphony, and from then on worked with quadraphonic sound, thus making the release of his works difficult. Les Éphémères is close in time and also holds close ties to The Lubéron Symphony, which Viktor considered his magnum opus. Perhaps most strikingly is the shift in the way he uses the recordings of insects, birds and animals in both The Lubéron Symphony and Les Éphémères: Often untreated and clearly recognizable, the field recordings leave the inherent melody and rhythm of the animal sounds to sing for themselves, layering recordings to create simple and elegant sound images. In two of the twenty pieces Viktor's own voice blends with the animals, as he recites two poems. One about the singing vineyard populated by musical crickets, the other painting an autumn picture with wine bubbling in the barrels as we hear the wine flies humming. Viktor's work emanates with a tremendous love and fascination with his companion species and the landscape and geology that surrounded him. His works are devoted to depicting the life on the mountain where he lived for fifty years. Hearing how the ecology of the landscape changed as commercial farming and pesticides took effect, a larger perspective in his work became clear to him: "As it turns out, my work has actually set many things in motion; it touches upon something universal that I feel I have a duty to convey to others. A duty that I feel as a citizen of the earth. Not as a human citizen, but as a citizen of the earth. It may sound pretentious, but this is a question of generations to come."
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2LP
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IDL 008LP
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2018 release. Reissue, originally released in 1987. This release presents a major electronic work by the Danish composer Per Nørgård (b. 1932). The music was originally issued in 1987 on a double cassette tape by Fønix Musik. Instruments: Jupiter 8 Synthesizer, BX-800 8 channel stereo mixer, Roland MC-500, Hindsberg grand piano.
Here follows Per Nørgård's own notes about the work (1985): "Expanding Space (1985): Electronic music in three parts, for synthesizer (Roland Jupiter 8), piano and field recordings. These electronic pieces touches the meditative element of music, but more in a non-rhythmic (or free rhythmic) than a pulsating, minimalistic way. The music is often 'streaming' and the association to water is obvious, especially in Najads. Sometimes a sound recording of water (from Santa Cruz by the Pacific Ocean) is integrated, but most of the time different kinds of 'water music' and 'water sounds' are composed and recorded by me, via different electronic and acoustic instruments in my own studio. The idea is a music that could give a meditative experience, but also a music that could be used as 'ambient' or 'background music', without the disturbing elements -- like in muzak and elevator music -- of small discreet themes calling for your attention, but doing nothing with it..."
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LP
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IDL 006LP
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Restocked, last copies. The Institute for Danish Sound Archeology and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde, Denmark present a reissue of the most enigmatic and rare of Danish artist and composer Henning Christiansen's albums Satie I Høj Sø. Originally released in 1977, the album collects five central works from Christiansen's neo-romantic period in the 1970s. This completely overlooked and virtually unheard period in Henning Christiansen's oeuvre contains perhaps his most fascinating and beautiful works. For ten years, from 1969-79, Christiansen turned his back to the art scene and made a very unorthodox artistic decision: To leave behind "art for arts sake", fluxus, and the concretist art music, that he had invented in the 1960s. Instead he created a music that was a positive vision for the future. A music that would make it "sing" inside the listeners -- and by changing them would change the world. A convinced communist, Christiansen created wonderful joyous waltzes and dancing melodies that set to bring about a revolution -- both an inner and an outer revolution -- by believing in the good in the world and by having hope for a bright future. Now, with the re-release of Satie I Høj Sø the music can make it sing inside us again. "Art should be such, that the People believe in themselves" --Henning Christiansen, journal entry, 1971. Carefully remastered from the original master tapes; 180 gram vinyl; High gloss cover; Henning Christiansen's own program notes for the music in both Danish and English -- 16-page booklet with never-before-seen pictures and a new in-depth article about Christiansen's works from the 1970s in Danish and English.
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