Küpper joy overfloweth (musique de bouche et électro-poésie ) / DG AG boxed (unclever) / beak music

 

Spied via this new, sorta-tempting-yet-not box set of the Deutsche Grammophon Avant Garde series 

As discussed here by Kyle Gann and Phil Freeman at the latter's Substack

Said box set economically reconstituted by cheapskate me here (if you've got a spare 17 hours)

Well, look I already have a few on vinyl!

And much of it, I don't really want, as it's that sort of orchestral but atonal 'n' anguished second-half 20th Century composition...

But the Léo Küpper , now that I would love to have in its original analogue form. 

My first DG AG was actually one of my first musique concrete / avant-electronic vinyl purchases - just $4 from a street market in New York, near the end of the '90s. 

Those were the days! When you could pick up bargains in this area, before Discogs ruined it but also before there was that much demand for the less-well known names 

The Luigi Nono side is one of my faves by him.

The Roland Kayn side is good too - but generally I find that I can never get very far with his epic abstract dronescapes, they are too granular (similar response to Eliane Radigue), too extended (lots of double and triple albums.... and there was a 14 hour long reissue/first-time issue of  just one vaaaaaast single work by Kayn (reviewed here by Geeta Dayal)

I also have this DG AG 

And possibly another in the series - I'm not sure. 

Love the design.  

Probably I'd covet more the original era vinyl box set compendiums (there were several I think), as opposed to this new 21 CD (fucksake!) job.

But not really... 

These box sets never work out as useable collations of music. 

See, I have INA-GRM CD boxes of Bernard Parmegiani and Francois Bayle, but after the initial forced-march run-through of the entire contents in one gigantic go.... somehow it's never seemed tempting to reenter, it's never really felt like an opportune moment for the deep dive.  

(Similar appetite loss induced by the Luc Ferrari and Pauline Oliveros boxes, which I have in non-solid form)

With Parmegiani and Bayle especially  the sheer stupendous brilliance and intensely micro-detailed density is paradoxically off-putting. Like how could I possibly take in, absorb, digest, the immense concentration of  work that went into these works? I'd need some kind of perceptual or cognitive upgrade of massive proportions.

I'd rather have the albums contained within these boxes separately, in their individual vinyl husks.   More digestible, and more tangible, somehow.  

Back to the Küppertronica 

"Belgian composer and theoretician, born April 16, 1935 in Nidrum. He worked with Henri Pousseur at the first electronic music studio in Belgium, Apelac (1959-62), and is founder and director of the "Studio de Recherches et de Structurations Electroniques Auditives" in Brussels (1967). He created Sound Domes in Roma, Linz, Venezia and Avignon (1977-87). In thirty years, he composed around 35 pieces of electronic music, vocal and instrumental music, midi and computer music and wrote about his own research in the field of phonetic and vocal music, musical machines and psycho-acoustics (space perception and diffusion)." 

'

Bit of beak music here

"Of the six works presented on this CD, five involve the human voice. Sung by Barbara Zanichelli, Anna Maria Kieffer, and Nicholas Isherwood, their microphone recordings were integrated into Kupper's digital computer sessions - hence the title Digital Voices. The remaining work is for the santur.

All the songs on this recording are abstract, which allows both composer and singer a certain artistic liberty. Kupper's stated goal in this recording of digital songs is "to encourage the internationalization of spirituality through a musical language that accepts both sung and instrumental world sonorities that can be mixed with electronic sounds derived from the voices of the singers."

More Beak Music - birdsong as "orchestral accompaniment"