replacing Hardly Baked whose feed is broken for reasons unknown. Original Hardly Baked + archive are here http://hardlybaked.blogspot.com/
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good" - Eno
Well there was I, thinking I'd heard pretty much all of the mouth music out-thereness worth hearing - and then I stumbled, in a second-hand record shop in the East Village, yards from where we used to live, on an artist I'd never ever come across before: Carles Santos. A real polymath, it appears. But this particular album Voice Tracks, from 1980, contains a "Starsailor"-level voicescape titled "Autoretrat".
Now I'm kicking myself I didn't pick up the LP. It wasn't even insanely priced.
It can be found at YouTube and on the streamers.
Another fab repository of mouth music is 1989's Five Voices - an abstract-vocalese quintet involving vaguely recognised names like Ann Homler, Shelley Hirsch and David Moss as well as Santos.
This next one ultra-sibilant and edging into avant-asmr territory
This next one is madcap - ludic yet alarming
Bit of recitative amid the crone babble here
Voice-only stuff crops up again in his variegated output
Don't I feel an oaf for only having just heard this amazing
lingual freakout of psychedelia-glossolalia?
Kind of wish there was no guitar in it at all (there's only the odd wisp and curlicue-of-flame admittedly).... that it was just voicescape (or rather voice-vortex )
As incantatory multitracked delay + echo stimmung-maelstroms go, it's sort of the missing link between Tim Buckley's "Starsailor" and this Roy Harper piece when it really takes off...
Or this Harper eternal classic when the vocals really start multitracking into a billowing tapestry around 8.41
Also a bit Animal Collective in their most lights-out tribally freakout mode...
Also Gibbytronix.
What other things in the psych / prog / Krautrock zone does "Truth And Probability (A Lexicon Of Self Knowledge)" (shit title though innit) resemble?
Amazing to think that Achim Reichel, who was A.R & Machines,
was previously the main force in The Rattles, who did this ridiculously exciting nifty-groover with a necromantic theme.
Fantastic guitar but a completely different mode to the use of guitar in A.R. & the Machines
"The Witch" also earns some vocal-extremism points for Edna Béjarano's flamethrower singing and that hideous cackling in the background of the chorus.
Dreams of madness : for choir with electronic manipulation (1991)
Choir: members of the Omroepkoor
Conductor: Tera de Marez Oyens
The composition is based on the music which was written for the radiophonic play "Lier" (text: Gerrit Pleiter), commissioned by the KRO Broadcasting Company. The voices are manipulated electronically, to give an illustration of the mad dreams of the farmer Lier (a free variation of King Lear), who suffers from the sound of many voices in his head.
Tera de Marez Oyens was a Dutch composer. She graduated from the Amsterdam Conservatory in 1953, where she studied piano with Jan Odé. After graduation she studied composition and orchestration privately for two years with Henkemans. Her earliest compositions included religious works, such as choral songs and psalm settings. Raising her four children stimulated her to write educational works and children's operas, such as Partita for David (1960) and Adventures in Music (1970), both for school orchestras, and the opera Van de vos Reynaerde (1966). She was firmly convinced that acquainting children at an early age with contemporary music would develop their appreciation for this type of music. In 1978 she wrote a manual for school teachers, Werken met moderne klanken, a progressive series of short vocal or instrumental, mainly graphically notated, études. Her own workshops on contemporary music, which she continued to present throughout her career, proved her to be a talented teacher. In the 1960s she became interested in electronic music and studied with Gottfried M. Koenig at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht. Many of her works show that she was often inspired by text. She also explored the sounds of words, stripped of meaning. In the choral work Bist du bist II (1973), which uses both graphic and exact notation, only four German words are heard in dramatic, emotional eruptions: 'da', 'der', 'du' and 'bist'. A number of later compositions, such as Litany of the Victims of War (1985) and Sinfonia testimonial (1987), the latter based on texts by the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman and the Mexican Rosario Castellanos, express her deep concern with human suffering. She also composed several large-scale dramatic works to texts by her second husband, the political scientist and philosopher Menachem Arnoni, including an oratorio, The Odyssey of Mr Good-Evil (1981). In most of her music the texture is spare. Short rapid motifs are repeated in ascending or descending direction in assymetrical patterns. This style effectively highlights the texts in Vignettes (1986), seven short haiku-like poems she wrote herself and set for soprano, flute, percussion and piano. From the early 1980s until her death she was involved in the women's movement in music, often representing Dutch women composers at international congresses. She also performed her own works for piano, and conducted amateur and professional choirs and orchestras on an incidental basis. Throughout her life she lectured internationally on music education, group improvisation and the role of women in music, and wrote articles on these subjects. From 1978 to 1988 she taught at the Zwolle Conservatory. She was a prolific composer with an output of over 200 works. Many of her compositions were commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Culture and various broadcasting networks. In 1995 she was commissioned to write Unison for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. A few months before her death she married Marten Toonder, a renown Dutch writer and cartoonist.
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 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.
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"
