Here's another Musicworks
cassette compilation. Musicworks was a journal that focused on Canadian avant-garde music as well as music recorded during music meetings in Canada by foreign musicians.
It was founded by Andrew Timar and John Oswald in Toronto. Numerous cassettes were released and accompanied by background information and different articles on music.
This volume includes:
France based American composer Rhys Chatham known for his orchestral works for electric guitars and compositions with guitar, trumpet, keyboards and electronics. He studied under electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick and minimalist icon La Monte Young and was a member of Young's group, The Theater of Eternal Music, during the early seventies. Chatham also played with Tony Conrad in an early version of Conrad's group, The Dream Syndicate.
Composer, ethno-musicologist and percussionist Don Wherry who was also part of the improv outfit The Black Auks. Didgeridoo player, flutist and sound sculpture creator Susan Rawcliffe. Composer, performer, video artist, sound poet, writer and instrument maker Warren Burt and electroacoustic composer Susan Frykberg from New Zealand.
More info on the different pieces in the included liner notes.
Here we have another cassette that was released by the Canadian magazine Musicworks that focused on Canadian avant-garde music since the late 70's. Musicworks was founded by Andrew Timar and John Oswald in Toronto. They released dozens of cassettes that
accompanied the Musicworks magazine that published on the relation between science, technology, ecology, sonic environments and music.
Music As Transformation was assembled by composer and sound artist Tina Pearson in 1983. It features edits and excerpts by different Canadian composers involved with experimental music, field-recordings, abstract composition and also contains sequences of spoken discourses. Amongst some of the composers that are present are R. Murray Schafer, known for his concept of acoustic ecology, David Mott, a baritone saxophone player and composer from Toronto and Gordon Monahan, a Canadian pianist, visual and sound artist.
The compilation creates its own unfolding narrative blending natural field-recorded sounds with avant-garde composition within an existential or reflective framework based on the experience of environments and life-cycles. It takes the listener on a subtle transformative trip through sounds of folk traditions, water, rain, fire and other ecological elements weaving in and out of those sound-spaces constantly going back and forth from improvisation and electro-acoustic music into the dark yet sunbursting universe.
A beautifully assembled piece that can't be titled anything else but Music As Transformation. It reminds me a bit of the music by Darren Copeland that was published on the blog some time ago. Even though the extensive tracklist is available, the cassette has been unindexed to maintain its natural flow.
Music As Transformation - The hypnotic focussing of the word mandala
Living It Out In The Dead Air-Space was the magnum opus cassette album release by the Ontario based composer, sound-artist and electronic music producer Darren Copeland. The music was realized over the course of half a year during 1987 and 1988 together with a larger group of Canadian experimental musicians: Ron McFarlan (also to be found on the blog under his project Dust That Collects), David Edwards, John Marriott, Michel Flock and Lhuke Shier.
The pieces create a conceptually hollistic space that consists of dark ambient electronic soundscapes, spoken word, field-recordings and ethno-tribal influences. It carries different properties that on the one hand seem to carefully invoke the void of space (a dead end space) with its dark and silent chaos of endless probabilities and on the other hand it displays human consciousness and rational forms of understanding that are defying the dead end space from an existential point of view. The sounds of the dark untamable and alienating universe have an eternal presence in the natural and urban environment on earth. Alienation and the presence of the unknown are of great influence on life existence.
Living It Out In The Dead Air-Space is another beautiful work of Canadian experimental music that is perfect for a deeper listening experience. Simultaneously it works well as an invocation for different existentialist questions on a scientific, natural or spiritual level.
Through the further development of technology in later decades sound explorations from scientific standpoints have obviously become endless and have elaborated into many realms. Yet on this recording we can experience the scientific exploration as a subject of the music rather than that scientific approaches are being used to create the music.
Considering the year of the release, ofcourse Mr. 'Star Wars-program' and buffoon-president Ronnie Raygun is depicted on the cassette cover, but I suppose we could all think of other people suitable for the cover in today's world.
The following information has been
extracted from the Alternative Toronto website and the BlackDotMuseum blog and
partially recombined:
The C.I.A. Tape was recorded live at
the Fallout Shelter and Ildiko's, and features poetry and musical performances
by Dick Lucas (of Subhumans), Mecca Normal, Nick Toczek, Rhythm Activism
and Mourning Sickness.
The Fallout Shelter recordings are the Toronto postscript to the Black
Wedge tour on September 5, 1987.
The Fallout Shelter was a "nuclear free" performance space and coffee
house run by the peace organization A.C.T. for Disarmament on Harbord Street.
The Black Wedge was a tour of activist resistance culture organized by Jean
Smith of the band Mecca Normal, which set out to "spread the word of how
to combine poetry, music and politics and have a fun time doing it.” As Smith
comments about the Black Wedge tour in his essay "Take Something You Care
About and Make It Your Life":
“One step easier than punk! The Black Wedge is out to spread the word of how to
combine poetry, music and politics and have a fun time doing it. Hardcore poems
and shredding guitars, radical voices crushing sexism, militarism, poverty and
conformity. The Black Wedge wants to set wild hearts and imaginations free, to
release a riot of emotion–opening up a new arena for activist resistance
culture.”
At the beginning of 1986, Mecca Normal released their first LP on their own
label, Smarten Up! Records. Soon thereafter, they flew to Montreal and hooked
up with Rhythm Activism; another music duo dealing with social
issues with a strong anti-authoritarian perspective. While the four stood around in
the basement of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation building waiting to go live on air from coast to coast, they listened in on the segment prior to their timeslot–England’s Red Wedge was being featured. The Red Wedge was formed in the late 80's to support
the Labour Party, they presented political ideas within a musical
context and showcased musicians that encouraged people to vote Labour. The Black
Wedge however, that came into existence that same night, would encourage people to reclaim
their voices, to speak out against oppression rather than rely on electoral
politics as a means to solve social problems. Answers were looked for elsewhere than existing politics and against the establishment.
During the Black Wedge tour, through their lyrics or in between songs, the bands covered topics like sexism, disenfranchised citizens, poverty as well as other social issues which can be heard throughout the various songs of The C.I.A. Tape. A song like “Are you hungry
Joe?” for example, includes a dialogue between Joe and someone that stands between him
and the bag of groceries at a food bank, forcing Joe to argue why he needs food...
All tracks on The C.I.A. Tape were recorded live in Toronto. The tape was eventually published
by Bluurg Tapes with the editing done in June '88 at T.A.S.C. Master Studios,
Trinity & All Saint's College, in Leeds England.
"This tape is dedicated to all exceptionally oppressed people, but
particularly to those whose entire lifestyle is being destroyed... Romany,
Amerindian, Aborigine, and all other proud tribal people whose culture won't
readily bow down before the all-consuming gods of western 'civilization,'
social 'progress' and cash-culture.”
The original information for both Jean Smith’s essay and The C.I.A. Tape information
can be retrieved from: https://www.alternativetoronto.ca/archive/items/show/500 https://blackdotmuseum.wordpress.com/the-black-wedge-1986/
- Juan Vacas
This blogpost is a collaborative effort. Many thanks to: Juan Vacas (curation and assembling of text),Jon "Dietsociety" Kruithof and acab_in_1985 (SLSK) (providing rips and doing archival work). Editor: Bence.
Here we have a compilation cassette that was released by Canadian magazine Musicworks that focuses on contemporary avant-garde music since the late 70's and is still active to this day. They released dozens of cassettes that accompanied the magazine thoughout the decades.
Musicworks 46 starts with a piece of synthesizer played live by Henry Kucharzyk. The piece is composed by pioneering Canadian female electronic music composer Ann Southam. Since the early 70's she has been involved with electro-acoustic composition in combination with dance and choreography. Her album Sky Sails from 1973 which she made in collaboration with Seán Ó Huigín is a highly sought after record of electronic composition and modern composed collage. It's regarded as one of the more important recordings of Canadian experimental electronic music of the 70's.
The second part of the A-side continues with installation soundworks that were given the name "Very Nervous System". It's a multimedia installation focusing on bodily movements and sound recorded by Canadian artist David Rokeby. There is a sense of artificial interpretation of organic and natural sounds. Those themes are explored in pieces as Waterworks or Gamelaraga. That conceptual sonic exploration of pseudo-natural themes is also used by Fast Forward, a tribal rhythmic project by the American percussionist Paul Wilson, who in this case mostly uses a Trinidadian steel drum in different rhythmic manners.
The compilation ends with a contemporary composed jazz piece composed by Canadian violinist Malcolm Goldstein dedicated to the South African township of Soweto. The piece titled Soweto Stomp was written in 1985 to commemorate the Soweto uprising in 1976 and is dedicated to the black people of South Africa in their struggle for freedom and equality.
This is an interesting sound-poetry record I found in Italy not too long ago. It came out on the wonderful
3ViTrePAIR label that was founded by Enzo Minarelli, an Italian artist and sound-poet that played a protagonist role in gathering sound-poetry artists on different compilations and hosting poetry festivals during the 80's. He created compilation series around his concept of Polipoesia, that was based upon a manifest on poetry he created. The series were each dedicated to the poetry exchange between different countries. Here we have the compilation that focused on sound poetry from Canada and Italy.
The Canadian poets on the compilation are all from Quebec so the main language used here is French, hence the references to Antonin Artaud the French dramatist and subversive theatre director who also did strange recordings on radio that could be seen as sound poetry to a certain extent. In the liner notes written by Minarelli references are also made to French poets like Henri Chopin and Bernard Heidsieck. The Canadian representatives on this compilation are Pierre-André Arcand, Jean-Claude Gagnon, Alain-Martin Richard, Richard Martel and Gilles Arteau. The poets from Italy are aside from Minarelli himself Gian Paolo Roffi, Corrado Cicciarelli, Massimo Mori and Luigi Pasotelli. Sound poetry has always been important in Italy and this series is another strong example.
The music ranges from sound experiments to casiotone rhythm minimalism to the use of mouth harps, voice manipulation and more. It gives a mail-art music feeling from back in those days that can be experienced on compilation series like the VEC Audio Exchange for example. Here are some contextual words from the liner notes:
It seems, today, after a great deal of sound poetry is touching the limits of the extremest noise, denying value to the word, almost atomized, if not disapeared because it has been reduced to non-significant sound, the thread of the word is taken up again, proposing it in its natural shape. [sic.] Such a return to and into the word can also be explained as a return to a more immediate communication, to a listening pleasure, keeping in the right side the needs of the audience in a theatre or in front of a TV. The authors herewith included prove and point out how the sound experimentation is no longer synonym of ambiguity of communication, but is still possible practising sound experimentation with intelligent grace and refined, oral taste. In a word, more harmony, less disharmony. So, sound poetry is, or can be for those who want to understand, the next step of certain written poetry, at least the right entry door to continue into the oral a process of invention that in the written field it's no longer original and it is still into the most stagnant impasse. - Enzo Minarelli
Dust That Collects was an explorative electronic sound project by Canadian artist Ron McFarlan. McFarlan had been involved in the home-taping culture of the 80's and started his project Dust That Collects around 1990 when opening for Illusion of Safety at the Music Gallery in Toronto. A brief autobiographical summary of McFarlan's musical history can be found over at Don Campau's Living Archive.
Black Water Delirium is a nice cassette bringing together four pieces of post-industrial soundscapes of noise, mechanical sound manipulation, field recordings and drone. You can hear almost ambient psycho-acoustic atmospheres that are indeed somewhat reminiscent of Illusion of Safety, or maybe even something of the Hafler Trio, Empirical Sleeping Consort or Zoviet France (many examples obviously exist). The last 22-minute track Black Water Delirium is a nice highlight where some sort of tenniscourt sounds are being manipulated into dark aquatic and swirling depths that ultimately culminate into their own sonic deconstruction.
The sound fidelity and certain parts of the tape are still very much rooted in the cassette medium and culture. Later this type of dark ambient soundscape music transitioned almost in its entirety to CD and became very inherently clean in production, even if the music was noise. This was the first self-released cassette by Dust That Collects, maybe some other tapes will surface with the time.
PS:
We still have major issues with Zippyshare as an external file-hosting server since it is being blocked in many different countries. You can bypass it by using proxy servers though, which is what you should do. But still, where are we migrating to with the files? Any suggestions?
Broken Paws was a solo project of one Richard Reynols from Calgary, Canada. On this only self-titled cassette he plays a variety of different instruments in combination with electronic drum computers and synthesizers, creating over an hour long cassette full of minimal synth and experimental home-taping tracks.
I guess in a way some tracks carry a similar zeitgeist of other minimal synth artists from Canada in the eighties like Ohama, Ceramic Hello, or Lou Champagne System. Still I think that Broken Paws has a much stronger experimental DIY approach to it, not afraid to move far away from the common sounds of the overly known corporate analog gear doing a new wave pop-song (although some tracks come close).
There is a lot more insane manipulation, cinematic sound improvisation and the creative blend of instruments in the form of analog synthesizers with a clarinet or a music box. In a way atmospherically it stands much closer to the tape-album of Canadian artist Edie Steiner but it also has a feeling of stuff like Unovidual, Á Suivre or Brobat Enema.
Anyway, it's still quite a good and varied release with some nice minimal synth, new wave and home-taping experiments. Also it has a lovely art work. The cassette has been digitized before as part of the Noise-Arch Archive, but the first ten minutes of that particular tape were damaged and absent, so hereby I can present it in its entirety!
