R. Murray Schafer, David Mott And The New Music Co-Op - Music As Transformation -1983- (Cassette, Musicworks 25), Canada

 

 

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

Kindly donated by Matthew 

Get it HERE

Angst - De Witte Villa -1980's- (Cassette, Geef Appel Neem Chocolade/Kubus Kassettes), Belgium

Angst was a project by Flemish writer, poet and musician Erik Vloeberghs (in this case in collaboration with Herbert Alkali). He also did projects such as The Firing-Squad, Kwajongens In Bloei and The Parts. Vloeberghs was closely related to the Antwerp based industrial and interdisciplinary art group Club Moral. Frequently he contributed to their art-zine/fanzine called Force Mental. His musical subjects mostly dealt with excess in all kind of forms adapted into musical concepts. The whole Club Moral sphere is known to have explored the extremes of human nature and deviant human behaviour within society, both in cathartic experience and conceptualization, a bit in a similar way to what industrial and power electronics groups like Whitehouse, Ramleh or Consumer Electronics did in England. Just somewhat less uniformic in sound (noise) with more influences from literary poetry and visual arts including performative aspects and multimedia elements.

De Witte Villa (The White Villa) is a cassette that came out both in Belgium and Holland,  respectively on the Belgian Geef Appel Neem Chocolade and Dutch Kubus Kassettes cassette labels. It takes a villa as its core reference, perhaps because the music was played at a villa during an intensive stayover (since the last field recorded track is called 'In The Kitchen of The White Villa'), perhaps because Vloeberghs used it as an aristocratic concept as another point of reference in the light of deviance and excess of society in let's say a Marquis De Sade type of setting. In any case, the music starts with Italian, maybe Napolitan song, mixed through distorted radio noise. Next up is a sort of minimal home-taping Marxist 'introduction to capitalism' explaining how human production powers lead to different classes in society and that capitalist fatalism causes tragedy in the face of nature as well as alienation of the self. The tape continuously thrives upon primitive field recordings with an industrial sound approach of eeriness and noise.

Some of the music is reminiscent of Italian industrial projects like the hyper-obscure work by Stefano Tamburini or the industrial group Tasaday. The field recording aspect of home-taping taking place as an integrated part of daily life also reminds me of music primitivists like the Gefährliche Klons I posted before on the blog. De Witte Villa is another rarity of the Belgian home-taping scene that didn't fear to sonically self-investigate and integrate darker subject matters into the recordings.

This tape was kindly donated by the Y Create archive

Get it HERE