3 Vi Tre, edizioni di polipoesia – issue #3

The 3rd issue of 3 Vi Tre edizioni di polipoesia was dedicated to US sound poets, two of them already featured in Charles Amirkhanian’s 10+2: 12 American Text Sound Pieces on Arch Records in 1974, e.g.: Amirkhanian himself and Beth Anderson.

♫ US poet Ernest Robson devised an intuitive system of graphic notation for his poems in which letters’ height, length and position under or above the line indicate loudness, length and pitch. 17 Noises in Testicles of an Old Giant is his most famous poem. Buddhist and astrologer Bliem Kern delivers a mysterious ethnic and shamanist song based on onomatopeia and small percussion. Beth Anderson‘s I Wish I Was Single Again is a playful list of approximate homophonies based on the title. In Amirkhanian’s splendid, no-wave-y The Putts, drum machine and synth noise from an Eventide Harmonizer H-949 both underline rhythmic flow and vocal textures.

01 Ernest Robson  – 17 Noises in Testicles of an Old Giant (1:46)
02 Bliem Kern – Ke Kee Kee Alahboo (2:10)
03 Beth Anderson – I Wish I Was Single Again (1:15)
04 Charles Amirkhanian – The Putts (5:18)

Total time 10:28
7inch record released by Edizioni Di Polipoesia, Alatri, Italia, 1983

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3 Vi Tre, edizioni di polipoesia – issue #2

Enzo Minarelli‘s Edition of polipoesia and the 3 Vi Tre seven inch records series were obviously aimed at raising the profile of Italian sound poetry on the international scene dominated in the early 1980s by French and US poets – Swedes were also incredibly creative around the Fylkingen venue. This second issue of 3 Vi Tre clearly put Italy on the map with a pair of provocative sound experiments where poetry is to be found amid highly unusual sounds rather than the expected declamation.

♫ Giovanni Fontana‘s Poema Larsen, or Larsen Poem, is a study for tiny glottal sounds, feedback and larsen. In this experimental piece, the artist confronts fragile human utterances with electricity sounds represented by larsen noises, thus creating a feeling of unease and danger from the juxtaposition. Larsen sounds also deliciously nod towards Steve Reich’s Pendulum Music. Examining speech beyond significance, Enzo Minarelli‘s own contribution is a brilliant tape collage of slowed-down vocals, found sounds and unidentified noises. In this bleak, claustrophobic soundscape, extremely slowed down vocals become mere disembodied traces of human speech, magnifying elementary tonemes, the basic constituents of phonemes. The liner notes encourage the listener to experiment with 45 and 33rpm speeds, so the download link offers both. Each version  has its own merits and some sounds, like speech or bell sounds in the background, are only apparent or distinguishable in one version.

Giovanni Fontana
01 Poema Larsen (5:48)
Enzo Minarelli
02 Neotonemi per campane e fruscii (45rpm speed) (6:44)
03 Neotonemi per campane e fruscii (33rpm speed) (9:00)

Total time 21:28
7inch record released by Edizioni Di Polipoesia, Alatri, Italia, 1983

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3 Vi Tre, edizioni di polipoesia – issue #1

Created by Italian sound poet Enzo Minarelli, born 1951, the concept of Polypoetry (polipoesia) encompasses various forms of sound poetry live performance, from basic poetry reading to elaborated multi-track tape collage to intermedia events (see the official 3 Vi Tre website for more info). In the late 1970s, Minarelli himself mixed poetry readings with video or dancers during multimedia installations and performances he called videopoems. The interest in sound poetry had been reignited in Italy in 1982 with two legendary releases: the Polyphonix n°1 LP on Cramps records, a compilation of international sound poets documenting the festival of the same name ; and the Voooxing Poooetre compilation LP, edited by Minarelli. When he launched the 3 Vi Tre seven inch single series in 1983, Minarelli’s personal tastes brought him closer to Charles Amirkhanian’s 10+2: 12 American Text Sound Pieces on Arch Records (1974), than John Giorno’s Poetry Systems records (1972) – that is, sound poetry exploring sound effects, loops or musique concrète sounds.

♫ 3 Vi Tre‘s inaugural issue offers vocal and tape manipulations verging on pure musique concrète in the case of Henri Chopin‘s Chercher, recorded 1975, a remarkable noise study ala Pierre Schaeffer/Pierre Henry, complete with larsen and distortion, microphone rubbed on all kind of materials, and minimal, hushed vocal interventions. Arrigo Lora-Totino‘s 1983 Rumore d’Ombra could pass for a Futurist provocation with its Intonarumori-like noises and Italian onomatopeia.

01 Henri Chopin – Chercher (7:22)
02 Arrigo Lora Totino – Rumore d’Ombra (5:42)

Total time 13:04
7inch record released by Edizioni Di Polipoesia, Alatri, Italia, 1983

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Leven Signs – Hemp Is Here

Leven Signs were a duo from London composed of Maggi Turner and Peter Karkut. Their unique release was the Hemp Is Here cassette published on Robert Cox’s label Unlikely in 1985 (on Unlikely, see here), reissued in a slightly different version on Cordelia that same year with different track order, omitted and new tracks (on Cordelia, see here). In 1986, Alan Jenkins also included a track from this album on Volume 2 of his Obscure Independent Classics series on Cordelia.

♫ Leven Signs belong to that British breed of avant-synth/new wave experimentalism including the Flying Lizards or General Strike – i.e. bands regurgitating their ethnic, ambient, new wave, avantgarde and systems musics influences into a highly creative musical hotchpotch where each song is a sonic playground crammed with musical ideas. Thanks to a choice of synth sounds emulating acoustic instruments like percussion, organ or flute, as well as Turner’s ethereal vocals, Leven Signs’ music has a timeless quality, something further exacerbated by the many Medieval touches in melody and rhythms – some tracks indeed sound like an electronic version of Officer‘s Kalenda Maya. Sequencer programming, synth playing and drum machine are brilliantly taken care of by Peter Karkut, while Maggi Turner is on vocals.

01 This Motion Will Never Stop (5:32)
02 Iraj 11 (3:15)
03 La Luna (5:24)
04 Sedes Sapientiae (3:57)
05 Drain Melsh (7:14)
06 Held In Arms (3:29)
07 Carry The Torch (3:13)
08 Morse Message (1:31)
09 This Inner Space (3:32)
10 Rumi (3:38)
11 Das Seal (4:02)

Total time 44:45
Cassette released by Unlikely, ref. URT90, UK, 1985

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Marran Gosov – Vocoding Life/Psycho-Akustik

Better known under his artist name of Marran Gosov, Bulgarian Tzvetan Marangosoff was born in 1933 in Sofia to a Bulgarian father and a German mother. He relocated to Munich in 1960 and made all his career in Germany as a film director, actor, playwright, singer and film music composer. In 2008, a retrospective of his 5 full-length films and numerous short films was held in Filmclub 813 in Cologne (from German Wiki). In 1977 and 1978, Gosov self released two LPs of his rather idiosyncratic own songs, under the unifying theme of Diletanttische Lieder, or Dilettantish Songs, or Dabbler Songs (see official website). Titled Baby Mann, the first LP was an autobiographical homage to his mother through a cycle of intense, one of a kind songs in unique arrangements. The Steine Kitzeln LP followed in 1978 and then Vocoding Life/Psycho-Akustik appeared in 1980 on Kuckuck, the legendary electronic and avantgarde label from Munich (Deuter, Hans Otte, Eberhard Schoener, etc).

Above: one of the short films Gosov produced in 1977 based on his songs.
Several of these films were uploaded to Vimeo in 2011 (look here).

♫ As opposed to his first acoustic LPs, Vocoding Life is dominated by synthesizer and Vocoder, as all vocals and guitars are channeled through the device. But while in Giorgio Moroder the Vocoder is used to create a pseudo-futuristic sheen over smooth girly vocals, in Vocoding Life the Vocoder creates a feeling of radical estrangement, or Verfremdungseffekt, ala Bertold Brecht, something even more exacerbated in the video above. These are mostly sentimental songs with weird arrangements on the verge of incredibly strange music. Due to the tone of the voice and the lyrics from previous LPs, I assume the German lyrics are either autobiographical or deal with very personal feelings and thoughts. It is even possible the entire project meditates on the state of Heimatlos and loneliness. Somewhere between spoken word and song, often semi-improvised over a basic written structure, these tracks form a coherent song cycle with extremely minimal arrangements sometimes reduced to voice and Vocoder only. Other tracks feature synth loops, rhythm from an electric organ or electric guitar, but voice and Vocoder remain prominent features.

Klar, unvollkommen bin ich. Wie kann ich anderen die Leviten singen. Auch ich bin ein von Zukunftserfahrungen gebranntes Kind, zurück-gefallen auf mich selbst und ahne schon die Gewißheit, daß am Ende nur jene Güte beweisen werden, die an nichts glauben.
[from liner notes]

01 Eifersucht (8:39)
02 Amore (3:15)
03 Lampenfieber (9:09)
04 Babymann (2:58)
05 Gitterbett (2:27)
06 Mütterlein (5:18)
07 Ferne Nähe (7:25)
08 Clown (5:02)
09 Kaltes Stück (5:11)

Total time 49:20
LP released by Kuckuck, Munich, West Germany, 1980

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Walter Fähndrich – Musik für Raüme (Giannozzo)

Teaching improvisation at the Musikhochschule in Basel since 1985, Swiss composer and sound artist Walter Fähndrich (b. 1944) is both a professional viola player performing in chamber ensembles (see here) and a composer interested in various genres like stage and film music, electroacoustic music or Hörspiel (see official website). Since 1980, Fähndrich has explored room frequency resonances through a series of sound installations in art galleries, specific architectural sites and even outdoor venues (like Music for a Quarry, 1999; see info/video). Titled Musik für Räume, or music for spaces, these sound installations use simple electronic tonalites whose pitch is determined by the room’s dimensions and resonance properties. The music is meant to excite room resonances and thus achieve the sonification of architectural spaces. Several exhibition catalogs with CDs were published about Fähndrich’s Musik für Räume, so it is possible the music on this cassette has already been digitized and made available.

♫ Published in 1985 by Edition Giannozzo, this cassette was the first to document Musik für Räume as a standalone soundtrack. Founded in 1978 by sculptor and musician Rolf Langebartels, Galerie Giannozzo was a two-storey gallery in Berlin Charlottenburg, with monthly exhibitions by artists like Rolf Julius, Takehisa Kosugi, Akio Suzuki or Christina Kubisch, until it closed doors in 1986. On show in the gallery during November 1985, Fähndrich’s sound installation consisted in the sonification of both storeys with sounds deduced from the galleries’ proportions. For instance, and if I understand the liner notes correctily, the upper room’s length of 720 cm corresponds to a frequency of 47.6 Hz. Of course, these electronic sounds are meant to be heard in the Giannozzo gallery only, but, on their own, they function as a wonderful musique d’ameublement, or discreet music in English.

01 Räume Giannozzo VI (23:28)
02 Räume Giannozzo VII (23:28)

Total time 46:56
Cassette released by Edition Giannozzo, Berlin, 1985

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Continuumix #13

Continuumix #13 – Transwonderland
Mix by Continuo – May 2012
Total time 93:30

Named after Noo Saro Wiwa’s book Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, published by Granta in 2012. Artwork after Buckminster Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome, as reconstituted at Art Basel Miami Beach, December 2011.

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/     /     /     /      T      R      A      C      K      L      I      S      T      /     /     /     /

00:00 | Atom™ – Cold Memories Part 1 (1994)
Composed in 1994 by Uwe Schmidt for Helsinki’s Museum of Contemporary Art “Ambient City Radio” program. Released as a 2xCD set on Sähkö Recordings, Finland, 2012.

04:25 | Stuart Dempster – Didjeridervish (1976)
Shouts and didjeridoo droning sound recorded by trombone player Dempster inside the resonant Abbey of Pope Clement VI in Avignon, France, in 1976. The “didjeridoo” is actually a plastic sewer pipe. Excerpt from the B-side of the legendary In The Great Abbey Of Clement VI LP published by Arch Records in 1979.

09:29 | Eternal Music application
Using the yellow, blue, pink and green dots, anyone can produce enchanting chiming tonalities.

11:58 | Alexander Zhikharev – Bronze Flat Bells
Moscow composer and bell ringer Zhikharev, born 1951, created and fine tuned these flat bells in 1988, with specific resonances. He plays them often at the Kolomenskoe monastery, near Moscow. [source]

16:52 | Albert Mayer – Proposta Sonora X (1966-69)
Italian composer Albert Mayer conceived his Proposta Sonora experiments from 1966 to 1969 in Pietro Grossi’s own Studio Di Fonologia Musicale Di Firenze, and using the same basic electronic tonalities sourced from elementary sine waves and enveloppe generator. From the “Proposte Sonore” CD on Ants, 2004.

18:09 | Steve Reich – New York Counterpoint (2005)
Interpreted and arranged by Swiss duo One Plus One (Anne Gillot on recorders and Laurent Estoppey on saxophones), this 10-inch record wa published by Lausanne contemporary art center Circuit in 2005. One Plus One also made a great Philip Glass LP in 2006.

27:30 | Masayoshi Urabe – デュオ (2008)
In this excerpt from the Flag Of Midsummer CD on PSF, 2008, Japanese radical saxophonist Masayoshi Urabe is heard on harmonica, accordion and found objects, with assistance from Kuwayama Kiyoharu on found objects.

32:30 | Roland Moser – Stilleben mit Glas (1970)
Mostly based on glass sounds, this musique concrète piece was created in 1970 by Swiss avantgarde composer Roland Moser, born 1943, in the Studio für Elektroniche Musik der Hochschule in Köln. From the Ensemble Neue Horizonte Bern 2xLP published by Jecklin, Switzerland, 1977.

40:56 | Astreya – Dolcissimo & Death Valley (excerpts) (1988)
Astreya (Viacheslav Artiomov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Victor Suslin) with Californian electronic musician Miles Anderson. Recorded 1988. From the Astreja retrospective CD on SLYD Records, ref. SLR0027, 1994. On Artiomov and Astreya, see previous post.

49:22 | Friedrich Glorian – Nuzheng Miniature (2012)
German composer and improvisor Friedrich Glorian started playing in kraut rock and jazz bands in the 1960s, before turning to Indian classical music, special intonation and self build instruments. This track is played on a guzheng, a Chinese traditional string instrument, with live loop and sound effects [source].

53:07 | Excerpt from Hüört ens! Songs aus Solingen Vol. 2 (2012)
Unidentified excerpt from Vol. 2 of a compilation celebrating artists from Solingen, a town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. The compilation comes with a rare appearance of German art rock/NDW band S.Y.P.H. [source]

58:22 | Hentai Improvising Orchestra – Coelacanth remix (2011)
Hailing from Fort Worth, Texas, Hentai Improvising Orchestra are Terry Horn, Matt Hickey and Ken Shimamoto. On this track, electronic artist Coelacanth remixes some H.I.O.’s live performance at Doc’s Records, a Fort Worth record store, with the addition of Chris Vaisvil’s fretless bass.

65:51 | Pascal Comelade – La Coquille et le Clergyman (2009)
In 2009, Comelade was commissioned a new soundtrack to Germaine Dulac‘s Surrealist silent film realized in 1927, published as a DVD by Éditions Light Cone in 2009. The score was written for a re-formed Bel Canto Orchestra with Comelade at the grand piano.

72:14 | Ezra Pound – On Cantos
Archive recording of Pound himself reading from his Cantos cycle. From American experimental webcast Cytopicus and sister project Saxonian Folkways blog. Also highly recommended is their Decline of Poetry in 20th Century mix of atonal contemporary music ala Xenakis with unidentified poetry readings, possibly Yeats, Pound and others.

74:15 | Charles Curtis – Ultra White Violet Light (1999)
US classical cellist Curtis, b.1960, collaborated with La Monte Young in the 1990s, performed within the Dream House and premiered a La Monte new composition in 2003, as well as a piece by Eliane Radigue in 2006. Ultra White Violet Light is for two cellos, sine wave and sustained electric guitar. From the double LP on Beau Rivage, originally published 1998, reissued by Squealer Music in 1999. This is side A, but I noticed all 4 sides are available on YouTube.

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Hugo Weris – Nouvelle Recette

Parisian cassette label La Fondation started in 1981 as a collective including experimental film makers, radio producers, musicians and contemporary artists. They first released a pair of compilation cassettes and, later in the 1980s, solo efforts by the likes of new-wave singer Nini Raviolette or the Residents-inspired Les Frères Lefdup, a duo including Alain Burosse. The collective became famous in France in the mid-1980s, when Burosse produced short films and soundtracks for avant-pop French TV programs Haute Tension and L’Oeil du Cyclone. Under the “L.D. Track” alias, Hugo Weris composed some of the music for Nini Raviolette’s new-wave songs, including the hit Indicateur Ou Dragueur. As a solo artist, Weris released four cassettes on La Fondation: Nouvelle Recette (198?), Dessert (198?), Bonne Année (1985) and Bzz (1992). This post offers my own rip of Nouvelle Recette, yet the tracks are different from the sound files offered by La Fondation’s website for the same cassette.

♫ The music blends synthesizer, sequencer loops, musique concrète and found sounds, typical of hometaping releases of the 2nd half of the 1980s. More peculiar is the great lyricism with which Weris infuses his minimalist keyboard playing and the vintage gearing used (apparently a VCS3), so that the music evokes both Brian Eno’s Music for Films and ZNR’s Barricades 3. Another original touch is the addition of found sounds or kitchenware recorded at home – hence the title, meaning New Recipe. There’s also a remarkable tape loop lifted from an old movie on track #9, where a French actress endlessly repeats “Embrasse-moi” (or Kiss me) on a background of static noise, creating a rather moving moment of pure Hauntology.

17 tracks

Total time 60mn
Cassette released by La Fondation, Paris, France, 198? (~1985-1990)

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