ALAN LICHT & BRIAN CHASE - we thought we could do anything (2014)

           ALAN LICHT & BRIAN CHASE - we thought we could do anything (2014)            

ADRIAN VERDEJO - modern hearts - new music for electric guitar (2014)

       ADRIAN VERDEJO - modern hearts - new music for electric guitar (2014)            

ALAN LICHT - rabbi sky (1999)

       ALAN LICHT - rabbi sky (1999)        

TETUZI AKIYAMA / OREN AMBARCHI / ALAN LICHT - willow weep and moan for me (2006)

      AKIYAMA/AMBARCHI/LICHT - willow weep and moan for me (2006)     

TERRY FOX - berlino / rallentando (1988)

      TERRY FOX - berlino / rallentando (1988)       

THE LOST JOCKEY

part of the late-'70s/early-'80s post-minimalist scene that also included artists like the penguin cafe orchestra, soft verdict, gavin bryars, piero milesi and the durutti column, the lost jockey were an instrumental ensemble that fused the concepts of minimalism to a more rock- and jazz-influenced sound. the music of the lost jockey and these other artists was more accessible and friendly than the forbidding early music of steve reich or philip glass, and likely introduced a number of pop-oriented listeners to the world of modern classical music and the avant-garde. rather than being simply minimalism with training wheels, however, the lost jockey's music was an inventive, eclectic mix of influences and styles; the group's deliberately loose structure encouraged a diversity of sounds one doesn't immediately identify with the more structured worlds of minimalism or systems music.

organized by pianist andrew poppy in early 1981, shortly after his graduation from goldsmiths college of music, the lost jockey was initially composed of five keyboard players and composers: poppy, orlando gough, john barker, schaun tozer and david owen, who rehearsed at gough's "squat" (illegally occupied rent-free housing) in one of london's less reputable neighborhoods. however, by the time the group started performing regularly, they had expanded into an enormous collective, with singers, percussionists, string and reed players and others drafted into the group as needed, depending on the whim of each piece's composer. as many as 30 musicians might be on stage during performances, as well as a handful of dancers, and the lost jockey's sole full-length album credits ten musicians, with 14 others listed as "other personnel."

although he lost jockey's self-titled debut album was recorded in the summer of 1981, it was not released until july 1982, due in part to the difficulties in mastering and pressing an album of unusually extended length. side two consists of one 32-minute track, "hoovering the beach," and the three tracks on side one run over 23 minutes by themselves. over the course of these four pieces, influences ranging from terry riley to bill evans to frank zappa to karlheinz stockhausen are present, but the sometimes raucous, often hypnotic pieces are hardly derivative genre work. the delays in releasing the lost jockey meant that the group's second and final release, the lengthy 10" EP professor slack, came out in the same month as the earlier record. produced by john leckie, professor slack is a somewhat more pop-oriented work, with melody taking precedence over the additive rhythms that predominate on the album.

although the lost jockey continued performing live for the next two years, they made no more recordings, due to what poppy later cheerfully termed the group's "constant state of disorganization." the presence of five composers meant that there was an endless, ahem, jockeying for position; although this variety is what made the lost jockey so interesting, it simply couldn't last. the ensemble split amicably in 1984. andrew poppy had the most visible post-lost jockeypresence, signing to ztt records for his 1985 solo debut, the beating of wings, and going on to a fruitful career of orchestral and film work along with holding a few teaching positions. orlando gough and schaun tozer formed the more experimental ensemble man jumping with many of the lost jockey's ancillary personnel; tozer went on to score films, while gough became a prominent figure on the U.K. dance and theatre scene. john barker is a minor composer and performer of systems music in great britain.

  

     12" LP (1982)     

     10" (1982)     

      cassette (1983)     

WIM MERTENS - for amusement only (1981)

     WIM MERTENS - for amusement only (1981)     

ARNOLD DREYBLATT - propellers in love (1986)

from alan licht's extended minimalism-list:

     ARNOLD DREYBLATT - propellers in love (1986)     

ZOLTÁN JENEY - om

  

 

    ZOLTÁN JENEY - om    

ALAN LICHT - four years older

"alan licht solo electric guitar. four years later recorded december 2012 at echo canyon west. four years earlier recorded live december 2008 at the electric possible, washington d.c. all selections played as heard, no overdubs. a new set by the coolest chap in new york city documenting the development process of a solo electric guitar piece that alan licht has been playing out for last four years. revered for his work in the blue humans and text of light, and a key figure in the pantheon of experimental solo guitar players born in the late sixties such jim o'rourke and oren ambarchi, 'four years older' is his debut editions mego release, representing another peak in a career of mining the rich seams of minimalism, noise and avant-garde in general that stretches back more than two decades. as it says on the box side a was recorded four years later than the side b (and vice versa). if that wasn't enough it's been four years since his last solo lp, ymca, on family vineyard. four years older sees a move away from the loop-based pieces of recent releases. on four years later in particular the guitar's fingerboard is actually touched more than on any other solo piece of the last ten years, although the guitar is pushed to sound more like a suitcase synth, a church organ, a hornet's nest, and a malfunctioning playstation than a guitar per se." (label info)

four years older

ELODIE LAUTEN - the death of don juan

"It was 1986. The rush of excitement over the advent of minimalism had subsided. The orchestra and opera house (yawn) had co-opted Steve Reich and Philip Glass, La Monte Young was in seclusion, Terry Riley was singing Indian ragas. What next?, was the question that seemed to hang in the air. And into that lull poured Elodie Lauten's The Death of Don Juan" (Kyle Gann)

"This is one of the great lost experimental records of the 80s. (...) The first two tracks sound like Joe Jones meets Glass or Steve Reich, with harpsichords, trine (an electric lyre that Lauten invented) and Arthur Russell’s cello. “Death As A Shadow” recalls Meredith Monk’s “Turtle Dreams” but is even more haunting and doomy. Russell’s vocal on “Death As A Woman” even reminds me of MOONDOG 2 and sounds unlike any of his other work. Even the libretto is fab-A+" (Alan Licht)

     the death of don juan     

HARLEY GABER - Discography

Harley Gaber - American minimalist composer, visual artist, photographer and film maker. Born in Chicago on June 5, 1943. Committed suicide in Gallup, New Mexico on June 16, 2011. He took a break from composing in 1978 (to play tennis) and didn’t resume until 2003. He studied music with Horace Reisberg, Darius Milhaud, Lejaren Hiller, Aldo Clementi, Franco Evangelisti, Giacinto Scelsi, Giulio Rotoli, William Sydeman, and most importantly Kenneth Gaburo.

from the Wire:
When Harley Gaber gave up composing in 1977 at the age of 44 to devote his attention to, of all things, teaching and playing tennis, only three of his works had appeared on disc: Kata and Ludus Primus on CRI in 1972, and 1975’s monumental 104 minute string quintet The Winds Rise In The North on Titanic Records four years later.

     Ludus Primus / Kata     

     part one            part two     

In 2007 Editions RZ’s Robert Zank, realising the latter’s appeal to 21st century listeners more attuned to drone, late Cage and Feldman and lowercase improvisation, reissued it to considerable acclaim, and Gaber set to work on digital transfers of three other pieces dating from the same period written for or created in close collaboration with his partner at the time, violinist Linda Cummiskey, Sovereign Of The Centre (1972–74), The Realm Of Indra’s Net (1974) and Michi (1972). Experimenting with superimposed versions of Michi, combining it with other early recordings and – an original move – adding a soundtrack of treated field recordings eventually resulted in I Saw My Mother Ascending Mount Fuji, which marks Gaber’s return to composition after more than over three decades away.

What goes around comes around. With its emphasis on quiet sustained sounds interspersed with stretches of silence, Gaber’s early 1970s music predated John Cage’s number pieces by 15 years and the Wandelweiser Group by 20. Though Winds made it to The Wire contributor Alan Licht’s extended Minimal Top Ten list, it would be a mistake to file Gaber away as just another minimalist. A veritable renaissance man whose artistic activities also include painting, calligraphy, photography and installation work, he studied with Kenneth Gaburo and Lejaren Hiller at the University of Illinois and with Clementi, Evangelisti and Scelsi in Rome in 1964.

Sovereign Of The Centre, scored for four violins, is more discontinuous in texture than Winds, its fondness for semitones and their major 7th/minor 9th inversions revealing Gaber’s affection for Anton Webern. “Those of us who came after Webern eventually came to understand that a so-called moment could be perceived as either an eternity or, in common parlance, a nano-flicker,” he writes, an observation that connects to his studies of Oriental thought and religion but also to Stockhausen’s concept of ‘Moment form’, in which “each and every Now is not unremittingly regarded as the mere consequence of the one which preceded it… but rather as something personal, independent and centred, capable of existing on its own.” At times Sovereign seems like a tiny moment from a Webern quartet, frozen in time and put under the microscope to reveal its inner details. It’s what Gaber calls slowed-down sound, a direction he began to explore back in 1968 with the alto flute piece Chimyaku, and in his essay accompanying the release he points to the crucial distinction between slow (he cites Feldman) and slowed-down music. Watching someone walking very slowly isn’t the same as watching slow motion footage of someone walking at normal speed. Simple musical figures – isolated pizzicati, subtle shifts of pitch and timbre – become extraordinary events, commonplace gestures become magical surprises.

     indra's net      

It was while slowing down the tape of Winds to study its spectral components that Gaber discovered the potential of bridge harmonics – varying the contact point of the bow very close to the bridge of the violin (sul ponticello) to emphasise upper partials of the fundamental tone. The acrid, metallic timbre of ponticello is present throughout Winds, but the bridge harmonics are heard to their best advantage in The Realm of Indra’s Net, in which Gaber painstakingly assembled a four-track mix of Cummiskey’s close-miked violin, instructing her during the recording to bring out particular partials using three different microtonally-inflected tunings. A bald description of what happens – the music broadens from a unison to a whole tone halfway through before eventually returning to where it started – fails miserably to explain the magic of its complex interweaving spectral melodies. Despite its instrumentation, it bears no resemblance to Tony Conrad’s 1964 power drone Four Violins. The only remotely comparable listening experience is Eliane Radigue’s Naldjorlak I, her 2005 solo cello piece for Charles Curtis.

When Gaber worked on the digital transfers of Michi, he found himself unable to remove the extraneous noise during the piece’s silences without dulling the sound of the violin itself. Superimposing several versions of the piece to cover some of the silences with sound, he began to explore the music’s hitherto unexplored harmonic potential. Aware that he was working on the 18th anniversary of his mother’s death, he began to see it as a whole new work. I Saw My Mother Ascending Mount Fuji is a spiritual journey with the violin as the principal protagonist. Finding the violin alone too austere, he added an accompanying soundscape of field recordings made in New Mexico and extracts from 1974’s The Death Of Chuang Tzu, which uses slowed-down recordings of the composer’s own breathing. He then incorporated his 1968 solo flute piece Chimyaku, slowing down and partially pitchshifting the flute until it attained a timbral quality between the acoustic violin and electronically manipulated soundscape. Gaber’s mix is exemplary, camouflaging the more obvious canonic procedures of the multitracked violins and placing the flute tones and field recording with remarkable care, as are the performances: David Gilbert’s exquisitely varied vibrato recalls the great shakuhachi master Watazumi Doso, and Cummiskey’s intonation and bow control are worthy of Irvine Arditti or Charles Curtis. The resulting 65 minute piece is a tour de force of spectral music, in both senses of the word, a remarkable journey across 40 years of artistic thought and development.

      i saw my mother ascending mount fuji      

Drawing on his 20 years of work as a visual artist in diverse mediums, Gaber constructs In Memoriam 2010 using collage techniques, drawing on fragments from composers including himself, Philip Blackburn, Kenneth Gaburo, Verdi, Beethoven, Werner Durand, Paul Paccione, and Morton Feldman. His ability to fuse these musical elements without diluting them speaks to his organic outlook on sound and musical discourse. Like his previous Innova release, I Saw My Mother Ascending Mount Fuji, In Memoriam 2010 is both harrowing and peaceful. A sense of loss may permeate these works, but it never obscures the overall sense of redemption and love.

      In Memoriam 2010      

previouslyunreleasedpreviouslyunreleasedpreviouslyunreleasedpreviouslyunreleasedpreviouslyunreleasedpreviouslyunrelease
The following treasures were never released officially, though they hopefully might see the light of day in physical formats some day in future via enlightened and audacious labels such as Innova Recordings or Edition RZ in the past. The first one is very close to In Memoriam 2010 and is called "Portrait and Dream: In Memoriam Kenneth Gaburo"

      portrait and dream 1           portrait and dream 2       

In an Interview to Robert Reigle in 2010, Harley Gaber refered to "Turning Music" a lot. The Interview can  be streamed here at Acoustic Levitation or download it here. Plus, you will find "The House of Tudor", which is a compostion of 2010 as well.

     Turning Music              the house of tudor      

Harley Gaber @ Edition RZ

Harley Gaber @ Innova Recordings

Harley Gaber's Website is this one (highly recommended)
Harley Gaber on Facebook