VA - 2009 - Source: Music of the Avant Garde 1968-1971 3xCD

 

Pogus Productions – P21050-2  986.38MB FLAC

Source is an unusually exact title because this collection does not merely preserve thirteen early experimental compositions. It returns us to a point before many later musical categories had settled into dependable shapes, when artists were building instruments, corrupting language, feeding sound back into rooms, setting materials on fire, programming mainframe computers and treating magazines as performance spaces. The three discs contain music, but the music originally belonged to a much larger organism. Source: Music of the Avant-Garde was an oversized spiral-bound journal containing graphic scores, interviews, photographs, theoretical arguments, tactile objects and records. A subscriber did not merely read about experimental music and then purchase an album separately. The publication arrived as a toolbox whose pages, images, instructions and vinyl could potentially be activated. Reading, listening, building and performing were placed inside the same circuit.

The 2009 Pogus edition therefore performs an act of rescue while also revealing the limits of rescue. These thirteen recordings survive, but the strange paper architecture surrounding them has largely disappeared from the listening experience. The fur attached to a page, transparent sheets, diagrams, unusual paper stocks and scores designed to stand on a music rack cannot be compressed into three audio discs. What remains is one audible limb of a multimedia creature. Yet that incompleteness is not simply a loss. Heard together, the records disclose an extraordinary alternative history of electronic and experimental music, one less concerned with creating a recognizable style than with inventing new conditions under which sound might occur.

The cover of the Pogus set captures this archaeological tension. Its scraped, layered surface resembles an object excavated from damaged storage rather than a clean academic anthology. Turquoise, red, black and dirty gold overlap like old printing, circuitry, reflected light and oxidized machinery. A fingerprint-like spiral opens at the left, suggesting identity, vibration, record grooves or a tunnel leading backward through time. The enormous narrow letters of SOURCE dominate the image without making the object easy to classify. Below them, the composers’ surnames are packed together in red and blue blocks, not arranged as a hierarchy of famous masters and lesser contributors. They form one dense informational field. The cover looks forward and backward simultaneously, preserving the handmade technological optimism of the original period while acknowledging forty years of physical wear.

The word “avant-garde” has since become a loose shelf label applied to almost anything slightly difficult, unconventional or commercially obscure. These recordings restore some danger to it. The artists are not merely decorating established forms with strange sounds. They are questioning the agreements that allow listeners to recognize music in the first place. Must a performer intend every audible event? Can a room compose? Can burning plastic function as an instrument? Can speech destroy itself through repetition? Can a piano become an electronic feedback system? Can an installation be played as though it were a forest of strings? The works do not answer through manifestos alone. They build situations in which the questions become physically audible.

Robert Ashley’s “The Wolfman” opens the collection by placing the human voice inside an environment powerful enough to erase it. Ashley performs softly into extreme amplification while Gordon Mumma’s electronics generate a vast field of microphone feedback. The usual relationship between singer and sound system is reversed. Amplification is no longer a transparent servant making the voice easier to hear. It becomes an unstable partner whose behavior depends upon the tiny signal entering it. Ashley must remain restrained because a more forceful vocal performance would overwhelm or alter the feedback structure. Vulnerability becomes the technical requirement.

The title suggests animal transformation, but the piece avoids theatrical howling or cinematic horror. The wolf emerges through pressure, darkness and the sensation that the voice is being watched by the machinery surrounding it. Feedback often signifies failure: the microphone has heard the speaker, the circuit has closed incorrectly, and the operator must reduce the gain. Ashley treats that forbidden loop as habitat. The mistake becomes the world in which the performance lives.

This remains an exceptionally confrontational opening because it denies the listener an ordinary focal point. The voice is present but difficult to possess. The electronics are sustained but never comfortably atmospheric. The volume implied by the original performance gives the piece a bodily violence that domestic playback can only partially reproduce. It asks whether music can be built from a system hovering near catastrophe, with the performer maintaining just enough control to prevent either silence or total collapse.

David Behrman’s “Wave Train” moves the experiment into a grand piano fitted with guitar pickups. The instrument is not played primarily through its keyboard. Electromagnetic pickups placed near the strings and high amplification produce feedback, causing the piano to excite itself. The grand piano, one of Western concert music’s supreme symbols of control and refined technique, becomes an unpredictable electrical body.

The title is beautifully literal. A train is both a connected sequence and a heavy machine moving along an established route. Waves travel through strings, pickups, amplifiers, air and back into the instrument, each stage affecting what follows. The pianist or operator establishes the conditions, but the complete result emerges from relations among materials. Composition becomes system design.

This does not eliminate human agency. It relocates it. Instead of deciding every pitch and duration, Behrman listens to the system’s behavior and intervenes within it. The performer resembles someone tending an electrical weather pattern, changing proximity, gain and resonance while remaining alert to consequences that cannot be fully predicted. Later generations of improvisers would take for granted the possibility of performing with self-generating electronics. “Wave Train” catches that relationship while it still feels newly dangerous.

Larry Austin’s “Accidents” attacks virtuosity from another direction. A pianist attempts to depress keys on a prepared piano without producing sound. Every accidental noise is captured, electronically altered and magnified. The traditional performer tries to eliminate unintended events; Austin makes unintended events the only acceptable material. Failure is not tolerated reluctantly. It is harvested.

The piece creates an almost comic psychological pressure. The more carefully the performer attempts silence, the more meaningful each mistake becomes. A tiny scrape, impact or failed key movement is enlarged until it enters a realm completely disproportionate to its origin. The electronic apparatus functions like an unforgiving conscience, refusing to let any lapse disappear unnoticed.

“Accidents” also exposes the fiction that musical performance can ever be perfectly controlled. Bodies shift, mechanisms click, fingers touch surfaces and rooms respond. Conventional practice trains listeners to ignore these events as noise surrounding the intended composition. Austin removes the intended composition and leaves the supposedly irrelevant sounds standing alone. The background becomes the subject.

Allan Bryant’s “Pitch Out” expands the instrument beyond any inherited object. Lengths of mandolin and electric-guitar strings were mounted on boards, fitted with magnetic pickups and connected into a homemade apparatus that resembles equal parts sculpture, laboratory device and eccentric workshop invention. The composition begins before a performer touches anything because constructing the mechanism is already an act of musical thought.

The result has a raw, tensile physicality. Strings vibrate as materials under pressure rather than as carriers of familiar chord shapes. Pitch is pulled out from wood, wire, magnetism and amplification. The phrase “pitch out” can mean throwing something away, removing pitch from ordinary musical organization, or sending it violently into open space. All three possibilities seem active.

Bryant’s piece demonstrates why the visual dimension of Source mattered. Hearing the recording without seeing the apparatus leaves part of the proposition invisible. Yet that absence also frees the machine to grow in imagination. Its creaks, drones, metallic attacks and unstable resonances suggest an instrument too large or peculiar to fit inside a conventional studio. The listener reconstructs a mythical device from acoustic evidence.

The first disc is therefore not merely a collection of four early electronic works. It traces a progressive displacement of musical authority. Ashley shares control with feedback. Behrman shares it with an amplified piano circuit. Austin grants accidents compositional power. Bryant transfers composition into the building of an unprecedented object. By the end, the traditional image of a musician intentionally producing selected notes has been dismantled and distributed across rooms, machines, mistakes and materials.

Alvin Lucier’s “I am sitting in a room” opens the second disc with one of experimental music’s clearest and most profound processes. Lucier records himself speaking in a room, plays that recording back into the same room, records the playback, then repeats the operation. Each generation strengthens frequencies favored by the room’s dimensions while speech gradually loses intelligibility. Language is not obscured by added effects. It is transformed by architecture.

The opening statement explains the procedure, but the piece does not become redundant once the mechanism is understood. Knowing what will occur does not prepare the listener for the emotional force of hearing it happen. Lucier’s voice begins as personal evidence: breath, pacing, accent and irregularity. Repetition gradually turns those individual features into sustained resonance. The room does not violently destroy the speaker. It absorbs him.

Every room contains such frequencies, but ordinary life rarely isolates them. Lucier creates a procedure through which architecture can reveal its inaudible signature. The room becomes composer, filter and performer. A supposedly neutral container proves to have preferences. Certain sounds thrive; others vanish.

The piece is often described as a demonstration of acoustics, but its enduring power exceeds demonstration. It stages identity passing into environment. The spoken self becomes less linguistically understandable while becoming more completely joined to the space surrounding it. Erasure and transformation become indistinguishable. Lucier loses his voice and discovers the room’s voice within the same process.

This early fifteen-minute realization is especially valuable because the transformation occurs quickly enough for the listener to retain a strong memory of the initial speech while its features dissolve. Later, longer versions may allow the process to become more gradual and monumental. Here the metamorphosis has the compact force of a ritual. A person enters, names the procedure and is converted into resonance.

Arthur Woodbury’s “Velox” moves from room acoustics to early computer composition. Realized on a PDP-10 mainframe with final processing through a Moog synthesizer, the piece belongs to an era when computer music required institutional machinery, technical access and considerable patience. The computer was not a personal instrument resting conveniently on every desk. It was a large shared environment into which musical ideas had to be translated.

“Velox” sounds animated by rising, crossing figures whose relationships create an electronic counterpoint. Patterns seem to climb, restart and pass through one another, suggesting a fugue composed from continuous motion rather than recognizable melodic subjects. The Latin root of the title implies speed, but the more interesting velocity lies in the movement of perception. The ear keeps trying to identify stable objects inside a field whose components are already passing elsewhere.

The historical machinery does not make the piece feel primitive. Its limitations produce clarity. Rather than burying the process beneath thousands of available timbres, Woodbury exposes a concentrated relationship among trajectory, repetition and electronic color. Early computer music often carries this sense of decisions made under scarcity. Each operation cost time and access, so the resulting structures possess an unusual deliberateness even when their surfaces seem playful.

Mark Riener’s “Phlegethon” abandons the computer for combustion. Its score calls for a sheet of polyethylene suspended from the ceiling and set on fire. Named after one of the rivers of the classical underworld, the piece allows heat, gravity and melting material to compose. The performer initiates an irreversible physical process and then loses ordinary control.

Fire is an ideal avant-garde musician because it is both predictable and uncontrollable. Everyone knows the material will burn, shrink, deform and eventually extinguish, but the exact sequence of crackles, collapses and resonances cannot be repeated. The composition has a defined action and an indeterminate interior.

The recording is short, abrasive and oddly delicate. Tiny sounds become evidence of structural destruction. The material’s physical change is translated into audio, leaving the listener to imagine the visual danger absent from the disc. Unlike a conventional instrumental object, the polyethylene cannot simply be reset for another identical performance. Performance consumes the instrument.

Larry Austin returns with “Caritas,” another work involving the PDP-10 computer and final processing through a Buchla electronic system. Placed after burning plastic, the computer does not represent a clean technological opposite to physical destruction. Its tones also appear to form, mutate and disappear according to systems only partly available to the ear.

The title means charity or selfless love, a striking word for music generated through machinery associated with artificial intelligence research. Austin resists the easy opposition between humane emotion and technological calculation. A computer-derived composition can carry tenderness, unease or spiritual suggestion without pretending the machine itself experiences those states. Human meaning enters through selection, framing and listening.

The work also links two distinct technological cultures. Mainframe calculation supplies one level of organization, while the Buchla system introduces voltage-controlled physical manipulation. Digital and analogue are not competing faiths. They become successive stages in a hybrid process. This was not yet the familiar studio workflow it would become decades later. The piece documents experimental systems being persuaded to communicate across their differences.

Stanley Lunetta’s “moosack machine” is the disc’s most wonderfully irreverent collision of invention and nomenclature. The title degrades “music” into “moosack,” suggesting commercial background sound, childish noise, machinery and deliberate bad spelling all at once. Lunetta’s custom analogue-digital computer system does not aspire to the polished neutrality associated with later electronic technology. It sputters, buzzes, convulses and produces a field of aggressive autonomous behavior.

There is something prophetic in its roughness. The piece can suggest later industrial electronics, noise, circuit bending and improvised systems, yet it belongs to a period before those practices had hardened into recognizable scenes. Lunetta is not adopting a genre’s surface. He is discovering that electronic systems can possess unruly personalities when they are allowed to operate near the edges of intended use.

The machine does not sound futuristic in the sleek science-fiction sense. It sounds handmade, unstable and slightly comic, like a homemade intelligence that has awakened with no obligation to its builder. This humor is important. Avant-garde music is often discussed with such solemnity that its playfulness disappears. “moosack machine” refuses dignity while making a serious proposition about automated musical behavior.

The second disc moves through room resonance, mainframe structures, fire, hybrid computing and homemade machine autonomy. It widens the field from composition as organized sound to composition as organized circumstance. The artist may write instructions, design a system or initiate an event, but the result depends upon forces not fully obedient to individual intention.

Lowell Cross opens the third disc with “Video II (B)/(C)/(L),” the audio component of a multimedia work in which visual and sonic information were generated simultaneously. Heard without its visual half, the piece is necessarily incomplete. That incompleteness becomes part of the modern listening experience. The three-disc anthology preserves sound from an artwork that was never meant to become merely an audio track.

Its slowly changing electronic tones can nevertheless stand with remarkable authority. Frequencies stretch, merge and alter color, producing the sensation of a visual field unfolding behind closed eyes. Knowing that light and image once accompanied the work causes the ear to search for shapes. Sound becomes virtual illumination.

Cross’s piece also demonstrates how easily archival formats reorganize artistic intention. A multimedia event is pressed onto a record, later transferred from vinyl to CD, then preserved as FLAC files. At each stage, certain elements survive and others vanish. The work does not travel through history unchanged. It sheds dimensions.

Arrigo Lora-Totino’s “english phonemes” attacks another supposedly stable system: spoken language. Fragments of English are recorded, isolated, repeated and rearranged until they hover near comprehensibility. The piece belongs to sound poetry, but it does not present poetry as expressive speech accompanied by unusual noises. Speech itself becomes the unusual noise.

A phoneme is a unit small enough to alter meaning while carrying no complete meaning alone. By concentrating on this scale, Lora-Totino exposes the mechanical and musical structures beneath language. Mouth, tongue, breath and recording technology become a percussion-and-resonance apparatus. The listener repeatedly approaches recognition, only for syntax to collapse.

The use of English adds another layer because Lora-Totino was working from Italy and realized the piece in Swedish Radio’s studios. English becomes transportable material passing among national and technological contexts. It is treated less as the transparent global language it would later appear to be than as an exotic inventory of mouth sounds.

The composer described such work as verbophony, a useful term because the piece inhabits the point where verbal information becomes sonic event. It does not completely abandon communication. It keeps communication perpetually almost happening. The listener’s frustrated effort to understand becomes part of the composition.

Alvin Curran’s “Magic Carpet” was performed upon the objects of Paul Klerr’s installation String Structures at the Gallery Arco d’Alibert in Rome. The title perfectly describes the work’s method. A physical installation becomes a vehicle capable of transporting performer and listener through an environment of metallic resonance, plucked tension, collision and vibration.

The piece does not sound like a conventional instrument enlarged. It sounds like someone exploring an unfamiliar habitat through touch. Each action tests what the surrounding structure can do. The installation is not passive sculpture waiting to be interpreted. It answers with its own materials, resonances and limitations.

Curran’s performance belongs to his work with Musica Elettronica Viva and to a broader collapse of boundaries among composition, improvisation, sculpture and social encounter. The musician enters an existing field and responds in real time rather than imposing a complete score from outside. “Magic Carpet” turns improvisation into travel. The destination is not predetermined because every contact reveals another possible route.

The missing visual information again matters. Without photographs of String Structures, the listener may imagine an enormous hanging instrument, a room woven with wires or a skeletal machine. The recording activates this imaginary architecture. The absence of an image does not make the work less vivid. It causes sound to build the installation anew inside each listener.

Annea Lockwood’s “Tiger Balm” closes the set by gathering animal sound, human breath, machinery, eroticism and environmental collage into one continuous sensory field. Originally commissioned for the London Contemporary Dance Theatre, the work does not supply rhythm in the conventional manner of a dance score. It creates a world through which a body might move.

The opening tiger purr is immediately destabilizing because the sound resembles a domestic cat while carrying the knowledge of an enormous predator. Intimacy and danger share the same vibration. Other layers gradually enter, and distinctions among human, animal, instrumental and technological sound become increasingly uncertain.

Breathing is central because it joins all these territories. Animals breathe, lovers breathe, performers breathe and machines are often described as breathing when their cycles become physically suggestive. Lockwood allows respiration to become a bridge between species and systems. A woman’s orgasm emerges not as isolated provocation but as one bodily intensity among purrs, air, vibration and passing machinery. Erotic sound enters an ecology rather than standing on a stage for judgment.

The transition into airplane noise is especially powerful. The human body’s intimate climax and the technological body’s passage through air seem to occupy one expanding breath. Lockwood does not argue that nature and technology are harmoniously unified. She shows that the modern sensorium already contains them simultaneously. A tiger, woman and aircraft can meet inside recorded sound even when their physical worlds remain separate.

“Tiger Balm” concludes the anthology by dissolving nearly every boundary the preceding works had challenged. Voice, animal, machine, environment, composition and found sound enter one field. The piece is sensual without becoming decorative, conceptual without losing bodily force, and ecological without offering a moral lesson. It feels less like the final track than an opening through which later sound art will pour.

The sequence across all three discs reveals how misleading it would be to treat experimental music as one style. “The Wolfman” and “Tiger Balm” share almost no surface resemblance. “I am sitting in a room” is governed by an audible process, while “Phlegethon” depends upon irreversible material destruction. “Velox” emerges from institutional computing; “Pitch Out” from handmade strings and boards. “english phonemes” dismantles speech; “Magic Carpet” expands improvisation into installation. What connects them is not sound but permission.

Source granted permission to redefine where music could be located. It could exist in the feedback path between microphone and speaker, inside the resonances of a room, in the failed attempt to remain silent, in a piece of plastic burning from a coat hanger, in a computer’s operations, in fragmented language or within the tactile exploration of another artist’s sculpture. The magazine did not merely report that such practices existed. Its design and inserted records allowed the practices to enter subscribers’ homes as active propositions.

That physical delivery matters. Today, radical work can circulate instantly, but it often arrives separated from context inside the same interfaces used for every other recording. Source arrived slowly through the mail as an object that demanded handling. Pages could be unfolded, scores placed on stands, records removed and instructions attempted. The publication treated its readers less as consumers than potential participants.

This is where Source feels unexpectedly close to the larger archive surrounding this post. A music archive becomes most valuable when it does more than store isolated masterpieces. It places objects into relationships that allow unfamiliar systems of thought to become visible. Robert Ashley changes how Alvin Lucier is heard. Burning plastic alters the meaning of computer music. Sound poetry prepares the ear for Lockwood’s biological collage. None of these works provides the complete image, but their alternation creates a field larger than any individual composition.

The 2009 reissue adds another historical layer. Most original masters had vanished or deteriorated, so Pogus worked from surviving records, reducing noise and crackle while retaining the character of the vinyl sources. This is not a minor technical footnote. The transfer embodies the fragility of experimental history. Artists imagined new futures using unstable machines and ephemeral situations, yet the evidence of those futures nearly disappeared through ordinary neglect and material decay.

The audible trace may therefore contain two periods at once. Beneath the restored recording is the original event; around it is the surface of the record that carried the event through four decades. Digital preservation does not erase that journey completely. The supposed imperfections testify that someone pressed the music, stored it, handled it and eventually recognized that it needed rescue.

The FLAC archive extends the journey again. Six 10-inch records once embedded within three issues of an oversized magazine become three compact discs, then a 986.38 MB file capable of moving independently of every physical component. The archive preserves the sound without lossy compression, but it cannot preserve the full tactile argument of Source. That difference should not be hidden. It should be understood as another transformation in the work’s life.

Source: Music of the Avant-Garde remains important not because every experiment became a lasting compositional method or because all thirteen pieces are equally satisfying. Its importance lies in showing people constructing possibilities before they knew which possibilities history would retain. Some works became canonical. Others remain obscure, eccentric or inseparable from technologies that quickly aged. Together they preserve the actual texture of invention: confidence, play, failure, crude machinery, philosophical ambition and the willingness to make objects that did not yet have dependable audiences.

The collection does not ask listeners to admire an old avant-garde from a respectful museum distance. It challenges the assumption that its fundamental questions have been answered. What is being ignored as accidental sound now? Which technologies are being used only according to their manufacturers’ intentions? What parts of current artistic life will vanish because nobody preserved the original files, interfaces or social context? Which rooms, bodies and systems are already composing while people continue waiting for a recognized musician to begin?

The word Source finally identifies no single composer or origin. It describes a network from which further thought can flow. These recordings were sources for later electronic music, sound art, noise, installation, process composition and improvisation, but they were themselves fed by rooms, machines, institutions, bodies, political upheaval, other artists and material accidents. No source is pure. Every beginning contains older currents.

That is why the anthology still feels alive. It does not present thirteen polished answers. It presents thirteen openings. The feedback continues, the room keeps filtering, the plastic keeps falling through fire, the phonemes nearly become words, and the tiger’s breath passes into the aircraft. More than half a century later, the listener is still standing at the source, watching music decide how much larger it is willing to become.