Superior Viaduct’s subsidiary États-Unis is dedicated to the limited-edition reissue of truly unusual recordings from assorted regions of the avant-garde, debuting last year with the simultaneous release of five LPs that sold out with striking rapidity. Now here comes the imprint’s second batch of five; scheduled for an April 13 release, Superior Viaduct’s website already lists the entire bunch as sold out. That means for folks who want to hear Jean Dubuffet’s Musical Experiences, Warner Jepson’s Totentanz, Remko Scha’s Machine Guitars, John Duncan’s Organic, and Annea Lockwood’s Glass World, the best bet is to coordinate a few record store visits in the immediate future.
États-Unis’ inaugural spate of experimental underground goodness was one of the sweetest reissue twists of 2017. It corralled the early tape music extravaganza Highlights of Vortex, Tod Dockstader’s Eight Electronic Pieces, Die Tödliche Doris’s “ ”, Le Forte Four’s Bikini Tennis Shoes, and Joe Jones’ In Performance, in total a broad but non-random cross-section of stuff that, given its speedy evaporation from availability, obviously set numerous ear-mouths intensely watering with a Pavlovian quickness.
Like the prior batch, États-Unis’ second installment is offered in editions of 500 clear wax copies each. The selections are as diverse yet well-considered as those detailed in the paragraph above, and naturally can be explored through numerous angles. It also rings true that some listeners will only be interested in one or a few of the records included.
Those jonesing to soak up the early motions of the Buchla 100 synthesizer immediately spring to mind. Warner Jepson utilizes the instrument on his États-Unis entry, which first appeared as a self-release in 1972. It combines Don Buchla’s device with tape experiments as Jepson employed concrète sounds from his collection in the creation of accompaniment for Carlos Carvajal’s ballet Totentanz.
Jepson, who passed in 2011, was a 1950-’60s Bay Area mover in the circles of La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros, Steve Reich and others, and was a regular at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, a non-profit co-founded by Oliveros, Morton Sabotnick, and Ramon Sender that’s credited as playing an integral role in the creation of the Buchla synth. Jepson was also one of the performers in the world premier of Terry Riley’s In C, but most relevant to Totentanz, he worked with postmodern dance pioneer Anna Halprin and the dance company of Welland Lathrop.
All this set him up quite nicely as a contributor to Carvajal’s danse macabre-inspired work, and the corresponding LP is described in États-Unis’s promo text as the first piece of electronic music to accompany a ballet. Spread across two side-long tracks, the music is as abstract as one might expect, and while the manipulations of tape are noticeable, there are few of the sharp sonic transitions sometimes found in musique concrète.
This circumstance likely derives from its reality as a dance piece, one that’s unwinding mysteriousness helps to reduce, if not quite alleviate, any nagging thoughts of missing out on the full experience. In Buchla terms, this does deliver, but in a way that’s distinct from spacey proto New Age drift. Early avant-electronic vibes are abundant, though. Altogether, Totentanz is a document as satisfying as it is intriguing.
The same is true for the 23 tracks that comprise the debut LP by New Zealander Annea Lockwood. Initially issued by the Tangent label in 1970 (by Anna Lockwood, not a misspelling but her then choice of first name), it’s been reissued as a compact disc a couple of times since, but like the other items here, this is its first-time vinyl reissue.
The music is a deep plunge into the sound-making possibilities of various types of glass. Per États-Unis: plates of wired glass, glass discs, chunks of green cullet glass, glass tubing, sheets of micro-glass, glass jars, and more. The recording was the byproduct of Lockwood’s glass concerts, with her series of London performances in ’68 stirring up the city’s underground; the attendees included Pink Floyd’s Richard Wright.
Glass World isn’t a concert document but the result of two years’ worth of recording in a London church. Lockwood’s intention was to painstakingly document the spectrum of her material’s sonic capabilities. Some of it is recognizable, for instance the vibration of glass (specifically recalling an old soda bottle) against a hard surface, but much more of the whole is not.
Instead, there are sounds reminiscent of early synths (but notably lacking bleep and bloop), wind chimes, gongs and the general clanging of metal. Furthermore, Lockwood’s determined audio-documentary focus pays persevering dividends, as Glass World is a treat for deep listening. It’s also highly approachable, which cannot necessarily be said for the records considered below.
Like Remko Scha’s Machine Guitars, in which the instrument of the title is played, not with human hands, but with saber saws, and for one track, a motorized rotating wire brush. This may read as a mere act of provocation (of the ear) and possible vandalism (of the guitar), but the sounds, if often rigorous, produce a full-bodied immersion.
Fans of Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham, to which Machine Guitars has drawn comparisons (the wire brush recording that culminates the LP dates to April 1980 in NYC) will surely want to investigate (“Stroke” alone should prove satisfactory to No Wavers/ fans of Sonic Youth’s early and more out work), but ultimately, the contents cohere into a unique succession of flavors.
And conceptual. Dutchman Scha was noted (he passed in 2015) as the cofounder of the arts-space Het Apollohuis (the location for the rest of the Machine Guitars’ recording), a credit that places him as close to the world of visual art as it does the realms of underground avant-garde music. But in the u-ground disciplines often overlap, which means there’s nary a hint of dabbling or interloping to be found.
First hitting wax via the Kremlin label in 1982, it’s become quite the celebrated (and physically scarce) item since, praised by Byron Coley (who made the Branca/ Chatham observation above) and listed in guitarist-writer Alan Licht’s Minimal Top Ten list. Oozing a strange but methodical allure, is easy to understand the esteem.
Multi-disciplinary? That’s John Duncan in a nutshell, his specialties including film and video, performance art, instillations, and of course, audio, with his early recordings including an appearance on the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art’s Sound compilation, which was produced alongside the museum’s 1979 exhibition of sound sculpture, instrument building, and acoustically tuned spaces.
Duncan was also closely associated with the Los Angeles Free Music Society. That legion of beautiful margin dwellers distributed copies of Organic, though the album was produced in ’79 through Duncan’s own AQM label. This relationship will perhaps give listeners familiar with the LAFMS’ output a rough idea of what to expect, though as that collective’s productivity was also stylistically broad, maybe not.
Organic’s two side-long tracks lack the intermittent fringe-punk freedom and occasionally audible Residents influences that’re noteworthy components in the LAFMS’ large thing, instead predicting aspects of Duncan’s (equally vast) discography to come. Additionally, “Broken Promise,” which features Duncan on tape and percussion and Michael Le Donne-Bhennet on bassoon, hangs rather snuggly at the intersection of drone and general experimentation, while the shorter solo drum piece “Gala” combines an attractive avant-garde performance feel with more than a hint of Minimalism. Cool.
Jean Dubuffet’s Musical Experiences is the oldest recording of the five and is also the first in discographical terms, listed as etat06. As a document of the famed art brut founder’s untrained encounters with assorted musical instruments, meaning he didn’t know how to play piano, horns, hurdy-gurdy, cabrette, bombarde, etc. in a trad sense, but played them anyway, it registers as a huge, loving finger pointing the way forward for etat07-etat10, and a simultaneously great big middle digit unfurled in the face of convention.
The contents were first released in 1961 as part of Expériences Musicales, a six 10-inch set. That edition of 50 (which goes for thousands of bucks, if it goes at all) offered 20 tracks, but in 1973 composer Ilhan Mimaroglu culled eight of the selections for the LP Musical Experiences (ditto the multi-thousand-dollar price tag), which is reissued here. Untrained sound making is a not uncommon impulse to be sure, but today most examples fall into the category of noise music, of which Dubuffet’s exercises can register as fascinatingly predictive.
And not just noise, but avant-jazz honk, the deep weeds of free-improv, and most interestingly, the hands-on layering of sound, as Dubuffet used two tape recorders and then edited the results. But most of all, Musical Experiences delivers a generous lesson while putting it into action; if you want to make music, pick up an instrument and create a sound. If you like the results then others might, as well. It’s as simple as that.
Jean Dubuffet, Musical Experiences:
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Warner Jepson, Totentanz:
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Remko Scha, Machine Guitars:
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John Duncan, Organic:
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Annea Lockwood, Glass World:
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