Tag: Tim Hodgkinson

A detailed update from ReR Megacorp:

BAKU: SYMPHONY OF SIRENS SOUND EXPERI.MENTS IN THE SOVET AVANT GARDE – ORIGINAL DOCUMENTS AND RECONSTRUCTIONS of 74 KEY WORKS of MUSIC, POETRY and AGITPROP from the RUSSIAN AVANT GARDE 1908-1942

In 1922 Arseni Avraamov composed and conducted a visionary public sound event, activating the entire port city of Baku: its factory sirens, the ships horns of the entire Caspian flotilla, two batteries of artillery, several full infantry regiments, trucks, seaplanes, 25 steam locomotives, an array of pitched whistles and several massive choirs. Constantly referenced but forever lost, this extraordinary event is here painstakingly reconstructed and spatialised to approximate the original experience. Plus 39 other priceless sound works, including the legendary Victory over the Sun and other lost DOCUMENTs of Malevich, Dziga Vertov, Nikolai Foregger & his Orchestra of Noises, Sergei Prokofiev, El Lissitsky, Velimir Khlebnikov, Ivan Ignatyev & The Ego Futurist Group, Mikhail Matiushin, Alexei Kruchenykh, Georgi Yakoulov, Konstantin Melnikov, Igor Severyanin, Vasilisk Gnedov, Vladimir Kasyanov & The Futurist Circle, David Burliuk, Elena Guro, Olga Rozanova, H2SO4 Group, Simon Chikovani, The Nothingists, Vasily Kandinsky, Danil Harms, Igor Terent ev, Mikhail Larionov, The Psycho-futurists group, Vasily Kamensky, Varvara Stepanova and Roman Jakobson.

CD2: Enthusiasm! The Dombass Symphony 1930 is possibly Dziga Vertov s most revolutionary achievement: a symphony of abstract industrial noise for which a specially designed giant mobile recording system was constructed it weighed over a ton in order to capture the din of mines, furnaces and factories. For Vertov, the introduction of sound film didn t mean talkies, but the opportunity to collage, montage and splice together constructions of pure environmental noise. In addition, this CD collects together for the first time a definitive library of original sound DOCUMENTs from the Russian Avantgarde: contemporary recordings of Alexander Mossolov, Julius Meytuss, Roman Jakobson, Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Lili Brik, David Burliuk, Sergei Esenin, Vasily Kamensky, Semen Kirsanov, V.I. Lenin, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Alexandra Kollontay, Leon Trotsky, Boris Pasternak, Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelshtam, Ilya Ehrenburg, Marina Tsvetaeva, Naum Gabo, Noton Pevsner and Dmitri Shostakovich.

BOOK: A comprehensive overview of the complexity and breadth of the many early C20 Russian avantgarde movements, followed by detailed notes and contexts for the individual recordings – including summary biographies of the main actors; additional work notes about the process of the extraordinary Baku reconstruction; a bibliography, rare photographs, web research links, artwork, facsimiles of contemporary DOCUMENTs, a comparative timeline of European and Russian Avantgardes and the first English translation of an article by Avraamov about the symphony. This is a definitive library collection, some seven years in the making and possibly our most important release of recent years.

Henry Cow Box

HENRY COW: 40th ANNIVERSARY BOX SET – VOL 1 – 5 CDs , box, book

THE 40th ANNIVERSARY HENRY COW BOX SET
9 CDs and 1 DVD with 2 substantial books – in two solid Boxes. LIMITED EDITION.

Assembled over 15 years, this collection gives for the first time some idea of the breadth and depth of Henry Cow s work. Always very much a live band, performance was their metier, and a concert might range far – always driven by an intense dialogue between tightly knit compositions and radically OPEN improvisation. The officially released LPs tell at best only half this story, and one purpose of this definitive collection is to set the work back into its broader context. These are all previously unreleased recordings, that include many compositions and improvisations new to anyone who only knows the official releases, DOCUMENTation of a number of one-off projects and events and – where different or remarkable enough to justify inclusion – live versions of parts of the LP repertoire. Many of these recordings are high quality radio transcriptions taken directly from the original masters, others are less hi-fi, but justified we think by their historic and musical quality. And everything has been carefully transferred and re-mastered by Bob Drake to the best audio quality that current technology allows without interference or tampering.

MARTUSCIELLO, ELIO: To extend the visibility DVD

In a limited Edition of 2000 numbered copies this DVD comes in a threefold art DVD case with a full colour 48 page book offereng substantial exegetical essays (in English and Italian) by Tim Hodgkinson and Sebastiano Giacobello) and additional artwork by Ale Sordi and Ester Curcio. It s is a fully integrated electronic composition/animation exploring and aestheticising the contemporary fact of the digital unification of visual and aural data. It is also a meditation on the earth, its fragility, order, chaos, art and hubris. In six explorations, using all manner of digital processing techniques Elio animates abstract sequences of imagery derived from satellite pictures of our beleaguered planet and a mixture of concrete and synthetic – always highly composed and processed – sound. It is neither a film with soundtrack nor a composition with pictures but rather a contribution to a still unfamiliar medium, a rather demanding medium. Essentially it is a domestic installation, or the C21 multimedia version of a small print edition.