72 hours of Love

 

Now I want to hear the 72-hour version! 

On the same record, there's also "Water Music"

I'm interested in these composer dudes who just do one or two or maybe three tape / electronic pieces - and then revert to the orchestral / choral palette. 

Takemitsu also did this electro-acoustic piece  - harp + tape 

Other dabblers include Ligeti, Boulez, and Henri Sauguet, who did just the one concrete piece, among my absolute favorite pieces of electronic music ever

Ligeti's efforts:"Glissandi" and "Artikulation" 

Wonder why Kubrick didn't use either of these in 2001?

Boulez bits: 

And this job has some tape in amidst the tiddlybonk 

What disinclined these chaps from going any further? 

Ligeti expressed frustration: ""I am in a prison. One wall is the avant-garde; the other is the past. I want to escape."

Yet according to this liner note chappie, Ligeti had mastered how to express emotion through tape rather than the usual gimmickry and discontinuous sound-events

Arel in the pink

 

hitherto unavailable 

more Bülent beauty

mouth music (Todd is Odd) (wordscapes)

 

not mouth music, but electronic album by Todd that is excellent stuff

This tune is also well worth a listen and it's called "Wordscapes"

https://newfocusrecordings.bandcamp.com/track/george-todd-wordscapes

ústní hudba (the importance of being Ernst)

you, Berk!

Watch this - https://vimeo.com/255347738 -  for a reconstruction of Ernest Berk's avant choreography accompanied by Berk's own electronic music,  organised by Christoph Winkler in early 2018 and titled "The Complete Expressionist". The piece will be staged again in Berlin on September 3rd and 4th this year.

Reconstruction rationale:

"On three consecutive nights at HAU2, a rich programme of performances and lectures will explore the life and legacy of choreographer, electronic music composer, improviser, dance therapist, and pedagogue Ernest Berk. Berk’s innovative, multifarious career spanned six decades and reflected deep involvement in leftist politics and devoted interest in non-Western aesthetics.... 
Berk opened a studio in Camden, London and began dedicating himself more seriously to the composition of electronic music and musique concrète, at first mainly for his own performances but then also for theatre, television, and film. His synthesis of musique concrète and movement made him one of the most visionary in a wave of pioneering electronic music composers....  It wasn’t until the 1980s that Berk would return to Germany – this time to Berlin, where he began teaching music therapy and improvisation at both the performing arts and music departments at the Arts university, Hochschule der Künste (now Universität der Künste)....

In “The Complete Expressionist”, the celebrated and versatile Berlin choreographer Christoph Winkler will oversee the long-overdue reconstruction of Ernest Berk’s dance pieces and the performance of selected musical compositions as live tape concerts.... Whereas some performances strive to provide accurate reconstructions of original pieces, others will reference the originals through performativity or feature new compositions that pay tribute to Berk through adherence to his texts about performance. The evening, which resembles programme cycles typical of the 1960s and 70s in its eclectic collaging of short works, includes solo dances, duets, and group pieces both pre-composed and improvised. A lifelong believer in and practitioner of nudism, in the 1970s Berk regularly hosted “trance dance sessions” at his studio in which he improvised repetitive electronic rhythms and dancers moved, naked, in repetitive gestures." 

A couple of people associated with the PAN label - Rashad Becker and Pan  Daijing - were involved in "The Complete Expressionist".

"These sessions will be reenacted via two pieces, and group A will provide the live soundtrack using samples of Berk’s original rhythmic patterns. In collaboration with Pan Daijing, Rashad Becker will use fragments from Berk’s original material but also present new material inspired by Berk’s working methods, musical structures, and textual instructions.

"A short BBC film clip about Berk, select video art pieces, and talks by British experimental musician Ian Helliwell and theatre and dance researcher Patrick Primavesi will round out the presentations. Listening stations featuring Berk’s numerous compositions will also be installed in the HAU2 foyer."

Damn would love to have heard the Berk tuneage on those listening stations!

All that exists out there is an unfindable private press album in a very small run presumably done for the dance performances, and some contributions to a library album, An Album Of Space And Science Fiction Tracks And Unusual Brass Fanfares, equally unfindable.



Actually that's not quite true - two tunes appeared on the CD with Ian Helliwell's Tape Leaders book, "Chigger Sound 1" and "No Fish or Oh Mr Bard"

But the vast majority of his music, some 230 compositions, languish out of earshot.

But they still exist - safely kept if inaccessible to most everybody who'd be interested - in an archive in Cologne:

Content:
Berk, Ernest, 1909-1993, dancer, choreographer. 

The estate of Ernest Berk: 

The Historical Archive of the City of Cologne has been home to the artistic legacy of Ernest Berk since April 1994: audio tapes with accompanying works directories, a tape recorder, concert program, newspaper articles and letters. This hitherto neglected estate opens up the possibility of exploring another area of ​​Berk's artistic activity, which has hitherto been predominantly known as a dancer and choreographer: the composition of electronic music in the field of tension between "musique concrète" and "modern dance" - two terms, Berk has often chosen as the motto of his performances. 

The life of Ernest Berk:

Ernest Berk was born on October 12, 1909 in Cologne, from where he worked as a solo dancer and choreographer at various locations after training at the Cologne Wigman Institute (expressive dance) and at the Rheinische Musikschule (composition). 

In 1934 Berk went to England with his wife Lotte. Here was his ambition to make new forms of dance public through a wide range of art. In 1955 he founded his own studio for electronic music in London. With his instruments, he created a complete work of about 230 tape compositions for ballet, expressive dance, film and television. In 1985, Berk followed a call to the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin, where he expanded his activities through teaching, as an actor in the theater and in feature films. On September 30, 1993, Ernest Berk died in Berlin.

Find list by Martin Köhler 

Contains: 

correspondence, personal documents, production and teaching materials, audio tapes, photos 

Notices: Closed until: 01.01.2024 
Amount: 22 boxes, approx. 14.00 meters of tape


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Here's something I found online that may well be Berk's music - it's not identified as such - as the score to an "unrehearsed live performance with Peter Donebauer, Simon and dancer Ernest Berk" from the late Seventies..


In Earnest 1979 - clip from Peter Donebauer on Vimeo.


Then there's Berk's score to this short film by David Gladwell.




Public Information were supposed to reissuing some Berk music but they've gone awfully quiet recently - last release was 2016. 

shadok boksing

wiki entry entiere

"Les Shadoks is an animated television series created by French cartoonist Jacques Rouxel (26 February 1931 – 25 April 2004)[1] which caused a sensation in France when it was first broadcast in 1968–1974.

The Shadoks were bird-like in appearance (in the tradition of cartoon birds they had beaks with teeth), were characterised by ruthlessness and stupidity and inhabited a two dimensional planet.

Another set of creatures in the Shadok canon are the Gibis, who are the opposite to the Shadoks in that they are intelligent but vulnerable and also inhabit a two-dimensional planet.

Rouxel claims that the term Shadok obtains some derivation from Captain Haddock of Hergé's The Adventures of Tintin and the Gibis (who wear Bowler hats, which unlike their heads, contain their brains) are essentially GBs (Great Britons).

The Shadoks were a significant literary, cultural and philosophical phenomenon in France.

Even today, the French occasionally use satirical comparisons with the Shadoks for policies and attitudes that they consider absurd. The Shadoks were noted for mottos such as:

"Why do it the easy way when you can do it the hard way?"
"When one tries continuously, one ends up succeeding. Thus, the more one fails, the greater the chance that it will work."
"If there is no solution, it is because there is no problem."
"To reduce the numbers of unhappy people, always beat up the same individuals."
"Every advantage has its disadvantages and vice versa."
"If there is one chance out of a 1000 to succeed, rush failing the 999 first tries."
The Shadoks had five monosyllabic words in their language: "Ga", "Bu", "Zo", "Meu" and "Ni" (French spelling). But their brain had only four cells. So they could only remember the last four ones heard.

The Shadoks were also noted for their seemingly useless and endless pumping — as the Shadok say: "Better to pump even if nothing happens than to risk something worse happening by not pumping".

In 1973 The Shadoks appeared on Thames Television, London's ITV company, in the early evening. Kenneth Robinson provided the narration in English."


The Shadoks music by Robert Cohen-Solal appeared back in the late Sixties - or some of it  anyway- on this Prospective 21e Siecle release

Robert Cohen-Solal Shadoks (7:47)
A1a – Les Rumeurs Géophysiques De La Planète Shadok
A1b – Les Démêlés D'Un Shadok À Bicyclette Sur Une Route Et Sur, Sous Et Dans Des Escaliers
A1c – Visite Médicale Chez Le Sorcier-Psychanalyste-Plombier
A1d – La Machine À Pomper
A1e – Le Combustible « Cosmogol 999 »


Was reissued in its entirety not so long ago, here is a megamix sampler






below, other Cohen-Solal from an animation or short film, unofficially reissued by a micro-label that was actually the precursor to Creel Pone

Mundmusik (Kayn in the membrane)

One of the first electronic avant-classical albums I acquired was this deep purple Deutsche Grammophon release from 1970 with this on one side and Luigi Nono's Contrappunto Dialettico Alla Mente on the other. Only $3! Those were the days.

Roland Kayn's very productive 1968:

"The electronic composition Cybernetics I is realised in a provisional studio at the NDR, Hamburg. Kayn also completes the first version of Cybernetics II for seven choir groups, sound producers, sound sources, live electronics, and tape. Preparatory work for Cybernetics III begins, using only vocal sounds of humans and animals as the starting material."

tape music

mond muziek (vloeibare taal)

det var i morgen (danske but yes danske)

blurb from  Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology 

"This release presents a selection of sound experiments made by Danish tape amateurs during the period of 1959-1976. The pieces included on the record are all contributions, which have been submitted to Danish tape amateur contests, but none of the works have been released before. The compilation represents a fragment of a previously overlooked and forgotten piece of Danish sound- and music history, where people experimented with the tape recorder in their spare time, creating sound collages and electronic music. "

Institute for Danish Sound Archaeology  who also reissued this earlier-Creeled beaut by Knud Viktor