Sun Blindness Music
(Table Of The Elements - Re 75) CD $12.00 (Out-of-stock)
Home-recorded improvisations from 1965 through 1968, this is the first disc of three documenting Cale’s solo experiments and collaborations with other members of New York’s avant-garde underground (all previously unreleased until 2001). Without any real structure, the title track -- an incredibly extended improvisation consisting of just Cale and the Vox Continental organ -- explores minimalist sound dimensions, jams keys into place, locks into a series of drones, mounts pressure on the organ, clusters notes and creates a dissonant wash of noise. Resonant, booming drones escalate and disintegrate into silence as he prepares to wedge another cluster of keys in place. Raucous, guitar-driven “Summer Heat” is so awash with massive distortion that is sounds like pounding percussion more than guitar strumming, predating Branca’s guitar symphonies, Arnold Dreyblatt’s “sound of one string” experiments, and Metal Machine Music “The Second Fortress” manipulates the Vox in a series of high-pitched drones, and repetitious ambient textures.
Outside The Dream Syndicate
(Table Of The Elements - Li) Used CD $10.00 (Out-of-stock)
1993 reissue of minimalist classic, recorded in 1972. With one previously unreleased bonus track.
Point Source / Lapse
(Table Of The Elements) Used LP (one-sided) $10.00
Point Source sounds like a cross between minimalism and post-rock (with Dreyblatt on “excited bass,” Jim O’Rourke on drums, David Grubbs and Kevin Drumm on guitars, and Maureen Loughnare on violin). Lapse is traditional Dreyblatt string-based minimalism. From 2003. Clear vinyl
Solos For Contrabass Saxophone
(Table Of The Elements) Used LP $35.00
The first recordings of the Swedish saxophonist on the enormous and altogether imposing contrabass. Emphasis on the bass. Pressed in 2003 on clear vinyl, silk-screened on the reverse side with glow-in-the-dark ink, and packaged in clear vinyl jacket.
Thrum
(Table Of The Elements) Used LP (one-sided) $8.00
Fantastic music and noise from 2004 utilizing radio sound and electric guitar as realized by artists Peggy Ahwesh and Barbara Ess respectively. “Thrum sifts through detritus and stumbles on another dimension. It may be a house of the spirits or a tower of Babel in some far insect realm. It doesn’t matter. What makes this record remarkable is its fresh sense of absence, its longing for meaning and the ingenuity with which that longing is expressed.” Clear vinyl
Pullover
(Table Of The Elements) Used CD $4.00
Four German language texts by Markus Caspers expressed in German, regardless of the native tongue the various readers. On the semantic versions of the pieces, untreated vocals are permitted to appear, sometimes fading in and out, sometimes whispered and echoed, and sometimes even in a straight reading and sung melodically, while no recognizable voices appear on the abstract versions. Here the listener gets radio static, harsh waveforms, buzzes, burbles, whistles, and other unnamable treatments. Overall, Wehowsky retains the complex character of the human voice and balances the texts themselves and their transformations into abstract sound, with the possibilities and limitations of using such restricted sound sources. From 1996
Les Evening Gowns Damnées - 56 Ludlow Street 1962-1964, Volume I
(Table Of The Elements) Used CD $17.00 (Out-of-stock)
Readings of short stories and other audio excursions (featuring musical accompaniment by Tony Conrad, John Cale and Angus MacLise, and excerpts from the soundtrack to Flaming Creatures (the earthquake orgy scene). Sealed
Silent Shadows On Cinemaroc Island - 56 Ludlow Street 1962-1964, Volume II
(Table Of The Elements) Used CD $25.00 (Out-of-stock)
Highlights from exotic live events at the legendary theater–studio of filmmaking visionary and founding father of performance art. Early ’60s hilarity, tape and sound experiments, a chunk of the soundtrack to Smith’s watershed film Flaming Creatures, and a reading of “Pfeffernuss Flavored Aspirin.” Sealed
Harmonic Series
(Table Of The Elements) Used LP (one-sided) $20.00
A lovely and sublime nineteen-minute track from 2003, using sine waves, custom software, guitar and analog electronics. Blue vinyl with screen print on the B-side
Advent
(Table Of The Elements) Used CD $4.00
Privately issued in 1988 in a batch of 300, the 1997 reissue of this uncompromising, highly-individualized work earned a spot on Alan Licht’s “minimalism top 10” list. The primary distinguishing characteristic of the 41-minute composition, divided into three segments, is a hypnotic, two-chord piano figure that pulses with limited variation. In Part I Youngs makes his approach wielding only his plaintive vocals, repeatedly pleading “don’t fall apart,” in a manner that suggests he’s not directly addressing anyone outside his own skull. The heavy artillery comes out in Parts II and III, where extensive surgery (without an anesthetic) performed on a diseased oboe or two, conjures unearthly noises from every sector of the instrument’s established range and beyond, until he finally resorts to a full frontal electric guitar assault that unleashes rapturously anarchic sheets of sound, filling the air with red sparks as Youngs sharpens and bends all his blades in a futile attempt to overtake the unyielding piano.