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2LP
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HOL 138LP
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"Towards the end of the 1970s, a film about me and my work was made in Kabul for the South German TV program. The director was Arpad Bondy. In order to find a venue for my music that is typical for Afghanistan, it was agreed that my 'percussion environment,' a tubular cube of 2x2x2 meters including the associated instruments, would be transported on a barren, stony ridge in the Hindukush mountains. The people called the place 'Maidan,' which means nothing but 'place.' While a couple of men dragged the frame pipes and the instruments up the hill, I decided to carry my large Wuhan gong (100 cm diameter) up the mountain, in a kind of ritual. Michael Ranta sent me this gong from Wuhan/China to Kabul. With slow and careful steps, carrying the heavy gong like an umbrella on my head, I walked over the difficult rocky terrain without a path up. Suddenly a snake about two meters long came out of the rocks towards me and hissed aggressively at me... As I later discovered, it was a very venomous snake... I had to bring myself to kill the beautiful animal... I decided to name my solo performance Requiem For The Snake Of Maidan... While I was playing I only had one musician with me: the wind. I hung my metallophones on the linkage so that the wind could touch them and create sounds. The recording captured a few parts where I didn't have to lift a finger and the wind did everything that was necessary. The room was a wide landscape without any echo. If an echo can be heard in the recording, it is the reverberation from the big gong. Only a few noises came, apart from the wind, from outside... The big gong and the boo chals (Tibetan cymbals) produced a whole series of overtones. The string instruments, the metallo- and lithophones dominate the recording. In addition to the acoustic environment of my instruments, in some parts of my improvisation I used a battery-powered tape recorder (Uher 4400 report stereo IC) with a pre-recorded feeding tape that I had pre-recorded before alone or together with Michael Ranta in Kabul. The stones of the lithophone were collected by Ranta and myself in the valley of Goldara around an old collapsed Buddhist stupa. Almost each of the hundred stone plate we had lifted was ringing." --Hartmut Geerken
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LP
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HOL 094LP
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Holiday Records presents Orpheus by Hartmut Geerken. Fantastic sound poetry piece by Hartmut Geerken restringing the "Sun Harp", the Ukranian bandura that Sun Ra gave him in 1971 when he visited Egypt for the first time. The acoustics of his manual workings emerge without any esthetic intention: the bandura's voluminous resonating body forms the reverb of the room. Each manual action and each contact of the tuning key with the wooden body is "reverbed". The instrument creates its audio space. A mythic dream play is evoked: the myth's space of reverb. An ear ready to absorb, hears the labor pains of voice and string ahead of language and music. A human voice in search for language and thus for communication. A string instrument in search for sound and thus for music. Based on this phonemic pre-space, words do rise only sporadically. Through certain techniques of vocal chords the phonemes move close to the meditative Indian Dhrupad-singing, as well as to lunacy and disturbance. Animal languages, signals, shepherds' calls, silvered drum-language, ham-boning, calls, litany, subconscious voicings, sirens: the search for Eurydike and the search for the origin of letter and syllable, out of the breath. Besides one single "superimposition" no further mounting, no computer-generated sounds, no digital gimmicks, no remix or art mix do exist in this live-recorded dream play. Edition of 200.
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