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5CD BOX
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KR 092CD
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Electroacoustic Works celebrates the 100th anniversary of Iannis Xenakis (on May 29th, 2022). Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) is one of the most important composers of the 20th century avantgarde whose influence on music can be traced to the present day -- not only in the world of conservatory-trained composers but also in various streams of current non-academic underground aesthetics such as experimental electronic music, noise and industrial. After he arrived in Paris in 1947, Xenakis not only studied composition with Messiaen and later became a member of the famous GRM (Groupe de recherches musicales), he also worked as assistant to the famous architect Le Corbusier and realized, amongst others, the Philips Pavilion for the World Exhibition in Brussels 1958. His compositions often are based on mathematical principles which give his music an unprecedented aesthetic and "shocking otherness" (The Guardian). Although Xenakis also composed for orchestra (his most famous works are "Metastasis", "Pithoprakta", and "Terretektorh"), electronic music became his way for exploring new ideas and concepts and to develop new techniques like a graphic interface for sound synthesis or later, when computers were more easily accessible, his so-called "stochastic synthesis" (Gendy 3, S.709 > Disc V, Late Works). Xenakis's first electroacoustic pieces, like "Diamorphoses" or "Bohor", turned out groundbreaking works while the latter even caused, as Michel Chion put it, the "greatest scandal of electroacoustic music" on the occasion of its performance 1968 at the GRM in Paris. His so-called "Polytopes" were overwhelming multimedia performances with especially designed architectures, laser and light shows etc. where sometimes up to several hundred loudspeakers were used to move the sounds in space. For example, his most famous composition "Persepolis", commissioned by the Persian Shah, premiered in 1971 in Shiraz-Persepolis (Iran) as a performance including light-tracks, laser beams, groups of children walking around with torches and 59 loudspeakers to project the music in an open-air situation. The most radical aspects of sound can be found in Xenakis's late work and its merciless reduction to harsh, almost ruthless sound synthesis. In the early nineties, he devoted himself to the concept of a composing machine: a machine that designs everything independently and calculates the finished piece, the algorithm is the work. Years of source studies and comparative research by zeitkratzer director Reinhold Friedl, in collaboration with sound engineer Martin Wurmnest, made these critically reflected stereo mixes possible, which were appropriately mastered by Rashad Becker and which, in addition to the aspect of fidelity to the source, put the listener in the center. 5CD box set includes booklet with English/German liner notes by Reinhold Friedl (zeitkratzer) and rare photos from the Xenakis archive.
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KR 089LP
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Iannis Xenakis's early electroacoustic works define already the compositional space he is using later in his mature, almost one-hour long works like Persepolis or La Légende d'Er. After arriving in Paris as a Greek refuge in 1947, Xenakis quickly found a work as construction engineer with the architect Le Corbusier. He tried in vain for several years to become a member of the Groupe De Musique Concrète (GRM) and thus to gain access to the electroacoustic studios at the French radio. Pierre Schaeffer accepted him only when not only Messiaen pushed for it, but also the conductor Hermann Scherchen lobbied for him. Diamorphoses was his first attempt at composing musique concrète and was to remain his only one. He carefully recorded small sounds and worked on them systematically in weeks of tape-snapping. But he also combined sound material that presumably came from the GRM's Sonothèque, and here his fable for powerful sound masses was already apparent. Concret Ph originally was a sound installation: as Le Corbusier's assistant, he had been allowed to completely design the architecture of the pavilion for the Brussels World's Fair 1958, but his music was only to serve as a break filler between the repetitions of the main attraction: the Poème électronique by Edgar Varèse with projections by Le Corbusier. Under the title Interlude Sonore, Xenakis created a tape consisting of the most minimal tape snippets sticked together and got something that sounded almost like the tickling of glowing coal. Xenakis anticipated granular synthesis in analog tape form: the combination of little sound grains giving birth to a new sound. Orient Occident is an extract from music for a documentary film about the encounter of Eastern and Western cultures, shortened by about half. Xenakis had also used non-Western music for it, most of which is absent from the electroacoustic piece -- and yet even here one finds a reference to his many adaptations of ethnological music. Bohor caused -- as Michel Chion put it -- the "greatest scandal of electroacoustic music" -- on the occasion of its performance 1968 at the GRM in Paris. Curiously, hardly anyone noticed the piece when it was premiered in 1962. Xenakis simultaneously played four stereo tapes at extreme volume on eight speakers positioned around the audience, creating an ecstatic sound experience: close-ups of Persian jewelry are used, and large thunderbolts and stringed instruments like those built at the GRM by the Baschet brothers at the time the piece was written.
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KR 024LP
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Individual LP from the Electroacoustic Works boxset. The second release in the Perihel series is one of the most famous electroacoustic compositions by Iannis Xenakis. When Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001), who had fought against the occupation as part of the communist resistance, moved to Paris in 1947 it was the start of a highly creative and impressive career. Xenakis not only studied composition with Olivier Messiaen and became one of the most innovative composers of the 20th century, he also worked as assistant to Le Corbusier and realized a.o. the Philips Pavilion for the World Exhibition in Brussels, 1958. His compositions often are based on mathematical principles (in 1966 he founded the CEMAMu - Centre d'Etudes de Mathématique et Automatique Musicales), which give his music an unprecedented aesthetic and as The Guardian would say, a "shocking otherness". The most famous works of Xenakis, who won the Polar Music Prize (considered the unofficial Nobel Prize for music) in 1999, are his compositions for orchestra Metastasis, Pithoprakta and Terretektorh (where the 88 musicians are spread within the audience) and the electroacoustic compositions Persepolis, Concret PH, Bohor and La Légende d'Eer where Xenakis integrated his stochastic synthesis sounds for the first time. As legendary as this piece is, there is an impenetrable thicket of versions and stories around La Légende d'Eer, it exists in different releases, with wrong sample rates or digitized backwards. This version uses the 8-track-version that Xenakis himself presented at Darmstädter Ferienkurse in August of 1978. As the automatic spatialization is lost, this became the only original version of this composition and is presented here (mixed down to stereo by Martin Wurmnest who tried to preserve the spatial movements as perceptible as possible. La Légende d'Eer not only became a milestone of electroacoustic music but is also an important reference for noise and industrial musicians up to the present day. Mixed by Martin Wurmnest, mastered & cut by Rashad Becker. Includes insert with liner notes by Reinhold Friedl.
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KR 091LP
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Iannis Xenakis's late electroacoustic music became electronic: all sounds are synthetic "explicit computer music" as Peter Hoffmann called it. The music presented here shows Xenakis's way back from spatialized immersive music and multimedia spectacle to simple loudspeaker music. The sound does not move anymore, there are no synchronized visuals: nothing remains but structured noise. Xenakis used two inventions he had already presented in the context of the Polytopes: sounds created by stochastic synthesis in La Légende d'Eer and sound from his graphic interface transferring music into sound, the UPIC machine, in Mycenae Alpha for the Polytope de Mycènes. For Taurhiphanie and Voyage Absolu Des Unari Vers Andromède he so-to-say "painted" the music, using his UPIC machine: drawings are transferred directly into sound. Better to say: into noise! Xenakis's predilection for noise, found especially in his electronic music, became more and more obvious and even more pure and raw. Again, Xenakis was ahead of his time: what began as industrial music in England and started its triumphal procession as noise music and power electronics at the end of the eighties is found in his later electronic music in an even more radical form. At the premiere of Taurhiphanie in his last Polytope-like multimedia production with bulls and horses in a bullring in Arles, France, even the animals reacted so disturbed that the performance became a great failure. Remaining is only the digital music composition Taurhiphanie, music to intimidate bulls. Towards the end of his life -- his last composition was realized in 1997 and he died in 2001 -- Xenakis concentrated on one of his most contradictory dreams: a composer who invented such powerful overwhelming and emotional music as Xenakis thought he could teach a machine to do the same. He believed in the possibility to invent a composing machine and he worked hard on it. The computer, with the help of which he realized his last two electronic works, Gendy 3 and S.709, created random-based digital sample values and then transferred them directly into sound. Multidimensional computation of random values or changes in parameters produced similar but different pieces. Xenakis was never ideological, he simply chose the most beautiful results (the numbers in the titles probably refer to the versions).
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KR 090LP
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"Hibiki Hana-Ma" was created in 1969 for the Steel Pavilion of the Japan Iron and Steel Federation at the Expo 1970 in Osaka as musical part of a multimedia show. Even though the work does not bear the designation in its title, it can be already regarded as a Polytope: it was created for a specific architectural location, lasers and mirrors have been installed: a light choreography by the Japanese artist Keiji Usami accompanied the spectacle. This concept of synchronized laser and light choreographies -- now directed by Xenakis himself -- can soon be found in Polytope de Cluny 1972 and 1978 again in the Diatope (La Légende d'Eer). But Hibiki Hana-Ma is also a hermaphrodite in another sense: on the Japanese record release from 1970 Seiji Ozawa is credited as conductor of the Japan Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra and Kinshi Tsuruta as Biwa-soloist (a traditional Japanese string instrument). By listening one quickly realizes that the music is not orchestral or Biwa music, but only uses electronically processed recordings as source material for an electroacoustic music. Xenakis's first explicit Polytope (Polytope de Montreal 1967) was originally conceived for four orchestras, and then transferred to tape for practical and financial reasons. The first concept of a Polytope was an installation with live-orchestra-music -- as the tape version is a recording without further electroacoustic treatment, it is not included in this release. Like Hibiki Hana-Ma, Mycenae Alpha is also a special case but for another reason: it was composed for his last Polytope (Polytope de Mycènes 1978) and consists exclusively of synthetic sounds, realized with his graphic system UPIC. The result is rough and sober and marks the beginning of his last electroacoustic compositions, shifting back to purely electronic music. With Hibiki Hana-Ma and Mycenae Alpha, the first side of the record vividly demonstrates the vast musical range of the Polytopes, from recorded orchestral sounds to purely electronic parts. The synthesis of the most diverse musical materials had taken place in between, especially in compositions like Persepolis (1972) and the joyful-noisy Polytope de Cluny (1972) that is presented here on Side B. Polytope de Cluny was performed several times a day for six months in Paris and was a real multimedia event: the audience could relax on pillows on the floor of an old Roman bath in the middle of Paris and listen to Xenakis's architecture of sound and light.
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KR 044LP
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Individual LP from the Electroacoustic Works boxset. After La Légende d'Eer in 2016 (KR 024LP), the Perihel series presents one of the milestones of electroacoustic music: Iannis Xenakis's mind-blowing, 54-minutes oeuvre Persepolis. Persepolis is the longest electroacoustic composition by Iannis Xenakis (1922-2001) who ranks among the most influential 20th century avant-garde composers. Commissioned by the Persian Shah, the piece was part of a multimedia performance -- Xenakis's so-called "polytopes" -- which premiered in 1971 in Shiraz-Persepolis (Iran) as a performance including light-tracks, laser beams, groups of children walking around with torches, and 59 loudspeakers to project the music in an open-air situation. Xenakis had realized Persepolis on 8-track analog tape in the Studio Acusti in Paris and released a stereo reduction on vinyl in the famous Philips series "Prospective 21e Siècle" in 1972, adding the new subtitle "We bear the light of the earth", his most hymnal title ever. Out of print for decades now, the LP became -- especially the Japanese edition from 1974 -- one of the most expensive collector's item of electroacoustic music. There were some later CD versions with different durations -- too long due to a wrong sample rate, others shortened by three minutes due to other reasons. The Perihel series now presents a new version: mixed from the original master 8-track tapes by longtime zeitkratzer sound engineer Martin Wurmnest and mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin -- the same experts who had already taken care of the 2016 Karlrecords release of La Légende d'Eer, another milestone composition among the works of the Greek-French avant-garde composer. Previous releases in the Perihel series, curated by Reinhold Friedl: Guy Reibel's Douze Inventions en Six Modes de Jeu (KR 028LP, 2015); Iannis Xenakis's La Légende d'Eer (KR 024LP, 2016), John Cage's Complete Song Books (KR 029LP, 2016). 180 gram vinyl; Includes insert and download code.
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REGRM 007LP
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2020 repress, originally released in 2013. Recollection GRM assembles Greek experimental composer Iannis Xenakis' works for Groupe de Recherches Musicales circa 1957-1962. "Concret PH" (1958) was assembled for the Brussels World Fair. The industrialist Philips commissioned Le Corbusier's famous "Philips Pavilion": "I'll create an electronic poem for you, he said. Everything will happen inside: sound, light, color, and rhythm." Iannis Xenakis designed the architectural blueprint and composed "Concret PH" meant to psychologically prepare the public for the show created inside, accompanied by a musical piece by Edgard Varèse. The 400 speakers that lined the inner shell were meant to fill the space through the sound sparkles of "Concret PH" and achieve a joint emanation of architecture and music, conceived as a whole: the roughness of the concrete and its internal friction coefficient found an echo in the timbre of the sparkles. "Orient-Occident" (1960) was originally composed for a film by Enrico Fulchignoni for UNESCO. The film describes a visit to the museum comparing artifacts produced by various cultures and highlighting their interaction, dating back to ancient times. From an abstract point of view, the composer regards this work as a solution to the problem of finding highly diversified means of transition, meant to link a type of material to another. One indeed witnesses a varied gradation of mutations, interplays, overlaps, cross-fading, sudden shifts, and hidden junction points. "Diamorphoses" (1957-1958) portrays continuity and discontinuity within evolution. Here are two aspects of being, whether in opposition or in communion. In "Diamorphoses" this antithesis was illustrated sections of sound strongly opposed to others, and particularly in organizations of continuous variations of average or "statistical" heights. "Bohor" (1962): Bohor (referring to Bors the Younger, Lancelot's cousin), is a character from the medieval cycle of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. "Bohor" is dedicated to Pierre Schaeffer. The author deliberately abstained from giving any descriptive information on his piece, letting the listener choose an imaginary route for himself. This release presents the 1968 version, revised by Iannis Xenakis himself and as yet not made available to the public. "Even though Iannis Xenakis never made 'musique concrète' in the sense given by Pierre Schaeffer, the GRM was a locus for experimenting with his ideas about sound and sound structures. These works, composed between 1958 and 1962, show a boldness as advanced as in his orchestral approach. The relationship between Xenakis and Schaeffer was often tense. It nevertheless entailed mutual recognition and respect towards each other's musical approach. Schaeffer found the piece disproportionate in terms of intensity but was indeed pleased by the dedication. The four pieces presented here, all produced at the GRM, undoubtedly demonstrate the experimental intent and the strictly 'physical' character of Xenakis' music, in that it provides the audience with a listening experience of a rare intensity." --François Bonnet & Christian Zanési; Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin, January 2013. Layout by Stephen O'Malley. Executive Production by Peter Rehberg.
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JD 126LP
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Jeanne Dielman presents a reissue of a collection of Iannis Xenakis's work titled Electronic Music, originally released in 1997. Some of the earliest works from a truly groundbreaking composer in the realms of electronic music, musique concrete, electro-acoustic, 20th century classical, and more. The Romanian-born, Greek-French composer Iannis Xenakis was instrumental in the introduction of mathematical models into composition and helped revolutionize electronic music in the middle 20th century. Collecting some of his earliest works in electronic and electro-acoustic music, this is a crucial set for any fans of 20th century classical experimentation.
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BVHAAST 9219
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"'Rebonds' (I. Xenakis), 'Akea' (I. Xenakis), 'Epicycles' (I. Xenakis), 'Mania' (C. Tsoupaki), 'Concerto For Oboe And Chamber Ensemble' (D. del Puerto) Machiko Takahasi (fl.), Ernest Rombout (ob.), Mark Dijcks, Ria Kleinjan (cl.), Jonathan Reeder, Stefanie Liedtke (bsn.), Fokke van Heel, Guillermo Zarzo (h.), Peter van Dinther (tp.), Willie Verdievel (tb.), Jan van der Sanden (tu.), Mifune Tsuji, Izumi Okubo, Paul Hendriks (vl), Susan Bierre (vla), Tadashi Tanaka (cel.), Thom de Ligt (b.) Johan Faber, Stephan Meier (perc.), Geoffrey Douglas Madge, Gerard Bouwhuis (p.), Rohan de Saram (cel.), Diego Masson (cond.) Recorded live at the Festival Nieuwe Muziek Middelburg 1990/1991/1992."
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