Harmonia - Musik von Harmonia

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from Sherman Wick:

Categories provide simplification and generalization-especially in the music world. Music critics coin countless genres and sub-genres to link music and create connections between artists that actually only tenuously or entirely do not exist. For some groups-in particular, overtly commercial acts-the genres of pop, hip hop, punk, emo-punk, electronica et cetera are, unfortunately, far too appropriate and happily conformed to in order to continue to appeal to their record purchasing demographic. Admittedly, it is possible to excel within a genre-and categories act as a way of simplifying and understanding music. But for groups with exceptional artistic visions, the straightjacket of classification is too claustrophobic of a generalization-since they are not easily pigeonholed and willing to work in tight musical confines.

Harmonia exemplified a group that defied genre. Musik von Harmonia (1974) was the first collaborative effort between Cluster's Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Dieter Moebius and Neu!'s Michael Rother: a German supergroup, and genuine rarity, a colossal artistic success. The three members were skilled keyboard players, guitarists, electronic percussionists and composers. This was a group musically and conceptually miles ahead of its time. They have historically been lumped into the krautrock/kosmische musik genre (which is one of the most talented and forward-looking genres ever named). Among the seminal, disparate acts thrown in this category are: Popol Vuh, Can, Faust, Neu!, Kraftwerk, Amon Düül II, Ash Ra Tempel and Tangerine Dream. These groups share only a few common qualities: they are German speaking and creatively combine eclectic music forms of the past and present, especially early electronic, minimalist and avant-garde music. In interviews, the musicians deny a movement ever existed - and that they were scattered maverick groups attempting to overhaul or destroy the contemporary rock context. And they did it extremely well: listeners are gradually, with the passage of time, catching on to their precocity and influence. Harmonia was distinct in its structured approach to nascent electronic ambiance.  (article continued)

Bruce Palmer - The Cycle Is Complete

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LINER NOTES FOR BRUCE PALMER'S THE CYCLE IS COMPLETE

By Richie Unterberger

    At the end of the 1960s, the rock landscape was changing so radically, in manners so counter to the way things had been done just a few years previously, that many albums found their way to major label release that could have never been given the green light in any other era. One of the strangest of those is Bruce Palmer's The Cycle Is Complete, the sole solo album by Buffalo Springfield's original bass player. The record was nothing if not uncompromising, consisting of four largely instrumental, improvised-sounding psychedelic-jazz-world fusion pieces that bore little relation to conventional rock music, or even to conventional structured songs.

    Though the LP marked Palmer's first recorded venture as frontman, he had been in bands since the early 1960s, when he joined the Swinging Doors in Toronto. In the mid-1960s he was in the British Invasion-like combo Jack London & the Sparrows, leaving before the release of their first single to join the Mynah Birds. Fronted by singer Ricky James Matthews, the Mynah Birds eventually recruited a young Neil Young as guitarist in early 1966. The group got a contract with Motown and cut some unreleased tracks for the label in Detroit. But the sessions came to an end -- as did the Mynah Birds -- when Matthews was discovered to be AWOL from the American navy. That was hardly the last to be heard from Matthews, however; he would resurface in the late 1970s as funk superstar Rick James, and long before that would play an unheralded role on Palmer's solo album.

    Palmer and Young, in one of rock's most famous and romantic legends, set off to Los Angeles in Young's Hearse to try and find Young's friend Stephen Stills to start a band. They had no address for Stephen, but against incredible odds they found him when Stills and Richie Furay passed the Hearse going in the opposite direction on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. With the addition of drummer Dewey Martin, the musicians formed Buffalo Springfield, one of the greatest bands of the 1960s. Although Palmer didn't sing or write any of the group's material, his smoking, innovative bass lines were vital to the band's power, and his back-to-the-audience stage posture added some enigmatic mystery to the act's image.

    Palmer's stint in the Springfield, however, was stormy, as was the group's entire career. He was busted for pot in early 1967 and deported back to Canada for a few months. While he managed to get back into the States and rejoin the band for the last half of '67, another bust in early '68 instigated his final exit from the group, to be replaced by Jim Messina. He was considered for the bass slot in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young the following year, but rehearsals didn't pan out, although he does play on two tracks that surfaced on the CSNY box set in the early 1990s. That left him free to record his off-the-wall solo album for MGM.

    "MGM approached me, [producer] Don Hall and [MGM executive] Michael Curb, to do an album," Palmer remembered in John Einarson and Richie Furay's There’s Something Happening Here: The Story of Buffalo Springfield: For What It’s Worth. "I went in and did a demo for them. It was the first time I had written or sang a song in my life. I wrote it the night before. So I went in, did the song, played several instruments so it sounded like a band, they loved it, signed a contract, and I went in and did two and [a] half hours of instrumental music with Rick James and seven or eight other people. It was spontaneous music, over two hours long so I had to edit it down to 45 minutes."

    James, still going by the name Rick Matthews, added percussion and sings-scats here and there, sounding like a cross between Stephen Stills and Stevie Winwood when he breaks into stream-of-consciousness vocalese on "Oxo." The rest of the backing crew included organist Ed Roth; conga player Big Black (aka Danny Ray), a jazzman who'd done a few albums on his own; and four members of the fine folk-rock-psychedelic-world fusion band Kaleidoscope, then in their dying days. Only one of the four, violinist Chester Crill, had been in Kaleidoscope's first lineup; the others were drummer Paul Lagos, pianist Jeff Kaplan, and flute/oboe player Richard Aplan (aka Richard Aplanalp).

    Kaleidoscope had just worked with Hall on the soundtrack to Zabriskie Point, also issued on MGM, on which Hall (a DJ on pioneering Los Angeles FM rock station KPPC) had been music coordinator. As Crill (who played on The Cycle Is Complete under one of his several outrageous pseudonyms, Templeton Parcely) explains, the quartet of Kaleidoscopers had been engaged to work on three projects at the same time. One was Palmer's record; one was an even more obscure LP by singer-songwriter Curt Newbury, Half a Month of May Days (on which James/Matthews also appeared, and which Hall also produced); and the other was a solo album by Big Black, which Crill isn't even sure was released.

    To Crill's recollection, "The basic tracks were Bruce, Kaplan, and drums. I think Kaplan kind of helped him chart it all out, 'cause I think it wasn't everybody playing together. It wasn't live. Everybody heard those cuts, just with guitar and maybe a little piano, and then they layered it over a couple hours, one at a time. Everybody got one take.

    "If Kaplan show[ed] up on a session in those days, it was to try to make some sense out of it, 'cause he was a musicologist type. He would listen to something raw, and could write it up right away and kind of lead people in some kind of a way. It took a long time to get something out of it. There were like 900 layers on it. When I left, they had just gotten through doing two entire tracks on two of those really long ones of Aplanalp doing two oboe parts. By then, it was like chocolate mud."

    When the album was finished, Palmer added in There’s Something Happening Here: The Story of Buffalo Springfield: For What It’s Worth, "I handed it to them [MGM] and they dropped their drawers. I gave them what I thought music was all about, not what they thought music was all about. That was what I intended to do. They released it and I retired. I had a laugh at the industry's expense. I did that album and just had enough of the music business. I was seeing my friends turning into beets. Is this what I want to do? Is this what happened to music?"

    The record must have sold little upon its release in 1971, judging from how impossible it is to turn up an original, though Lester Bangs did find time to pan it in Rolling Stone as "long, long jams in a kind of limp noodle middling Eastern-Space vein, like a DMT hangover from the psychedelic era." His laugh at the industry's expense complete, Palmer made good on his promise to retire from the music scene, although he did play live with Neil Young briefly in the early 1980s (also appearing on Young's Trans album), and formed the tribute band Buffalo Springfield Revisited in the mid-1980s. -- Richie Unterberger

 contents copyright Richie Unterberger, 2000-2010 unless otherwise specified. 

Diplo - Express Yourself (feat. Nicky Da B)

Diplo teams up with Nicky Da B for the lead single of his upcoming Express Yourself EP released by Mad Decent.  Nothing too ground breaking here but it sure has got that early morning machine gun bounce.  Booyakasha.

Check it here via Soundcloud.

Boards of Canada - Boc Maxima

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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Boc Maxima was released by Boards of Canada on Music70 in 1996. This is prior to their more public releases on Skam Records and Warp Records. After Hi Scores was released on Skam Records, many of Boc Maxima songs were reused in 1998's Music Has the Right to Children. Boc Maxima was broadcast in full on Disengage in 2002.

Some songs have minor differences. The speech on "One Very Important Thought" differs between the two releases, as does the name of the song "Boc Maxima", renamed "Bocuma" for Music Has the Right to Children.

"Wildlife Analysis", "Boc Maxima", "Roygbiv", "Turquoise Hexagon Sun" and "One Very Important Thought" later appeared on Music Has the Right to Children. "Everything You Do Is a Balloon", "June 9th", "Nlogax" and "Turquoise Hexagon Sun" also appear on Hi Scores. "Rodox Video", "Nova Scotia Robots", "Skimming Stones", "Carcan", "M9" and "Original Nlogax" appeared on A Few Old Tunes (albeit in slightly different forms). "Sixtyniner" first appeared on Twoism. A longer version of "Chinook" appears on the Aquarius single.

"Niagara", "Red Moss", "Concourse" and "Whitewater" are exclusive to this release. The physical production of the album was limited to 50 copies world-wide, which were handed out to friends and family.

Can - Monster Movie

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Can’s debut album, Monster Movie, opens with the sounds of a Lou Reed-style side-project exploring punk and electronic music. The high highs and dissonant, feedback-laden guitar quickly bring to mind Cloud Taste Metallic-era Lips. As the drum and bass take things for an intense, slightly loopy twist, Mooney (half of the inspiration for the name of modern quintet, The Mooney Suzuki, Mooney’s replacement Damo Suzuki being, of course, the other) begins a Morrison-esque poetry/chanting session. “Father Cannot Yell” ends with nothing short of punching, pounding and squealing ecstasy.

Again sounding a bit like the Velvet Underground in steady, jangle-rock production, Can uses a common, traditional nursery rhyme for inspiration on “Mary, Mary So Contrary.” Karoli’s violin and Mooney’s emotion and spontaneity hold things together for an otherwise fairly straightforward piece, actually slightly reminiscent of “Heroin” towards the end.

“Outside My Door” really rocks my ass off for four straight minutes. It reminds me of some sort of pre-punk southern rock symphony written by a bunch of European lads. Though the chorus recalls Manzarek and The Doors, listening to “Outside My Door” is like seeing fossils of the ancestors of all garage, punk and progressive bands since the late sixties.

The final track checks in at just over twenty minutes, allegedly cut from a jam session originally running between six and twelve hours long (depending whom you ask), mixed and mastered by bassist Holger Czukay. A playful and uplifting track, “You Doo Right” highlights the repertoire of player Jaki Liebezet better than the previous three. What seems to be a heartfelt, lyrical celebration of love, Malcolm Mooney’s yelping draws comparisons to early Gordon Gano at times. Any one song that can seem to combine this with Mogwai-like progressive qualities and flicks and splatters of Pearl Jam’s No Code, all while being very entrenched in the roots of African tribal music, should be respected for the important part in musical history that it is.

“You Doo Right” did in fact stir up the new sound, the future of Can, heard on the following albums, Tago Mago and Ege Bamyasi. The only drawback I have with Monster Movie is the lacking production at some key moments. As far as debut’s are concerned, however, this one is as ground-breaking as any other rock group’s from this era.

Can, 1968
Jaki Liebezeit, Michael Karoli, Irmin Schmidt, Holger Czukay, Malcolm Mooney

Knife Party - 100% No Modern Talking

'100% No Modern Talking' by Knife Party

Albert Mangelsdorff & Lee Konitz - Art of the Duo

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from the All Music Guide:

No one has worked harder to elevate the art of the jazz duo than Lee Konitz. His 1967 session, The Lee Konitz Duets, was a seminal statement. This much-later duet session with trombone master Albert Mangelsdorff pales in comparison. Konitz has long espoused the belief that horn players can swing without a rhythm section, yet much of the time Mangelsdorff insists on serving as a faux bass -- really, tuba -- player. And when he uses his patented technique of singing into his horn while creating chords, he functions as a very simple guitar player. That said, anything with these two masters on it has its pleasures. Konitz creates tasty lines with souffle-like lightness, and when Mangelsdorff breaks free he provides some gruff, complementary solos. His use of mute on "Creole Love Call" offers a break from the session's monochromaticism. Konitz also brings some fetching originals to the session, notably "A Minor Blues in F" and "Cher Ami," which feature the kind of freewheeling counterpoint that would have been welcomed throughout The Lee Konitz Duets. 

~ David Dupont, All Music Guide

John Coltrane - First Meditations (for quartet)

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from Worldsrecords:

Not released initially until 1977, the music on this 1992 CD was the last recording made by the classic John Coltrane Quartet; other slightly later records found the group augmented by additional musicians. Four of the five movements on this release which are augmented by a lengthier second version of "Joy" would become part of the better known Meditations album along with another movement 2 months later when tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and drummer Rashied Ali temporarily made the group a sextet. Coltrane sticking here exclusively to tenor plays passionately, alternating ferocious explorations with more lyrical sections. Includes the full untouched version of "Joy" later replaced by "The Father And Son And The Holy Ghost".

Jackson and His Computer Band - Smash

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from http://www.dustedmagazine.com:

In everyday life, you are usually ostracized for wanton displays of self-indulgence. This should not be a problem for 26-year-old Parisian producer Jackson Fourgeaud as one suspects his relationship to the everyday is far-gone. For the casual listener, however, the issue remains. What exactly can you make of Jackson’s more-ideas-per-second electronic music?

You are there with Fourgeaud for the opening stretch of Smash. “Utopia” stitches together pleasure-spasm, helium-breath diva vocals, hanging them from the song’s humming, light-flare body like a child balancing baubles on the branches of a lit Christmas tree. Fourgeaud loves the heady stomp of glam rock, stringing its glitzy, brash stomp through current single “Rock On” and the hissing neon strobes of “Teen Beat Ocean.”

“Radio Caca” closes the album with pointillist scrawls of convulsive IDM, electrified particles dancing on the head of a bobby pin. The song acts a précis of Fourgeaud’s production technique: cumulative layers of compulsively rendered texture stacked and woven together in fantastical formations. You are continuallywatching an abstract machine make its way across the room, wondering if it will topple, Tinguely-like, into disrepair. Yet the best songs on Smash make for great pop. Fourgeaud’s stuttering melody lines are fishhooks that pierce deep into your skin.

Jackson’s debut album is not always a success, as Smash’s panoptic detail eventually turns homogeneous. Fourgeaud’s palette appears rich but he reapplies the same lexicon to every teetering structure. When Jackson’s productions work, they are so full of life the music explodes with the very joy of its own construction. However, the great grey patch in the middle of Smash suggests that Fourgeaud may well suffer from the gourmand’s curse: too much of a good thing. (A similar problem befell Akufen’s My Way - perhaps one of this record’s most immediate predecessors, though it works within a different genre.) Fourgeaud is a gifted producer with an enviable eye for detail and an ability to wrench almost profligate pleasure from the seizures of circuitry, but right now, a little Jackson goes a long way.

By Jon Dale

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Scraping Foetus Off The Wheel - Nail

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LONG PLAYER – 33 1/3 RPM – SOME BIZARRE/SELF IMMOLATION

ALL SONGS WRITTEN, PRODUCED AND PERFORMED BY SCRAPING FOETUS OFF THE WHEEL

PRODUCED BY CLINT RUIN/SCRAPING FOETUS OFF THE WHEEL AND WARNE LIVESEY

ENGINEERED BY WARNE LIVESEY

RECORDED AT LIVINGSTON, PARADISE AND WAVE STUDIOS LONDON 1985

MIXED AT LIVINGSTON AND CRESCENT STUDIOS

SONGS PUBLISHED BY INTERSONG

CHANGE YOUR MIND-MIND YOUR CHANGE-BLAST THE PAST-PAST THE BLAST

POSITIVE NEGATIVISM

ALL SONGS COMPOSED BY J. G. THIRLWELL

Harry Partch - The World of Harry Partch

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from the liner notes:

Change is in the wind. Western music is a little tired and wants to sit down. By electronic synthesis, prominent practitioners have diagnosed its ailment as an acute case of serialism with side effects attributed to aleatoritis. Rock now having reached a harmonic and contrapuntal respectability, we are ready for a breath of fresh air--a new season! Is Harry Partch just around the corner?

The musical world of Harry Partch is new and strange. His instruments, all hand-made by himself, have rarely been seen, and the sounds they produce have seldom been heard, at least not on this planet.

Forty years ago, Partch realized that American music wasn't really American but was only a facsimile of European convention and fashion. Serialism was only another step along this path, a path Partch wasn't interested in taking. In an attempt to retrace his steps, he found it was necessary to completely reinvestigate the nature of sound as music, and, for his point of departure, he chose to use the inherent musicality of the American language.

Partch's early compositions, dating from the 1930's, are all vocal, with small instrumental accompaniments. They are masterpieces of Americana, employing the language in a natural style uninfluenced by European traditions. BARSTOW comes from this period.

Although based on his earlier music in vocal style and structure, the more recent music of Partch provides a striking contrast. It is integrated theater on a grand scale. Parteh calls his esthetic position Corporeal, a music that is essentially "tactile." Not a believer in concert music, Partch mounts theater pieces that combine the senses of sound and sight. His instruments are part of the stage set; the musicians are in costume and sometimes involved in the stage action. Partch describes this dramatic staging as ritual, illuminating life and its psychological forces. At times, story line is communicated by the spoken word; at other times, by mime movement. Sight and sound, each complementing and intensifying the other, transport the viewer to a plane of catharsis.

The particular personal level from which Partch begins his works can be seen in this recent statement:

"The work that I have been doing these many years parallels much in the attitudes and actions of primitive man. He found sound-magic in the common materials around him. He then proceeded to make the vehicle, the instrument, as visually beautiful as he could. Finally, he involved the sound-magic and the visual beauty in his everyday words and experiences, his ritual and drama, in order to lend greater meaning to his life. This is my trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual."

The bulk of Partch's work dates from the past thirty years. THE WAYWARD, a collective title for four compositions--BARSTOW; THE LETTER; SAN FRANCISCO (newsboy cries); and, U. S. HIGHBALL--was finished in 1943. It is a setting of Americana, much of it coming out of the hobo experiences of Partch during the Depression, exploiting the natural rhythm and melodic contour of the American language. His first largescale theater work, OEDIPUS (1951), is the definitive musical setting of this drama. Out of this, the Partch theater style emerges. PLECTRA & PERCUSSION DANCES (1952), a dancetheater work, is comprised of three compositions-CASTOR & POLLUX; EVEN WILD HORSES; and, RING AROUND THE MOON. Another dance-theater work, THE BEWITCHED (1956), was performed in New York in 1959. REVELATION IN THE COURTHOUSE PARK (1960), billed as an "extravaganza," is a musictheater work of large proportions, employing not only a large cast of actors, dancers, and onstage musicians, but also a marching brass band, acrobats, gymnasts on apparatus, and a filmed fireworks display. WATER! WATER! (1961) saw his instruments moving on stage as participants.

In 1963, Partch started a study work, AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY PETALS FELL IN PETALUMA, in preparation for his latest work, DELUSION OF THE FURY (1966). DELUSION has the potential of establishing a new style in Western music theater. Partch has always wished for a more diversified, less specialized type of performer; the type of performer who not only plays instruments, but who can also sing, act, and dance. In DELUSION, the musicians do sing (as was done in THE BEWITCHED), but their instrumental passages are so arranged that they could dance also, if such people were available. Such concepts are quite ancient, Partch acknowledges, but he feels that in present practice this has all been abandoned. It is his purpose to reunite the intellectual with the sensual, in his Corporeal concept.

As the basis for his music, and the tuning of his instruments, he has formulated a 43 (or more) tones-to-the-octave scale tuned in just intonation, with each tone being a frequency ratio to a fundamental 1/1 (392 cycles per second). Partch describes his theories in his book GENESIS OF A MUSIC (University of Wisconsin Press, 1949; now out of print but tentatively scheduled to be reprinted by Da Capo Press):

"The major contribution of Monophony [Partch's name for his system] as an intonational system is its realization of a subtle and acoustically precise interrelation of tonalities, all stemming or expanding from unity, 1/1. This interrelation is not capable of manifold modulations to "dominants" or to any other common scale degrees; it is not capable of parallel transpositions of intricate musical structures; it does not present any tone as any specific tonality identity. Conversely, it is capable of both ordinary and hitherto unheard modulations to the natural limits imposed by Just Intonation and the arbitrary limit of 11; it is capable of an expanded sense of tonality, from Identities 1-3-5 to Identities 1-3-5-7-9-11. It is capable of great variety in that expanded sense; it does offer twenty-eight possible tonalities, more than are inherent in Equal Temperament, and therefore a greater total of tonality identities; or assumable senses, that does Equal Temperament."

Composer as well as theorist, Partch gradually evolved his array of instruments as his musical concepts expanded. One of his earliest, dating from 1930 but preceded by other experiments, is the Adapted Viola, a viola with an extended fingerboard that is played between the knees. Two lyre-like instruments, Kitharas I & II, date from 1938 and have twelve hexads per instrument; glass rods produce gliding tones on four of the chords.

Six Harmonic Canons have been constructed since 1945; five feature forty-four strings on one plane, while one is designed with two planes of forty-four strings each. The first set is horizontal while the second set dips from a high nut at the right to a lower set of tuning pegs at the left. The two sets intersect about seven inches from the right. Consequently, there is a choice of either set, or both together. Moveable bridges are placed underneath the Canon strings, which are plucked by fingers and picks as well as struck with sticks.

Also dating from 1945 are two Chromelodeons, reed pump organs tuned to the complete 43-tone octave with total ranges of more than five acoustic octaves. All the other instruments are tuned to the Chromelodeons.

Another stringed instrument is the Surrogate Kithara, with two banks of eight strings, and having sliding glass rods under the strings for stopping. Two Adapted Guitars also use a sliding plastic bar above the strings; one tuned to a six-string 1/1 unison, the other tuned to ten-string chord whose higher three notes are but a few vibrations apart.

Providing contrast to the strings and organs in Partch's orchestra is his percussion. The highest is the Eucal Blossom, its dry, brittle pitches produced by solid lengths of bamboo. The oldest percussion is the Diamond Marimba, 1946, its thirty-six blocks arranged diagonally in major and minor hexads. Its exact opposite, the Quadrangularis Reversurn, is arranged in reverse order to the Diamond Marimba with two rows of additional tones on each side of the diamond. The Bamboo Marimba (Boo) is constructed of ascending rows of hollow bamboo closed at one end; a tongue is cut in the opposite end and struck with a stick. The Bass Marimba has important lower range tones, while the subbass Marimba Eroica enables one to feel musical tone; it consists of four bars, the lowest eight feet long and vibrating at 22 cycles per second. The Mazda Marimba is made up of tuned light bulbs severed at the socket, while the bright, piercing timbre of the Zymo-Xyl is reproduced by suspended liquor bottles, auto hub caps, and oar bars. The Spoils of War consists of artillery shell casings, Pyrex chemical solution jars, a high wood block and Iow marimba bar, spring steel flexitones (Whang Guns), and a gourd guiro. Japanese Buddha bells attached to gourd resonators and mounted on a cucalyptus branch are collectively called the Gourd Tree; to the player's right are two Cone Gongs, airplane fuel tank sections Partch salvaged from Douglas Aircraft surplus in Santa Monica.

The most fragile of all the instruments are the Cloud-Chamber Bowls, Pyrex chemical solution jars cut in half, suspended on a rack, and hit on sides and tops with soft mallets. Each bowl has at least one or more inharmonic overtones, and if broken are almost impossible to duplicate, due to the nature of inharmonic overtones. A Japanese Koto, with its characteristic bending tones, is also employed, tuned to the Partch system.

Every sound produced by the instruments is a tone in Partch's tuning and consciously used as such in acoustic relationships. Notation for each instrument is different; nothing is left to chance.

BARSTOW, begun in 1941, is a setting of eight hitchhiker inscriptions copied from a highway railing on the outskirts of Barstow, California. This work shows Partch's style with language, as well as his approach to harmony and structure. Each inscription is stated, then humorously expanded, sometimes sung, other times intoned. Tonality is strong but ever-shifting. The over-all harmonic effect is quite smooth, as it would be in just intonation, with tones resolving to others by a subtle few vibrations as well as larger leaps. A masterpiece of Americana in song, it is more than that; it is musical dramatic narrative. Partch calls it his Hobo Concerto. As the word hobo itself is an American word, so is the music of Harry Partch an American music--probably the first truly American music since the American Indian.

CASTOR & POLLUX is a dance-theater work with a beguiling program. It is structured in two large sections, each section comprised of three duets and a tutti. The first section is entitled CASTOR, the second, POLLUX. The first duet of each section is titled Leda and the Swan (insemination); the second, Conception; the third, Incubation; and the tutti, Chorus of Delivery From the Egg. By its contrapuntal texture, CASTOR & POLLUX shows well the melodic capabilities of the instruments, and the two tutti section grand finales to the glory of birth. In the liner notes to PLECTRA & PERCUSSION DANCES, first issued by Partch on his own GATE 5 record label, he relates the story:

"It begins with the encounter of Zeus, the male swan, with the beautiful Leda, and ends with the hatching of the fertilized eggs--first Castor, then Pollux. From the moment of insemination, each egg uses exactly 234 beats in cracking. All of the right heavenly houses are in conjunction, and misfortune is impossible. Pairs of instruments tell the story in characteristic ways."

DAPHNE OF THE DUNES is here recorded for the first time live. Originally the sound track for Madeline Tourtelot's film WINDSONG, Partch recorded it alone, by the process of overdubbing. The film, a modern rendering of the ancient myth of Daphne and Apollo, is a classic of the integration between visuals and sound. Partch explains his approach to the score:

"The music, in effect, is a collage of sounds. The film technique of fairly fast cuts is here translated into musical terms. The sudden shifts represent nature symbols of the film, as used for a dramatic purpose: dead tree, driftwood, falling sand, blowing tumbleweed, flying gulls, wriggling snakes, waving grasses."

Melodic material is short, haunting, and reoccurs motivically. Arpeggiated harmonic texture contrasts melodic sections. Meter is ever changing, almost measure for measure, with pulse sub-divisions of five, seven, and nine common. A trio of the Bass Marimba, Boo, and Diamond Marimba written in 31/16 meter is structured with 5 unequal beats per measure, the beats sub-divided into sixteenths of 5-5-7-9-5. A duet of the Boo and Harmonic Canon is written in a polymeter of 4/4--7/4 over 4/8-7/8.