CORNER, PHILIP - On Tape from the Judson Years

"2022 repress. On tape from the Judson days. Remember? When you made these things at home, on the best equipment you or your other poor friends could find? Electronic music from the 1960s. And you had that Japanese tape recorder with built-in mike; indeed, that was the only piece of furniture on your tatami floor on the Lower East Side that summer of 1961. This compact disc presents tape music recorded between 1962 and 1963 for the friends meeting once a week in a loft in NYC. The first track, "Lucinda Pastime", was the soundtrack for a dance piece by Lucinda Childs: "the tape was made in the kitchen sink, with primitive equipment and all the different kinds of plates and bowls in the house. The enjoyment of listening to this musique liquid at night, in bed, and always finding it too short." "Memories: Performances": "Ah yes... yes! The principle of this tape is the recombining of recorded performances from the past, my past, this time. Because the idea, and practice, of collage was really around in that time." "From Thais", was made on request of Yvorine Rainer, "collaging mostly extracts from Massenet opera, mix after mix to get thrown around fragments of the opening until the thin, otherworldly quality of the ending." "Oracle, a Canata on Images of War", was commissioned by the Living Theatre: "All sounds in violent counterpoint, made by me at home... playing with real noises, with a deliberately pulverized reality made of over-recorded close-miked crashes which even blew the machine's circuitry. Mixed into the 'Darkest White Noise' ever made." "Flares" used dancers and musicians and slides and lights in a total-space multimedia; this is the only piece on this compact disc which uses purely generated tape sounds. "Circus Tape" was for "a whole evening of inspired crazy-fun, from burlesque to creaking doors." All previously unreleased works presented in a digipack CD with 16-page booklet." - Alga Marghen.