Author: admin

admin is a mousy little thing who does all the basic work that the rest of the EMC can trust it to do. It likes best to keep its nose and coat shiny and its whiskers quivering. admin is very shy, so you won't see it in the daytime, and rarely at night.

Original Obscure Recordings back again — and better!

Well, we’re pretty chuffed here at the EMC. Gavin Bryars has made a Herculean effort and has brought out two of the original Obscure Records recordings, struck from the master tapes onto CD. The first CD is Gavin Bryars’ Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet and The Sinking of the Titanic. Originally recorded on Obscure in 1975, this is part of Gavin’s GB Recordings Archive Series. You can find it on Gavin Bryars’ website: http://www.gavinbryars.com , on Amazon, and the usual places for CDs and downloads.

BCGBCD22 BCGBCD23

Also available is Gavin Bryars and Christopher Hobbs, Ensemble Pieces. This record is a compilation of two Obscure recordings, Chris Hobbs’s Aran and McCrimmon Will Never Return, and Gavin Bryars’ 1, 2, 1-2-3-4, from Obscure 2 (Ensemble Pieces), and Bryars’ The Squirrel and the Ricketty Racketty Bridge from Obscure 8 (Machine Music). Both CDs contain the original liner notes and updates, including pictures from a recent revival in London.

We’ll have more on this as we receive further news, including provisions for other formats and signed copies.

Blog problems

Hi there, admin here (tee-hee). We have some problems with our media (pictures, mostly) on the blog, due to some glitches with an upgrade at the server level. If you see nothing, or a big blue empty box, that’s what’s happening. We hope to fix this, and to upload some nice historic experimental music stuff very soon.

New Bandcamp ‘EP’

The EMC has just released their new ‘single’ download, Hobbs with the Hartzell Hilton, a set of two archival recordings by the Hartzell Hilton Band, both of pieces by Christopher Hobbs: Gothic Swing, and Another Part of the Forest.

They are available on our Bandcamp site:

http://bandcamp.experimentalmusic.co.uk/music

forest edit

Here are the notes:

Gothic Swing and Another Part of the Forest were written for the Hartzell Hilton Ensemble, an idiosyncratic group which played together in the late 1980s. Its members were Jane Aldred and Virginia Anderson (Eb clarinets), Karen Demmel and Michael Newman (violas), Simon Allen (vibes) and Christopher Hobbs (piano).

Gothic Swing, recorded here in the reverberant acoustic of Royal Holloway College, Egham on February 2 1989, is an exuberant, outward-looking piece. Another Part of the Forest (recorded at Lauderdale House, London on July 4 1988) is more introspective, and while the piano plays quite an ubiquitous role in the first piece, here it is silent for almost half of the work, with the vibes providing a gentle ostinato in the long slow middle section.

Also available: our free version of Christopher Hobbs’ Sudoku 104 (EMC-105), also on Bandcamp.

 

Back to Schooltime

We have a new release! Cornelius Cardew’s Schooltime Compositions, in pdf.

schooltime

Cardew’s famous 1968 ‘opera book’ that immediately preceded The Great Learning. Schooltime Compositions contains notes, scores, visual elements — all involved with the exploration of ‘experiment’ in the methodological sense as well as the musical sense. This is a much slimmer volume than The Great Learning, but shares Cardew’s fascination with the sense of mutual and self-education. In this way, Schooltime Compositions precedes the group education aspect of the Scratch Orchestra, which was founded a year later. This work can be performed by reading and/or non-reading musicians. It is also just a joy to meander through. The piece includes a facsimile of the cover — a parody of those splotchy school composition books that every kid had in those days. It is marked with Cardew’s signature and a number, from the original limited edition. for information, see our catalogue: http://www.experimentalmusic.co.uk/emc/EMC_Catalogue_List.html

test upload

 

Hello — this is a test upload of a picture, to see if we have fixed problems with our media library on this blog. For what it’s worth, this is an image of Paragraph 4 of Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning at the Union Chapel, Islington, 11 July 2015.IMG_0087

Doing the Hartzell Hilton

We’ve been looking through some archival recordings and thought you’d like to hear some Hartzell Hilton Band music. The Hartzell Hilton Band originated when Virginia Anderson and Jane Aldred agreed that there was far too little music for that fantastic little instrument, the Eb clarinet. And what made a fantastic ensemble was to add two violists, Michael Newman and Karen Demmel, a pianist, Christopher Hobbs, and a marimba/vibraphone player, Simon Allen. The Hartzell Hilton Band was named after a house in Redlands, California, owned by the composer Barney Childs. Childs hosted so many composers and performers at this house, on Hartzell Avenue, that he called it ‘the Hartzell Hilton’. Newman, Demmel, and Hobbs had stayed at the Hartzell Hilton; Anderson often lived there, so Newman gave the band its name.

The track that we’re sharing is from one of two classic Hartzell Hilton Band concerts: a concert at Lauderdale House, Hampstead, London, on 4 July 1988 (the other was in the Picture Gallery at Royal Holloway, University of London, Egham). The concert programme included two pieces by Hobbs, two by John White, one by Newman, one by Michael Parsons, one by Childs, an arrangement of Lol Coxhill tunes by Hobbs, and a piece by Hugh Shrapnel. The date of Fourth of July was accidental, but it was used in their advertising for the concert. We haven’t found that advertising in our files yet, but it stated that as it was American Independence Day, the Hartzell Hilton Band would play no American music…ah, yes, one, Barney Childs, but as an alumnus of Oxford, he was an honorary Brit. The programme ended, ‘Happy American Independence Day’.

 

Happy birthday!

A big happy birthday to John White (b. 5 April 1936). For those who don’t know it, John White is the originator of Machine and systems processes, and essentially is the father of minimalism in Britain. He has also been the greatest composer of music using postmodern irony, and has done so when most composers in Britain were only just beginning to accept serialism. He has written a number of symphonies, most of them (those written since the early 1980s) for electronic keyboards and computer processes. His series of piano sonatas (since 1956 and now numbering almost 200) have acted as a kind of diary of musical thoughts and information. John has also written extensively for the stage, dance, and television/film, and is musical director for Drama Centre London.

John White’s music has never failed to enthral us, surprise us and make us laugh. There are some pieces by John White on the Experimental Music Catalogue; we would like them all, if we could. Very happy birthday, John: can’t wait to see what you will come up with next!

Fizzle archive and new show

Andy Woodhead sends the following:

Hello!

Thanks to all who came down last week, it was lovely to see so many people out!

The recording is now up in the archive here:
https://www.mixcloud.com/fizzlearchive/footewrightfordpalmer-excerpt-plus-nobledunmallsanders-excerpt-240215/

(I’ve done excerpts of both sets and put them together in a little mash up because of various really boring reasons to do with Mixcloud’s upload policy)

Coming up on the 10th at the Lamp we have another absolute belter of a gig for you:

Bruce Coates – Saxes
John Edwards – Bass
Mark Sanders – Drums

Plus early set from

Richard Scott – Violin
Tapiwa Svosve – Shruti Box

Doors at 7, Early Set 7.15, Main Band 8pm.

£5 OTD

See you all there!

The Lamp Tavern, 157 Barford Street, Birmingham, West Midlands B5

 

Sound Out programme on Nature Study Notes

Perhaps, like the EMC, you were not able to get to the concert by the New Scratch Orchestra of excerpts from the Scratch Orchestra document, Nature Study Notes on Sunday, 22 February 2015. Well, here’s something to make up for it: the Resonance FM programme, Sound Out, from 20 February 2015, hosted by Carole Finer, which talks about the ways that the New Scratch Orchestra (or ‘Scratch Orchestra’, as it is called by some of the participants) approaches Improvisations Rites, the type of musical activity collected in Nature Study Notes. Hear it here: https://www.mixcloud.com/Resonance/sound-out-20th-february-2015/ . It’s a rather revealing glimpse into what the new generation thinks of Improvisation Rites and ‘improvisation and a musical life’, as Cornelius Cardew called it. Bryn Harris and Carole Finer represent the original Scratch Orchestra. Worth listening.