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This is a place to stash pieces I come across which I like (or admire in some
other way), some of which I
have bought, others encountered on the radio or elsewhere. We have (or will
have):
Benge
Wendy Carlos
Jonathan Harvey
Robert Piotrowicz
Dave Vosh
David Westling
Benge
The most enjoyable synth CD (in terms of skill, range, interest,
musicality, and even presentation) since Carlos W is Twenty Systems
by Benge (Ben Edwards). |

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Wendy Carlos
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Jonathan Harvey
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Robert Piotrowicz
added July 2009
My review on the intro page states, [An early 2009] purchase is Robert
Piotrowicz's Lasting Clinamen. A one-word tag would be
'uncompromising': four tracks of [almost unvarying] noise, some too loud,
some too quiet. While I like favour the atonal and arhythmic, I prefer
something to be happening. The sounds are, to me, drones and I would have
had something plinking over the top. I bought it, having heard the excerpts
here because I admire
the chap's dedication to his Art. Wagner's music was described as 'better
than it sounds', here I'm not so sure.
From the site selling
the CD,
He started play music in age of 12 years old, his first instrument was
drums. Then few years latter he found guitar as a tool to have band, form
this time he was trying to find his place in music. From early 90' he was
leader of his own band called STUCKONCEILING, there he found his way of
guitar playing and leading the bands. Around 96-98 he released couple of
albums with his early fascination which turned around hard core, noise
avantgarde metal. In this rock loud period he is founding improvisation as
way to create music and thinking about this. Together with this Piotrowicz
was researching electronics as topic for sound chalenge.
The breaking times for Piotrowicz music approach was 1999 when together with
his band he finishing noise rock period and he turn himself into free
improvisation. Together with Anna Zaradny - she joined STUCKOCELING around
98' - they both together strongly focused on experimental and improvised
music.
In 2000 Piotrowicz played few concerts with well know improv figures as John
Butcher and Tony Buck. In next year together with Anna Zaradny they found
label and festival MUSICA GENERA. From 2002 all their art activities are
strongly connected with record label, festival and events of improvised and
experimental music in Poland. From this time he regularly play concerts all
over Europe, including festivals and other events.
Activities of Musica Genera became one of most important phenomenon for
experimental music in Poland.
Piotrowicz uses analog synthesizer to work on sonic research. He treats
guitar as a sound source, to play he uses bow, metal, paper, engine etc.
Electronics - beside their sound characteristic - are other way of
expressions. Piotrowicz works with free impov contexts as well as working
solo and on compositions. As improviser he works usually with Anna Zaradny
and Burkhard Stangl with his most focused lineup (the trio released album
"Can't Illumination"). By last years he collaborates often with: Tony Buck,
John Butcher, Xavier Charles, Kevin Drumm, Jerome Noetinger etc.
Occasionally he collaborated with Otomo Yoshihide, ErikM, Martin Siewert,
Dieb 13, Werner Dafeldecker, Lionel Marchetti, Nikos Veliotis and many
others.
Piotrowicz released some solo production (2 albums and one single cd) and he
dedicates lots of attention for aesthetic of his musical status. Composed
works of him touch noise music aspect as well as electroacoustic music
tradition.
Together with pure audio work he collaborates with visual artists. His most
important work includes collaboration with great film maker and musician
Martin Klapper. He worked for the radio and theatres. Together with Anna
Zaradny composed music for films.
Piotrowicz participates in international festivals (Audio Art Festiwal, Jazz
en Gatineite, Alt F4, The Strings of Difference Athens, SKIFF, Muzyka z
Mózgu, In Beetwen Chicago, Jazz in E., Copenhagen Jazz Festiwal, Art Rhytmic
Depot).
He played in all over Europe (France, Germany, Norway, Denmark, Holland,
Czech, Austria, Italy, Slovenia, Greece, Croatia) and USA. |

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David Westling
added July 2009
I will add a review when the CD arrives, here are my initial
comments, in the post is Bum Crab Hatband from David Westling,
pictured right. I have not managed to find excerpts to listen to and so have
ordered it on the strength of his intriguing pronouncements (repeated on the
full page). It is available
here.From the
site selling the CD,
David Westling born 1954 Chicago IL. In 1978 I took the plunge into serious
electronic music creation by buying a small Emu systems modular. By 1983 I
had moved on to an ARP 2600 and a more developed sense of what it was that I
wanted to accomplish: still under the spell of Orwell's 1984, which I had
read while in high school, I explored in musical terms some of the darker
implications of the man-machine symbiosis then becoming a widespread
concern. This was the idea behind my work "Exoline Elga" (1984). For the
next few years I concentrated on visual art and didn't return to music until
the early nineties. In 1993 I had three works appear on a compilation put
out by Yucca Tree Records in Switzerland, "Point of Yucca Volume 1." In this
same year I had two more compositions released by Pointless Records
operating out of Kent, Ohio. The next six or seven years were devoted to
further expanding my forays into the outer reaches of sound, utilizing an
increasingly absurdist approach influenced by Dada and Surrealism. I began
my latest round of sonic exploration in 2005 with the acquisition of a
Doepfer-based modular setup. Since then, I have been increasingly
preoccupied with questions of time and cadence and what one might call the
Metaphysics of Wonder and Surprise. I am influenced not so much by the
impenetrable theories and sonic efforts of Stockhausen as by Varčse's early
"Poéme Electronique" and the work coming out of the GRM (Group Recherche
Musicale de France) in the 1980s.
"Bum Crab Hatband", while not rejecting outright such genres as ambient and
"space music", is predicated on the idea that the listener would benefit by
a more challenging approach. I am preoccupied with time, and time as
expressed in music. The shaman wishes in his attempt at connection with the
divine to utilize sound to induce trance and thereby stop time. Other "sound
workers" use rhythm to evoke certain types of motion, the galloping of
horses, twirling ballerinas, or the violence of storms. But this connection
to a naturalist perspective is not inevitable. At this point in time such
devices serve to maintain our atavistic connection with the past, a past
which cries out to be discredited. It is the world within one's own mind
which, for us in the early twenty-first century, takes on more and more the
evanescent qualities of the Real. Consequently, the external laws of nature
as exemplified by Newtonian physics are no longer applicable This shift is
of course mirrored in the newer theories of physics where at the subatomic
level Newtonian physics is seen to be invalid. At any rate I believe there
are profound new worlds to discover within us which might be accessed by
such methods as I employ here.
there's some here
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Page started 26th June 2009.
Image from 350 to 100 shortest
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