Sounds from Innerspace

innerspaceboy · 03-06-2019, 01:17 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rostasi

It’s not really as exciting as it may seem...

Song Of The Youths / Contact (1968) on DG was my initiation into musique concrète and soon thereafter I acquired complete digital archives of the DG avantgarde sublabel and the French Philips Prospective 21e Siècle labels as well as a few of those beautiful silver foil pressings.

I put together DVD-R compilations with jacket art for my digital archives -

I am absolutely in awe that you studied under him and were friends. Your archive sounds incredible! I sincerely hope that you've performed FLAC+CUE backups of all these discs and have them redundantly stored and bit-perfect synced across multiple disks in various physical locations because they sound like a pure treasure that needs to be preserved. (And if the works are not commercially licensed, perhaps you'd consider contributing them to The Internet Archive for future student's research?)

Thank you sincerely for the Satie recommendation. The Ciccolini volumes were precisely the pressings I intended to seek so your endorsement secures that decision. I also took a look at that 56-volume box set as you suggested - it looks fantastic and is a steal at just $71. I’d previously secured the 111 Years Of Deutsche Grammophon - The Collector's Edition 1 (111 CD set) but it contains very little of Satie, Debussy, and Ravel and from what I’m reading Ciccolini is the definitive performer of their piano works. Thank you so kindly for mentioning it!

If ever you’d care to share tales of your experience with Stockhausen or more of your own musical wisdom, I am all ears. Thank you once again.

rostasi · 03-06-2019, 01:58 PM

Nice to see those covers. I have all of those too.
They may not be all transferred to digital,
but they were a solid part of my growing up.

Not sure if what I have is really an archive,
but more closer to a collection of likes throughout the years.
The CDs were just a natural outgrowth of the situation and desires at the time.
Yes, I have digital backups on drives of all kinds of stuff, but I'm not obsessive about it.
They really aren't all that rare (except for the personal bits) because you can buy them
thru the Stockhausen Verlag (notice the "text" and "rehearsal" links at the top)
or at another CD shop here. The person running it used to have a nice technical setup
where you could listen to excerpts, but I don't know where it's at now.

The 111 Years Of Deutsche Grammophon set is nice (especially having the
Herbert von Karajan titles together), but DG really wasn't much of a
modern music label, so the "Avant Garde" series was pretty much of an anomaly.
Stockhausen bought the rights back to all of those DG titles and so those
performances are the ones that you get on the discs that he released thru the Verlag.

innerspaceboy · 03-06-2019, 07:03 PM

It’s been another productive evening! I realized that I’d never cataloged my Jim Henson / Muppet / Sesame Street / Fraggle Rock / Labyrinth / Dark Crystal vinyl collection so I dedicated some time to keying in all their matrix numbers and entered condition details and notes of the media, sleeves, and all included posters into Discogs.com.

I had to photograph and submit all release data for a few 6LP box sets that no one had ever contributed to the site before, entering all track and catalog data in addition to the images so it took some work but I’ve now got all 65 discs neatly organized with complete release data for reference whenever I’m crate digging in the wild.

Revisit your childhood and take a look at them all! Did you have any of these as a kid?

Here are just a few of the albums detailed in the link above:

rostasi · 03-06-2019, 07:59 PM

You got me there. I've never heard even one of those records.

innerspaceboy · 03-07-2019, 09:16 PM

I’m excited about a decision I’ve made tonight so I thought I’d share it with my friends.

I have a new work schedule pending in the very near future which will free me to see so many friends I’ve missed and to attend many events I’ve had to pass on for the past two years, so this is great news.

Leading up to that date will be a 9-day stretch of work. As it turns out, on the very last evening I have off before that stretch, contemporary instrumentalist George Winston, my favorite composer on the Windham Hill label, will be performing a show at Babeville in our fair city.

It took a lot of serious thought to decide to attend an evening concert right before taking on all that work, but I plan to rest during the day before the show. What is critical is, Winston is now 70 years old and is suffering from several severe health conditions including thyroid cancer, skin cancer, and myelodysplastic syndrome, so I don't know how many shows he has left in him. This may be my only opportunity to see one of my favorite instrumentalists perform live. Given my eclectic musical taste, there are very few concerts which pass through my city that interest me, so it seemed important that I go to this one.

I’ve just ordered a ticket. This will be an evening to remember, and one to celebrate the beginning of a new stage of incredible potential in my life.

Thanks for letting me share. Here is Winston’s most famous triple-platinum album, December. Enjoy. <3

OccultHawk · 03-11-2019, 09:57 PM

I saw George Winston back in the 80’s. I’d say William Ackerman is probably my favorite Windham Hill guy overall and Michael Hedges Aerial Boundaries is my favorite WH record. I saw Hedges live twice that I remember. Once touring AB and thankfully before he started singing.

innerspaceboy · 03-13-2019, 06:38 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by OccultHawk

I saw George Winston back in the 80’s. I’d say William Ackerman is probably my favorite Windham Hill guy overall and Michael Hedges Aerial Boundaries is my favorite WH record. I saw Hedges live twice that I remember. Once touring AB and thankfully before he started singing.

Incredible! Of course, Ackerman and Hedges, along with Winston, are the holy trinity of Windham Hill. That's so wonderful that you've seen Hedges live!

It's strange that Discogs lists 17 pages of WH releases when their real core material was issued during a brief window of time between '76 and '84 (bookended respectively by The Search For The Turtle's Navel and by Aerial Boundaries). I likely have all of the essential titles on vinyl and complete digital discographies of the key contributors we've named, but the A Quiet Revolution, 30 Years of Windham Hill box set provides a sufficiently encapsulated survey of the label's best works.

Really looking forward to tonight's performance. A shame I'll be attending alone, but it will be a treat just the same.

OccultHawk · 03-13-2019, 01:38 PM

most of the concerts I’ve been to have been solo missions

even when I was still in junior high I’d go by myself

It’s crazy thinking I was walking all over Atlanta by myself back then

I wasn’t unpopular. It was just none of my friends were interested

innerspaceboy · 03-16-2019, 09:48 AM

Given my predilection for 20th century classical, ambient, and drone music I seldom have the opportunity to experience my favorite artists performing live as few visit the States, (or in many cases they have stopped breathing many years ago). So when I learned that George Winston, legend and icon of Ackerman's Windham Hill record label was offering a concert performance in my fair city I simply couldn't pass up the opportunity.

For the few of my readers yet unfamiliar with Winston's beautiful music, on his website he describes his style as “rural folk piano.” Rateyourmusic.com tags him as Neoclassical New Age, Christmas Music, Modern Classical, and Jazz and employs descriptors including, “pastoral, peaceful, passionate, and bittersweet.”

Winston has two primary concert themes - a Summer Show and a Winter Show, each showcasing selections from his catalog related to those seasons. This week I had the pleasure of attending The Summer Show which was a treat as I'd previously gravitated toward his autumnal and wintery early recordings like his certified triple-platinum 1982 classic, December. This concert offered fresh, new content from one of my favorite pianists in an intimate live setting. And intimate it was, indeed! Only twenty or so rows of folding chairs were set up immediately in front of the stage and there were but two hundred in attendance and I was honored to be among them.

Initially I'd wondered if the experience would be a drowsy evening of so-called new age key-plinking, but it was nothing of the sort. Winston live would never be mistaken for a Steve Roach sleep concert - even at 70 and in his health condition Winston was lively, spirited, bursting with zestful energy, and his performances were dynamic and varied tremendously as he transformed from interpreting one musical period or performer to the next.

The performance featured not only standards from his early Windham Hill repertoire but also Winston's own stylistic interpretations of Vince Guaraldi's jazz, the classic stride-piano technique of numerous New Orleans R&B pianists like Henry Butler, James Booker, Professor Longhair, Dr. John, and John Cleary, Hawaiian Slack Key solo guitar, (a unique fingerstyle tradition of the island), and Winston's distinctive harmonica stylings as well.

For Christmas of 2013, Jay Gabler penned an incredibly thorough feature on Winston published by Classical MPR. The article summarizes the Winston concert experience so effectively that little more needs to be said so I will encourage my readers to visit his full original write-up. But a few of his key remarks really touch upon what I appreciated specifically about this concert experience so I'll share a few excerpts.

One particularly captivating number was “Muted Dream,” from his latest 2017 effort, Spring Carousel - A Cancer Research Benefit, which sounded like a prepared piano composition. (George manipulates the strings inside the piano during the piece.) Gabler describes the technique thusly:

Quote:

Winston acknowledged the influence of towering minimalist composer Steve Reich; in a Cage-ian flourish, Winston sometimes reaches inside the piano to mute the strings as he plays. Winston also shares the interest of minimalist composers — and, by extension, ambient musicians such as Brian Eno — in crossing the boundaries of genre to grab rhythmic ideas from jazz, from pop, and from international musical traditions.

And regarding the fascinating slack-key style:

Quote:

Winston is a practitioner, fan, and preservationist of guitar music played in the Hawaiian slack-key tradition; with its open tuning and alternating-bass pattern, the slack-key style is just the kind of thing that might interest 20th-century musical adventurers from John Adams to Sonic Youth.

Of Winston's harmonica playing, Gabler notes:

Quote:

Harmonica is yet another of George Winston's musical interests; he offered a sample of his technique at the Fitzgerald, and his approach is fascinating. As Winston plays, he effects rapid dynamic changes; he doesn't sound like Larry Adler or Little Walter so much as he sounds like a Steve Reich tape loop in which a snippet of sound is played over and over again at different pitches and tempos, creating a hypnotic effect that can be disrupted by sudden stops, starts, and reversals.

But my favorite segment of the feature is Gabler's summary of Winston's characteristic and trademark sound:

Quote:

Winston's music sounds distinctly urban, with its smooth sonorities and delicate textures, but it evokes a sense of the rural and the vernacular in its sense of suspended time, of burbling placidity that flows like a brook rather than marching like a fugue.

Quite poetic! For those musicians among my readers curious about Winston's choice in instruments, the Summer Show program included the following information:

Instruments:

Piano: George Winston plays Steinway pianos

Guitar: Martin D - 35 (1966) with a low 7th string added

Harmonica: combining Hohner Big Rivers with key of low D Cross Harp reed plates

Winston has released fourteen solo piano albums, as well as four benefit EPs and five soundtracks, and the concert inspired me to venture further beyond my familiarity with his early Windham classics to explore his complete catalog.

It was equally wonderful to experience him playing early staples like the hauntingly captivating and magical “Woods” from his very first Windham Hill release, Autumn (1980) and “Variations on the Kanon” (by Pachelbel) from December live, up close, and personal. He closed with a Doors cover, as featured on his album, Night Divides the Day – The Music of the Doors released in 2002, and for his encore concluded with a charming traditional fiddle tune, “Sandy River Belle.”

It was a concert to remember, and instantly became one of my favorite live music experiences. An RYM user described Winston's music as that of “contemplative solitude” and it was precisely the medicinal music I needed at this transitional time in my life. Thank you, George.

innerspaceboy · 03-24-2019, 08:00 PM

Last night I had the absolute honor of watching the new Apollo 11 moon mission movie composed of newly discovered footage from National archives along with previously existing footage. The content was expertly compiled into a riveting and breathtaking feature film, 100% authentic and free from Hollywood bombast and special effects. It was absolutely stunning.

And all throughout the film, I couldn't help but grin like a child each time I heard voice samples from Mission Control, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Nixon's legendary phone call to the astronauts all instantly recognizable from the countless downtempo/electronic/ambient techno albums which borrowed heavily from these classic archival recordings.

Among them, I recognized samples from:

Coldcut's "Outer Planetary Mix" remix of "The Guitar" by They Might Be Giants
The Orb - (much of the Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld LP)
Public Service Broadcasting - The Race for Space LP (featuring Sputnik 1, the Apollo 1 fire, and the Vostok 1, Voskhod 2, Vostok 6, Apollo 8, Apollo 11 and Apollo 17 missions)
and Lemon Jelly's beautiful "Spacewalk" from their classic Lost Horizons LP.

If I've missed any other classics, please let me know!

In celebration of the incredible spirit and inspiration of the new film, I'm spinning Time Life's NASA: To The Moon 6LP archival vinyl box set issued in 1969.

If you haven't seen the film yet - I highly recommend it!

03-11-2019, 09:57 PM	#696 (permalink)
OccultHawk one-balled nipple jockey Join Date: Dec 2010 Location: Dirty Souf Biatch Posts: 22,006	I saw George Winston back in the 80’s. I’d say William Ackerman is probably my favorite Windham Hill guy overall and Michael Hedges Aerial Boundaries is my favorite WH record. I saw Hedges live twice that I remember. Once touring AB and thankfully before he started singing. __________________ 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Member of the Year & Journal of the Year Champion Behold the Writing of THE LEGEND: https://www.musicbanter.com/members-...p-lighter.html

03-13-2019, 01:38 PM	#698 (permalink)
OccultHawk one-balled nipple jockey Join Date: Dec 2010 Location: Dirty Souf Biatch Posts: 22,006	most of the concerts I’ve been to have been solo missions even when I was still in junior high I’d go by myself It’s crazy thinking I was walking all over Atlanta by myself back then I wasn’t unpopular. It was just none of my friends were interested __________________ 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Member of the Year & Journal of the Year Champion Behold the Writing of THE LEGEND: https://www.musicbanter.com/members-...p-lighter.html

03-06-2019, 01:58 PM	#692 (permalink)
rostasi . Join Date: Aug 2012 Posts: 4,007	Nice to see those covers. I have all of those too. They may not be all transferred to digital, but they were a solid part of my growing up. Not sure if what I have is really an archive, but more closer to a collection of likes throughout the years. The CDs were just a natural outgrowth of the situation and desires at the time. Yes, I have digital backups on drives of all kinds of stuff, but I'm not obsessive about it. They really aren't all that rare (except for the personal bits) because you can buy them thru the Stockhausen Verlag (notice the "text" and "rehearsal" links at the top) or at another CD shop here. The person running it used to have a nice technical setup where you could listen to excerpts, but I don't know where it's at now. The 111 Years Of Deutsche Grammophon set is nice (especially having the Herbert von Karajan titles together), but DG really wasn't much of a modern music label, so the "Avant Garde" series was pretty much of an anomaly. Stockhausen bought the rights back to all of those DG titles and so those performances are the ones that you get on the discs that he released thru the Verlag.

03-06-2019, 07:59 PM	#694 (permalink)
rostasi . Join Date: Aug 2012 Posts: 4,007	You got me there. I've never heard even one of those records.