Out of stock
2 LP
David ROSENBOOM
“Brainwave music”
Black Truffle is honoured to announce the first ever vinyl reissue of David Rosenboom's legendary Brainwave Music, originally released on A.R.C. Records in 1975 and here expanded to a double LP with the addition of over 40 minutes of contemporaneous material. Pioneer of live electronics, innovator in music education, collaborator with artists as diverse as Jon Hassell, Jacqueline Humbert, Terry Riley and Anthony Braxton, Rosenboom is renowned for his ground-breaking experiments with the use of brain biofeedback to control live electronic systems.
Each of the three pieces that make up the original Brainwave Music LP integrates biofeedback with musical technology in different ways. In the side-long opening piece "Portable Gold and Philosophers' Stones", four performers have electrodes and monitoring devices attached to their bodies to receive information about brainwaves, temperature, and galvanic skin response. This information is analysed and fed into a complex set of frequency dividers and filters, manned by Rosenboom, but essentially played by each of the performers through their psychophysiological responses to the situation. The result is a slowly unfolding web of filtered electronic tones over a tanpura-esque fundamental, possessing the unhurried, stately grandeur of an electronic raga. In "Chilean Drought", three different variations of a text about a drought in Chile, each read by a different voice in a different style, are associated with the Beta, Alpha, and Theta brainwave bands. Alongside an insistent piano accompaniment, we hear a constantly shifting combination of the three vocal recordings controlled by the relative preponderance of each of the brainwave bands in the soloist whose brainwaves are being monitored. "Piano Etude I (Alpha)", the earliest piece included here, is based on research into the link between Alpha brain wave production and the execution of repetitive motor tasks. As Rosenboom plays a very rapid, incessantly repeated pattern in both hands – deliberately designed to be difficult to execute without being in an alert, non-thinking state similar to that associated with strong Alpha brainwave production – two filters controlled by monitoring his brainwaves process the piano sound, moving gradually higher in frequency as the average Alpha amplitude increases, resulting in a hypnotic, constantly shifting blur of repeated notes reflected through the shimmering, watery lights of the filters.
For this reissue, the original LP is supplemented with an additional LP containing an unreleased 1977 live recording of Rosenboom's "On Being Invisible", in which the composer himself performs on an array of electronics that are fed information from his brainwaves. Stretching out over 40 minutes, the piece begins in similar territory to "Portable Gold and Philosophers' Stones" but eventually becomes far wilder, building up to pointillistic bleeps and dense layers of electronic fizz that unexpectedly cut to near-silence. As Rosenboom explains, the piece creates a situation in which the 'performer's active imaginative listening became one of the ways to play their instrument, as well as an active agent in how self-organizing musical forms might emerge.' Enriched with archival images and new notes from the composer, this expanded reissue of Brainwave Music is essential listening for anyone interested in the history of live electronic music and alive to the possibilities it might still contain.
Includes archival images and new notes from the composer.
Gatefold sleeve design by Lasse Marhaug.
Mastered by David Rosenboom from the original analog tape masters. Cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
27,00€
In stock
CD
David ROSENBOOM
“Invisible gold”
“David Rosenboom (b. 1947) has been widely acclaimed as a pioneer in American experimental music since the 1960’s. He is a composer, performer, conductor, interdisciplinary artist, author, and educator having explored ideas in his work about the spontaneous evolution of forms, languages for improvisation, new techniques for ensembles, cross-cultural collaborations, performance art, computer music systems, interactive multi-media, compositional algorithms, and the structure of the brain and nervous system. These two works, “Portable Gold and Philosophers Stones” (1972) and “On Being Invisible” (1976-77), are classics of live electronic music involving extended musical interface with the human nervous system.”
14,00€
Out of stock
2 CD
David ROSENBOOM
“Roundup two”
“B.C.-A.D. I (The Moon Landing)” (1969) with Salvatore Martirano, “Musical Intervention” (1979), “Four Soundings from URBOUI” (1968), “Zones of Influence, Part I, The Winding of a Spring” (1984), “Music for Analog Computers” (1968-1969), “Musical Intervention” (1982), “Trio II” (1978) with Michael Byron and William Winant. “Limited 300. For over four decades, composer-performer David Rosenboom has developed unique circuitry and software for making musical models of the wondrous natural world come alive. Traversing the raucous and the sublime, Roundup two presents live performances with vacuum tube analog computers, solid-state manifestations of chaos and harmony, musical interventions on political tunes, virtuoso performers interlinked with hybrid processing, and more. Roundup Two is an essential, historical document containing important examples from a sixteen-year period in this innovative artist’s extraordinary, pioneering work. Acknowledgements and history : Several of these pieces appeared in an audio, cassette package released in 1987 by Slowscan editions, ‘s-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands, titled Roundup, A Live electro-acoustic retrospective (1968-1984). For Roundup Two, all those pieces have been re-mastered from tapes in audio archives that were in various states of preservation. Several that were originally presented only in excerpts are now presented in complete, unedited versions, and other works not on the original Roundup have been added”. (David Rosenboom)
25,00€