Harry BERTOIA
“Experimental I / Mechanical I”

This LP is cut straight from the original master tapes maintaining a straight analog signal path. The CD version contains a bonus track called Long Sounds.
When Harry Bertoia’s Sonambient label was resurrected, our intention was to tell the story of Bertoia’s groundbreaking Sonambient work as revealed through his extensive collection of notes and recordings. When the first new LP was released in 2016 we were only in possession of 1/20th of the archive. Now, in 2019, we’re excited to release the first LP of new material from the full archive and we present it to increase understanding of what Bertoia was doing in his sound-barn deep in the Pennsylvania woods.
The recordings contained on this LP were selected because of their relationship to Bertoia’s body of recorded work. The titles are from from Bertoia’s notes which Bertoia placed in each tape box, indicating date and describing briefly. Like his sculptures, Bertoia never titled his recordings but frequently referred to specific concepts he was pursuing. These are among the earliest known examples of Bertoia using terms which would become more common in the years to come: “experimental,” “mechanical” and “long sounds.”