Julius EASTMAN
“Crazy Nigger”

It’s little wonder that Julius Eastman (who died in 1990 under unexplained circumstances), remained the supreme underground composer. He was Afro-American and gay, a composer who rocked the cerebral world of process music with his explosions of free improvisation. This is
first time any of Eastman’s music has been available on LP, with the three extended pieces for four pianos, « Gay Guerrilla », « Evil Nigger » and « Crazy Nigger », all written and preformed around 1980. All three works generate their epic soundscapes through adamantly restated patterns and interlocking canons, not fragmenting now, but preaching urgent truths. To quote brilliant Mary Jane Leach liner notes: “He wrote what can be categorized as minimal music, but also wrote
“post-minimal” music before minimal music was fully established. His pieces straddle the two main styles of minimal music—rhythmic/pulse driven music (Steve Reich and Philip Glass) and spectral drone music (La Monte Young and Phill Niblock). While using process and rhythmic patterns, there is a flexibility that lends a breathing, organic feel to his music, a muscularity missing in a lot of other music from that time ith the re-emergence of his powerful music, a missing gap in the history
of contemporary music has been filled. Created in the late 1970s, these three pieces should have been released on vinyl at the time they were written. However, that was not to be, and they, and other pieces of Eastman’s, were unavailable commercially. Instead, they were shared on cassettes, copied and passed from one admirer to another, a kind of underground musical distribution by aficionados. Unlike today’s instant access to music, at that time each new copy represented a time
commitment, since it took as long to copy a piece as it was long, while also removing itself further from the original recording with a resultant deterioration in sound quality.
« Crazy Nigger, Evil Nigger, and Gay Guerrilla » form a trio of pieces that occupies a high point in
Eastman’s compositions. They were the culmination of his mature style.
Crazy Nigger is a sprawling sonic study, the last section exploring canonic form both harmonically and rhythmically, using the same process as James Tenney’s Spectral Canon for Conlan Nancarrow, but notated in a more intuitive way.
In the most transcendent sense, it’s music that occupies its very own place, a magical soundworld all of its own. Now issued across two LPs in their first ever vinyl release by Blume Editions, offering extensive liner notes by Mary Jane Leach and Bradford Bailey, these three seminal works by one of the most important, but neglected, American composers of the 1970s and 80s, return to the light once more. Not only are Gay Guerrilla, Evil Nigger, and Crazy Nigger an entire rethinking of Musical Minimalism, but they ferociously blow the doors of what classical music can be seen to be.
Edition of 300 copies. Color Vinyl. 180gr Audiophile pressing. Including printed inner sleeve housing a Nagaoka anti-static record sleeve, plus an original insert that functions as Obi. Housed in a fold-out outer sleeve. Vinyl Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi.