Dear Living Information,
I was thinking about Varese today (please excuse my lazy omission of the grave accent diacritical mark) and was unable to find this album anywhere on the internet, where I was under the impression that one could find any album one wanted to hear at the instant he/she wanted to hear it.
I was thinking about Varese today (please excuse my lazy omission of the grave accent diacritical mark) and was unable to find this album anywhere on the internet, where I was under the impression that one could find any album one wanted to hear at the instant he/she wanted to hear it.
This vaguely reminds me of a digression regarding the new family dog and my mother's iPod. My mom likes the 60s/70s "classic" records that our generation was taught to hold in reverence. I thought about when I heard the "White Album" for the first time. Then I thought about what it would be like to be a dog and hear the "White Album" for the first time in February 2010. I felt both sad and envious.
It gave me an odd inclination to hear Varese. Perhaps I was unable to find a link to his music because of my stubborn unwillingness to learn the keyboard hotkeys to create a grave accent diacritical mark. Of course, the other thing is that it's hard to find a particular "album" when it comes to a classic composer. There are dozens and dozens of Varese recordings. I am not an expert on Varese records. I am sensitive to the acoustic properties of a room, though. I hate listening to orchestra recordings with all of their "Carnegie Hall" ambiance. I generally like DRY sound. I want it to be a desert in my ears.
Of course, I rather enjoy the odd cafeteria-like ambiance of some of David Tudor's recordings...exacerbated, no doubt, by the playback of tape recordings taken in other locations. I probably like a lot of reverberant recordings, honestly...but I just have this sharp pain in my teeth when I think about certain Boulez-conducted, "CBS Masterworks," new "digital recordings" of classical music....or that godawful "Sony Classical" logo. It looks like fucking RED FLAG, screaming "DON'T BUY ME. I SOUND LIKE BAGGED LUNCHES AND FIELD TRIPS TO THE PITTSBURGH SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA." I realize I could be imagining things.
Anyway, I really love this Varese recording, ambiance and all. It was probably the first "experimental music" that I heard.
I feel like I purchased this CD not having heard Frank Zappa, which strikes me as odd, being that he seems to have been a rite-of-passage for cross-referencing teenagers. (I was a teenage cross-referencer.)
It was cheap. I think it was 8 dollars at Borders Books and Music. I loved "Ionisation" and especially "Poeme Electronique." I listened to the other pieces as well, though. Listening now, I realize that I was a new puppy at the time. These works are all such strange, futuristic, miniature blasts, with an aesthetic of expanded, fractured geometry.
It's dissonant, but it's also staged in outer space. The work has an extremely wide range of dynamics and timbres. I'm not sure what other recordings of Varese's work are this good.
Something about the olive green color on the cover... with the not-so-great Miro painting.
A word on the label...it's "Sony Music Special Products," which probably makes it the most "major label" of anything else on this site.....but it's a subdivision in Albany, called One Way Records, that put together this release. I am a little confused about what this label does. It seems like they put out bad popular music and Varese albums. We should go visit them in Albany sometime.
Hope all is well with you and that you enjoy listening to this, if you haven't heard it already,
Vitamin Roof Lining
P.S. Remind me to investigate how Super Nintendo created such a distinctive reverb effect for some of its music.
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