It's the 20th anniversary of one of the heroic music reclamation projects of our time - Creel Pone.
Keith Fullerton Whitman gives the low down about the label's history here.
Which has some surprises - I had gotten the idea it had evolved sideways out of a series of unofficial compilations of electronic music otherwise only available on avant-garde animations and experimental short films, but it turns out to be have started as a primarily visually oriented art project,
For another version of the story and the label's initial impact, scroll down to the bottom of this post and you will find a piece I did for The Wire. Which I think coincided with Creel Pone's fifth anniversary, but that I believe was accidental (it was done for a Wire issue dedicated to the retro-archival landscape). There's some Keith quotes in there (I had originally interviewed him for Retromania).
But first some of my personal Pone favorites out of what must surely now be fast approaching 400 "unheralded classics" of early electronic and tape music, reissued on CD-R and visually reproduced in miniature and in totality - the liner note booklets, the packaging quirks, the labels, etc.
Creel output is always interesting. Personally, I find the "outsider" stuff - independent composers without institutional support, lone loons DIY-ing in garages and basements - more variable, although there are some real killers in this vein. The library music inclusions are often fabulous. But overall the stuff that seems to blow me away me most consistently is the stuff from composers with access to the technological resources of institutions. The tenured type at universities, and others from far-flung countries who have the strength of the state behind them.
These three are probably my all-time favorite Creels.
Magyar Elektronikus Zene, Hungarian Electronic Music [CP-003]
In particular, "Mese", a voicescape of whisked phonemes, by Peter Eötvös
Let the composer explain:
In “The Tale”, 99 Hungarian folk tales are „squeezed” into 12 minutes and 34 seconds. The form of the composition corresponds to the general structure of all folk tales in the world:
– the introductory formulas (… once upon a time …)
– the quantitative description of the characters (3 brothers, 7 young goats…)
– the conflict (here a violent fight against the dragon)
– the resolution of the conflict leading up to the final formulas (… it was so.)
All the sounds of the sound play are produced by a female voice, filtered in the form of a three-part ratio round (3: 4: 5), cut, and as a result it is faster, to imitate a bird, or slower, to imitate a bear, telling the fairy tale made of fairy tales.
The time shifts create passages full of polyphony and counterpoint, where sequentiality turns into an odd simultaneity, as in our contemporary world of music, where three or four successive centuries are layered into and on the top of each other mixing into and suppressing the present time.
Then there is Ann Southam's The Reprieve, the Emerging Ground (CP 242)
Here's what I wrote about it a few years when it was my equal #1 album of the year:
Made for a dance piece, "The Reprieve" (1975) is less a unified 24-minute composition than a suite of texturescapes, a succession of spaces. The coherence comes from the techniques and the sound palette: even more than electronics, Southam's primary instruments here are reverb and delay. Listening, you feel like you're moving one by one through a grotto's chambers. Light from the headlamp flickers across nacreous walls and damply glistening ceilings; magnified sounds of distant dripping water bounce through the uncanny acoustics of the honeycombed underworld. "The Emerging Ground" (1983) - constructed according to a similar logic, nearly as wondrous - unfurls as serried ranks of pearly palimpsests, each pulse trailing a glimmering succession of after-images. The original 1983 album is expanded in this Creel edition with two other pieces composed for dance, "Seastill" and "Rewind" - plus an excerpt from 1974's "Walls and Passageways" - and these likewise get your mind's eye dancing with wraiths and rivulets, fronds like wavering perpendicular ribbons, looms of lustrous yarn....
And then there is Angel Rada and Miguel A. Noya's The Early Uraniun Recordings (CP 000.13)
And in particular Rada's 1983 album Upadesa and in particular particular, the track “Carillon” – a squoinky bubble-bath of electrobliss - which is the opening track below.
There is a sub-category of Creel faves where I actually discovered the album for myself before it got Creel-ed, so I have them on vinyl rather than in the Creel miniaturized CD-R format.
Nicolas Schöffer, Hommage À Bartok [CP 084]
Here's what I blogged about Hommage in 2007:Another Creel-worthy obscurity--Nicolas Schoffer's Hommage À Bartok. I scooped this 1979 album on the Hungaroton label up a few months back because it looked so odd, plus it was only 8 bucks. The sleeve notes suggested he was actually some kind of visual artist attempting to translate his plastic arts oriented theories about color and structure and space into sound, or in his words, "to construct trapped time--in the same way as trapped space or trapped light information." The austere pulses and pure poised tones of pieces like "Chronosonor 5" do seem to be striving for a kind of stasis, they're not so much music as sonic mobiles hanging there in space. Imagine Disco 3000 if Sun Ra had been lobotomized, or a Martin Rev solo album recorded in a K-hole.
Bülent Arel, Daria Semegen, Electronic Music for Dance [CP-121]
info/buy
Here's something I blogged not so long ago about the Arel-Semegen style of crinkletronica:
Hard to describe, but it really feels like a totally new language for music is being invented - yet it's oddly palatable, not grating or dissonant. There's a slippery, trickly way to how sounds distribute themselves in space. The plinks and blips and labial plops, it's like the language of an alien lifeform.
Alwin Nikolais - Choreosonic Music of the New Dance Theater of Alwin Nikolais +++ [CP 000.36 CD]
info/buy
Here's something I wrote about Nikolais for the 4:3 site:
One of the great modernist choreographers of the 20th Century, Alwin Nikolais used light design, costume, make-up, electronic sound and the moving human form to create enthralling spectacles that hovered somewhere in-between ballet, kinetic sculpture, avant-garde fashion, and ritual ceremonies from the far future or from some alien civilisation.
"It is impossible for me to be a purist; my loves are too various for that," Nikolais wrote in 1966. "I look upon this polygamy of motion, shape, color and sound as the basis of the theater." The multi-sensory impact of his work is conveyed in titles like “Fetish (ritual of shadows and blades of light),” “Prismatic Forest (maze of colored bars before infinite vista)”and “Glymistry (parts of people and things illuminated in glows of colored light).”
Born in Connecticut in 1910, Nikolais pioneered the use of side-lighting in ballet, as opposed to the traditional way of illuminating from above. He deployed “shinbusters” to bounce light off the performers’s bizarrely costumed bodies, pushing the spectacle towards abstraction. Some of his pieces involved dancers carrying flashlights or little lanterns, or wearing internally-lit tubes that sheathed the dancer’s arms and legs.
As well as inventive light-design, Nikolais devised the sci-fi garments, masks, wigs, and head-bands that his dancers wore, some of which anticipate Bowie’s more outlandish costumes of the early Seventies. If that wasn’t enough, Nikolas also composed his own music, using tape-editing and a variety of sound “conditioning” techniques to transform percussion and other acoustic instruments. Later, he would be an early adopter of the Moog synthesiser.
Involving a troupe of dancers webbed within a cat’s cradle of elasticated ribbons, “Tensile Involvement” (1953) is probably Nikolais’s most famous piece and can be seen in recreated form as the opening credit sequence to Robert Altman’s 2002 ballet film The Company. Also created in 1953 but here performed in 1993 as part of a posthumous Nikolais retrospective, “Noumenon” is less kinetic than “Tensile Involvement” but even more disorienting. The dancers are completely encased in a cocoon of Lycra fabric, which kinks and ripples as they gyrate and contort sightlessly within. The human body becomes a generator of planes and folds of abstract texture. The title “Noumenon”, incidentally, comes from philosophy and refers to objects that reason can conceive but which are not knowable by the senses....
There is an extensive tradition of experimental composers who worked closely with avant-garde choreographers, from John Cage’s partnership with Merce Cunningham to musique concrete visionary Pierre Henry’s collaborations with Maurice Béjart. But Nikolais appears to be unique in creating his own electronic scores. Before moving into the dance field, he worked as a musician, providing keyboard accompaniment to silent movies. When he started to create his own dance pieces, Nikolais recorded his own scores, always creating the sounds after the choreography was written, as a series of “motion-cues” timed for short sequences of dancing. Sound generated from acoustic instruments or from materials and objects (“tubes, pipes, pieces of wood, aluminum, steel and tin containers, glasses, elastic bands, coils of wire”, according to the Choresonic liner note) were subjected to various processes using the tape recorder: “speeded up or slowed down, interrupted, ‘pulsed’, reverberated, reversed [and] superimposed.” Just as his choreography, costumes and lighting worked to break up the human form into abstract motion-shapes, Nikolais was keen to avoid the “identification of sound sources” and strove to encourage listeners to hear “the sound itself divorced from its initial derivation.”
A true polymath seeking to create total art experiences, Nikolais was – as Jack Anderson wrote in his 1993 New York Times obituary – “not merely a choreographer” but also “a wizard… a prophet, and a wonderful entertainer.”
(There's several other Creels I found independently but I'd describe them as curios rather than real faves - Elias Tanenbaum, Arp Art; Emerson Myers, Provocative Electronics, Electronic Constructions On Traditional Forms+; Lejaren Hiller, Avalanche / Nightmare Music / Suite For Two Pianos And Tape / Computer Music For Tape And Percussion; Michael Czajkowski, People the Sky)
Back to the Creel faves....
Reinhold Weber, Elektronische Musik (x2), Phonetische Kompositionen, Computermusik [CP-009/099]
In particular this track
Anthology Of Dutch Electronic Tape Music, Volume 1 1955-1966 [CP-010/011]
Anthology Of Dutch Electronic Tape Music, Volume 2 1966-1977 [CP-020/021]
In particular this piece
Warren Jepson, Totentanz (CP-024)
(I reviewed this for The Wire as a subsequent official reissue)
Gil Melle, The Andromeda Strain [CP-028]
info/buy
Here's something I wrote on Melle's Andromeda OST for a Loops essay on science fiction movie soundtracks, later collected in Futuromania.
Robert Wise's The Andromeda Strain, an s.f. thriller about scientists investigating a lethal supervirus of extraterrestrial origin in an isolated underground laboratory, was released the same year as THX and has a similar post-2001 look: the sinister sterility of technocratic space. In the early Seventies people still thought tomorrow's world would look plastic-coated and vaguely fetishistic, as opposed to the cyberpunk-and-after vision of the future as seedy and disordered. But unlike THX, this time the official soundtrack itself is fully electronic. Indeed it's the most uncompromising effort of its kind since Forbidden Planet. Composer Gil Melle was a jazz saxophonist who'd written music for television shows like Ironside and had developed an interest in electronics engineering when looking to expand his palette of sound. His theme tune for Night Gallery was the first completely electronic title music for an American TV show. Commissioned to compose the score for Andromeda Strain, Melle explored musique concrete techniques to the hilt, going on field trips to gather found sounds-- railroad noises, the roars and blasts of a jet propulsion laboratory, the ambient hubbub and clatter of a bowling alley--then transforming them through tape-editing. And he exploited the greatly expanded budget at his disposal by designing an electronic sound-laboratory on the Universal Pictures studio lot. Here he built new instruments like the Percussotron III, an early form of drum machine, whose outlandish array of timbres are used to dramatise a sequence in the movie where the virus responds to X-Ray bombardment by mutating into ever-more deadly forms.
Josef Anton Riedl, Josef Anton Riedl [CP-023]
Matsuo Ono, Takehisa Kosugi, Roots Of Electronic Sound [CP-025]
Electronic Music, University of Melbourne / Full Spectrum - Australian Digital Music [CP-044 reedition]
In particular
Luis De Pablo, We (Nosotros) [CP-035]
Electronic Music: Experimental Studios In Prague, Bratislava, Munich, Illinois, Warsaw [CP-039]
New Zealand Electronic Music [CP-050/051]
Creelpolation-1 [CP-056/057/058] a collection of stray great pieces on otherwise less-interesting albums
Particularly for this long piece by Harrison Birtwistle with help from Peter Zinovieff, as blogged about here
André Almuró, Kosmos, Musiques Expérimentales, l'Envol, Ambitus [CP-067/097]
Dennis Smalley, The Pulses of Time [CP-075]
info/buy
Musiques de l'O.N.F., Music of the N.F.B. [CP-060/061]
Zbynek Vostrák, Miloslav Istvan, Václav Kucera, From Czech Electronic Music Studios [CP-076]
Nicolas "Nik Pascal" Raicevic, The Complete Narco Recordings [CP-079.5/080/081]
Something I wrote about Raicevic for this piece on Synthedelia
Not much is known about Nik Raicevic, who recorded under various permutations of his own name, such as Nik Pascal, as well aliases like Art In Space and 107-34-8933. First through his own Hollywood-based label Narco Records, and then via the major label imprint Buddah, in the early ’70s Raicevic released a series of abstract, rippling Moog mindscapes with titles like The Sixth Ear and Zero Gravity that anticipate the extended odysseys of Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler. His music’s relationship to the drug culture could hardly have been more blatant. Head, for instance, featured tracks with titles like “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide” and the 17-minute “Cannabis Sativa,” and came with a stoned-to-say-the-least bit of text: “The sound of numbers for soaking in soft dreams. Sweet moments and private notes making a rhyme into a habit. An album that creates the ultimate environment for the smoke generation. Taste it.” If the framing is a little dated, the music itself achieves a zonked timelessness. Highly – pun intended – recommended.
Knud Viktor, Images, Ambiances [CP-100/101]
Edgardo N. Canton, Musiques Électroacoustiques, Le Mur [CP-118]
Arnold Aard, Electro-Sonnances [CP-136]
Elektron Musik Studion, Dokumentation 1-4 [CP-140/141]
Elektronski Studio Radio Beograda (x2) [CP-139]
Such beautiful covers...
Klaus Röder, Elektronische Kompositionen, Kompositionen 1981-83 [CP-155]
In particular for "Mr Frankenstein's Babies"
Antero Honkanen, Åke Andersson, Reidarin Sähköiset Kuvat, Ode To Marilyn [CP-197/197.5]
Particularly for thisJim Brown, Wayne Carr, Ross Barrett, The First See + Hear, Oh See Can You Say [CP-201]
Electronic Music from York [CP-250/251]
A dreamed-of impossible-to-find, blogged longingly about here
Wow, that was a LOT - and I've only scraped the surface. There's so many cool curios - like the album of musique concrete meets folk sung in the ancient language of Provence, Lenga D'Oc (also rendered as Languedoc, and also known as Occitan) and the two different Sound Sculptures releases and the Wind Harp stuff and the works by Basque, Greek, Rumanian, Cuban, Argentinan composers.... and visual artists turned sound sculptors like Karel Appel and his Musique Barbare.... and...
And then there are the amazing bountiful packages of album series, box sets, and/or multiple releases by composers: the Turnabout compilations; the CAPAC musical portrait of composers series; the Philips 21e siecle 'silver records' trove Electronic Panorama; the ANS Electronic Music box; collations of Ilhan Mimaroglu and Pierre Henry..... Some of these I couldn't avail myself because I already own them in whole or part.
Sometime ago, perhaps a little past the half way mark of this label's life, I had a nutty fantasy of reviewing the whole series on this blog, starting at the start and doing maybe two a month. And try to develop a language for evoking this music that doesn't rely on technicalities. But at this point, so extensive is the discography, especially now that it's got into the proto-Creel releases (enumerated according to fractions between #0 and #1, an enormous sideways bulge in the discography!) and other lateral extensions (the Rééditions of earlier titles, turning them into double CDs or triples by adding other works by the composer or adjacent compatibles).... well, taking on such a project could easily extend beyond my likely lifespan!
Better, then, to just enjoy the apple-on-the-moon strangeness... and wonder how much more treasure there is still out there for Creel to excavate.
For they show no sign of stopping as yet...
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Here's the piece I wrote back in 2010 for The Wire.
CREEL PONE
The Wire, 2010
At some point in the middle of the last decade, a series of mysterious CDs began popping up on the "New Releases" lists of certain left-field music distributors. Sometimes they'd materialize directly on the shelves of a handful of esoterica-oriented record shops (surprising the owners, who couldn't recall having ordered them). These discs were packaged neither in plastic hard shells nor thick cardboard cases, but with thin card sleeves covered by a protective sheath of shrink wrap: they looked like five inch vinyl records, basically, rather than CDs. This effect was further intensified by the Deutsche Grammophon-style gold seals that each release sported. The legend proclaimed the series's name, its mission, and its means of production: CREEL PONE -- Unheralded Classics of Electronic Music - 1952-1984 -- 100 - Hand Assembled.
Eye-catching and intrigue-piquing, the covers were immaculate replicas of the sleeves of musique concrete and electronic records from that post-WW2 surge into the sonic unknown. They reproduced in miniature not just the original artwork but also--to take just one example, Andre Almuro's Musiques Experimentales--the six differently sized circles cut out of the front cover as spy-holes to a garishly psychotropic inner sleeve. Any liner note booklets or textual matter accompanying the original LP was likewise meticulously reproduced, and each CD-R was printed with the label of its source recording in vivid color. Great pains had clearly been taken to provide the purchaser with as close as possible to the sensation of having 'n' holding an original vinyl copy. But the retail price these avant-bootlegs went for--around ten dollars-- suggested a labour of love rather than an exploitative exercise in niche marketing. These were gifts for fans, made by fans.
Creel Pone's catchment stretched from the output of lesser-known state-funded or university-sponsored sound laboratories (60s and 70s compilations like From Czech Electronic Music Studios, the Flemish Elektronische Produktie Van IP.E.M, Musica Electroacustica Mexicana, New Zealand Electronic Music, Anthology of Dutch Electronic Tape Music, and, most mindblowing of all in a fiercely competitive field, Hungarian Electronic Music) to works by individual composers (Denis Smalley, Herbert Eimert, Phillippe Arthuys, Luis De Pablo, Ruth White, etc). The catalogue also encompassed "outsider electronics" self-released by synth-wielding mavericks unattached to any institution (Edward M. Zajda, Nik Pascal, Pythagoron Inc), along with one-off forays into sound by visual artists (kinetic sculptor Nicolas Schöffer, abstract expressionist painter Karel Appel), musique concrete made by animators like Norman McClaren (Music of the N.F.B.) and library music releases and movie scores by the likes of Tod Dockstader, Zanagoria, and Gil Melle (the splendidly hair-raising Andromeda Strain O/S/T.).
As the buzz about the quality, fetish appeal and sheer obscurity of Creel Pone output grew among electronic music fiends, so too did curiosity about the cryptic perpetrators of these exquisitely executed but wholly unofficial and unsanctioned reissues. Distributor advertorial for Creel releases alluded to a Mr. P.C.C.P. , a/k/a Pieter Christophssen. But suspicion mounted that this gentleman collector, who allegedly operated out of Iceland, was in fact a fiction: a Karen Eliot-style alias smokescreening the activity of a loose collective of crate-diggers and technicians. At the hub of this curatorial cabal, it transpired, lurked the experimental musician Keith Fullerton Whitman, who also runs the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based weird-music distributor Mimaroglu Music Sales [now Alpha State NYC].
The Creel Pone project came to a halt in the late summer of 2009 with the 99th instalment, Reinhold Weber's Elektronische und phonetische Kompositione (the "100" in the gold seal referred both to the plan to put out one hundred immaculate releases and to the approximate number of copies of each reissue made). Creel Pone may reactivate at some point, but, according to Whitman, it has most likely reached its "natural end".
Surveying the Creel catalogue as a curated body of work, two things emerge. One is that, as much as it was an idealistic international movement dedicated to opening up a new frontier of sound for humankind, the post-War electronic surge was also a craze that convulsed composers across the globe. Every developed nation (and quite a few developing ones) simply had to have its own electronic music research centre. Even the Catholic University of America had a resident concrete composer, Professor Emerson Meyers, whose 1970 LP Provocative Electronics was resurrected as Creel Pone #77.
Whitman compares the runaway evolution of the music and the faddish excitement of its makers to the techno and jungle scenes he was immersed in during the Nineties: empowered by new technology, a swarm of second-division producers pick up on the breakthroughs of a few innovator- producers, ripping them off but in the process intensifying and mutating the innovations. "You'll hear a technique that's invented in 1954 in Japan going out to Berlin, then to Spain... trademark sounds that become part of this general lexicon of transformation, individual composer's tricks that enter this grand pool of ideas." Early electronic music, then, was about scenius as much as genius; Creel Pone revels in the generic-ness as much as the singularity of the sounds generated.
The other aspect relates to the "1952-1984" time-span Creel Pone marks off as its Golden Age. (Some of the Creel Pone seals varied the dates slightly: 1947-1983 was one variant, as above). Whitman argues that this was the most concentrated period of innovation in human history--not just in music but across the entire spectrum of culture and society. In terms of electronic music specifically, though, the cut-off point of 1984indicates the eclipse of analogue by digital. "From the early Eighties onwards you had digital synthesiers and samplers like the Synclavier, you had computers," says Whitman. Citing the deterioration of outfits like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, he argues that "the early music made using digital audio technology has dated very badly." He believes that the approach encouraged by sequencers and computers is "'I'll fuck around and see what happens'" whereas tape-based music required so much planning and time investment it led to superior results. ”For someone like Herbert Eimert, a two minute piece took a month of 18 hour days to achieve. It involved sitting down with a piece of paper and scoring out your sounds, making a chart of all the different combinations. And then actually doing it. You get music that's really thought-through." The Herculean effort, the heroic spirit of risk-taking, imbues the music with an intangible but undeniable aura. "Also analogue sounds are just better."
[the label has subsequently ventured in the early clunky-but-cool era of digital synthesis, with some mid-to-late 80s releases and even I think one or two from the '90s.]
Bonus bit: my very first Blissblogpost on Creel Pone, from March 2007, a Feeling/Really Feeling/Not Really Feeling post.
Andre Almuro, Musiques Experimentales
Anestis Logothetis, Hor!-spielNEKROLOGLOG 1961/FANTASMATA 1960
Edward M. Zajda, independent electronic music composer
Jacques Lejeune, Blanche Neige: suite musicale en 14 tableaux pour dire le conte et danser avec les enfants
Various, Creelpolation 1,2, 3
Various, Electronic Music: Experimental Studios in Prague, Bratislava, Munich, University of Illinois, Warsaw, Paris
Various, Musiques de L’O.N.F./Music of the N.F.B
Various , Elektronische Produktie Van I.P.E.M
(all Creel Pone)
Various, Electronic Music (Folkways )
Various, Elektroakustická Hudba 1 (Slovak Electroacoustic Music #1)
Various, Siemens - Studio für Elektronische Musik.
Alireza Mashayekhi
Ilhan Mimaroglu, Tract
Trevor Wishart, Red Birds
Bernard Parmegiani, De Natura Sonorum.
You’d think it was all extreme metal round these parts judging by the recent blogg output but apart from Khanate and Blut Aus Nord and a few other things I’m forgetting I’ve not been that slayed by what I’m hearing. (Still pretty much at the “it all sounds the same” stage, which of course really means “I’m not prepared to get so utterly immersed that it ceases to sound the same”. Then again, you can turn that back on the genre, because if the basic thing of what the genre offers isn’t enough to extract that compelled immersion from you then… Anyway, I’m not sure I’ll ever get to the point where I can make distinctions of signature and rank within blastbeat science the way I did with breakbeat science.) No, round here, the recreational listening soundtrack is largely avant-classical (the kids don’t seem to mind, really). I’m just starting to realize that this stuff could consume a lifetime, like being into the blues or into reggae, there’s no bottom to it. Every bleedin’ university and government in the developed world seemed to have an electronic and tape music laboratory during the Sixties and much of the Seventies, and a lot of them still do. Like Creel Pone though whose releases have this gold seal thing saying 'Unheralded Classics of Electronic Music: 1952 to 1984" I have an arbitrary cut-off point at the start of the Eighties, although it's not arbitrary, because as Mr Pone argues that was when the analog era was definitively eclipsed by digital and it became a whole different game and in some ways no longer quite such a heroic one. The fellow who sorted me with the Slovak/Siemens/Iranian composer stuff describes Creel Pone as “avant-crack” and he’s not wrong there. In addition to the utterly obscure but surprisingly high rate of "true lost treasure" sonic aspect, what’s intensely fetishisable about these non-official CD-R reissues is the loving care with which the original vinyl sleeves have been miniaturized, including all the sleeve insert stuff with their somber technical and musicological descriptions of the pieces (the Creelpolation 3 cd anthology--which collates sundry one-off pieces from albums that aren’t worth salvaging in their entirety--has the album covers of each source record reduced to postage stamp size and comes with a neat little translucent plastic magnifying sheet thingy so you can sorta read them).
A stray peculiar - one of so many - from this album
A gallery of some of the Creel Pone's most eye-catching releases not already posted above
(they are ear-catching too)
