Lost Labels:New Albion
Shining an October light on the past, Bandcamp recommendations, and a subscription offer.
The first New Albion CD I ever bought was the Austral Voices collection of contemporary avant-garde and experimental music from Australia. I can’t remember exactly why I choose this one—I had been eyeing the label’s releases whenever I was browsing in a record store—but I had finished my MM and wanted to get back out of that again and find out what was going on at the edges of compositional thinking.
Austral Voices did that, and much more. This is one of the finest albums of post-WWII experimentalism, and in my opinion is essential to any library of avant-garde music (the subtitle is “For Telegraph Wires, Tuning Forks, Computer-Driven Piano, Psaltery, Whirly, Cello, Synthesizer and Ruined Piano”). It is also unbound by eras, there’s nothing dated about the thinking and the sounds in here, and I think that’s because there’s music on here that is constructed from the ground up, almost literally, not just responses to the Australian environment and the vastness of such a lightly populated continent.
That’s most prominent, and powerful, in the first and last tracks. The album opens with “Journeys on the Winds of Time I,” which is Alan Lamb’s piece for telegraph wires. He’s not playing them, but recording the sounds of the winds and shifting earth pushing and pulling these archaic and abandoned wires so that they vibrate, and produce audible frequencies. This is stunning, beautiful, the actual sound of emptiness, if you can wrap your mind around that.
The last track is Ross Bolleter’s “Nallan Void,” composed for piano. But not just any piano, Bolleter is connoisseur of pianos that have been left to fall apart, and this particular ruined one was located at the Nallan sheep station where it was in the bar of a hotel during the 1930s and ’40s, then neglected outdoors for a year, before being stored in a shed. To Bolleter, it was a piano “prepared by its environment.” Like Lamb’s piece, it’s incredible to simply hear the sound of this instrument as Bolleter works through its condition—and the recording is in the rough, with a barking dog and a truck starting part of the ambience.
Bandcamp Friday
This is all an introduction to both New Albion and the October edition of Bandcamp Friday. The label is out of print, and although you can buy digital versions at the Apple Music store or HDtracks, this is a catalogue that should be made available on Bandcamp because the concept and aesthetic of the label is perfect for the site. New Albion put out music from the Medieval era to the 21st century that all fit into a sonic niche of depth, spaciousness, focus, a kind mystery built around harmonic consonance and ambience. Another way to put it was that the defining quality of the label was sound and emotional/psychological response, not style.
That made New Albion one of the leading new music labels in its twenty-five years, before it was shuttered in 2012 (here’s a good article on its demise). The catalogue has many important, excellent, beautiful albums, including Carl Stone’s Mom’s, Ingram Marshall’s Fog Tropes/Gradual Requiem/Gambuh I, Morton Feldman: Only: Works for Voice and Instruments, Janice Giteck’s Home (Revisited), Alvin Curran’s Crystal Psalms, the 25th anniversary concert of In C, and several wonderful collections of Lou Harrison’s music. This is tremendously vital stuff, and I hope Foster Reed thinks about opening up a Bandcamp storefront.
Many of the artists on the label, and from Austral Voices, are still making music, and some of them are on Bandcamp, so consider them and the following choices if you’re shopping at the site this Friday:
Ross Bolleter
Total Piano
A 4CD collection of music played on variously ruined pianos!
Alan Lamb
Night Passage
Pre-order this November 1 release of Lamb’s classic Night Passage album of music for long wires.
Cecil Taylor
Phllip Freeman is administering Leo Records digital catalogue and putting it up at Bandcamp, and here’s Taylor’s wonderful spoken word album, first released in an LP edition of 200, my copy worn into the ground long ago.
Aphex Twin
Selected Ambient Works Volume II (Expanded Edition)
James Bernard
Atmospherics
The reissue of an expanded (and seemingly finally complete) version of Aphex Twin’s most important album is a major release this year, but so is this sleeper from Past Inside the Present. This is not just a reissue of James Bernard’s ambient Atmospherics album. It’s a fine album made remarkable once you know Bernard played it all in real-time, with no overdubbing, handling sequences, samples, and the bass all by himself. There’s also a second disc, which is an extensive remixing and rethinking of the original album by bvdub, and it’s damn good on its own.
Pauline Oliveros
Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1960-1970
Important Records has uncovered more copies of this fine archival release of Oliveros’ early electronic music, and it’s a value price for a 12CD box.
Body Meπa
Prayer in Dub
The second release from this band of Grey McMurray, Sasha Frere-Jones, Melvin Gibbs, and Greg Fox is a little looser and also much more fiery than their first, and that was one of the best albums of 2022.
Belong
October Language
It’s October, so time for the most October album of all time, all tangy, smoky, crispy crackling oranges and dry, cool breezes.
A Notice and an Offer
This newsletter needs more subscribers! Many more! So up through 11:59pm, October 31, all new yearly subscribers are eligible to win one of the following CDs (all brand new/mint/unopened):
One new subscriber will get a brand new copy of LIFETIME REBEL, the new 4CD/1DVD release from RogueArt that captured Joëlle Léandre’s full Lifetime Achievement concert at the 2023 Vision Festival. You can read my longer look here—it’s excellent, a best-of-year entry and just superb free and creative jazz, from the opening Tiger Trio with Nicole Mitchell and Myra Milford to Léandre’s duet with the great poet Fred Moten.
Two other picks will each get a brand new copy of the latest Can archival concert release, Live in Aston 1977. I included this in my Bandcamp guide to the band and it’s the best so far of their new series of live albums:
Every new paid yearly subscriber (including current monthly subscribers switching to yearly) will have their name entered into the drawing—get/gift two subscriptions, you’re entered twice, etc. Entries will close at the stroke of midnight PST, November 1, and I’ll run a randomized drawing later that day.
Now is the time to subscribe, because I’m going to have to raise rates sometime before the end of the year (there will be an announcement on that). Please subscribe, and good luck!