anestis logothetis “electroacoustic works” compact disc

• untitled, coloured noise, tape from the archive (5:40) 1962-1967
  
• fantasmata & meditation (19:58) 1960-1961
  
• nekrologlog (9:17) 1961
  
• wellenformen (13:09) 1981

december 2011 release ; ... a legit (legit !!!) collection of the entirety of greek composer anestis logothetis’ electronic music :: the pieces from his preisser / musikalische jügend österreichs lp :: ... along with the piece “wellenformen” from the “österreichische musik der gegenwart” lp :: ... & an otherwise entirely unheard piece (“untitled, coloured noise, tape from the archive ”) ... re: the music (w/ a little pontification re: the original lp release thrown in for good measure) :: ... i have a stipulation in my concert-rider that reads thusly: “if the promoters of the show take me to a record store wherein i find one of my personal ‘holy grail’ lps for a reasonable price, i will perform that evening for free” :: because of this, people are always asking me about my “holy grail” records and offering me advice (“french & german electronic music from the 50’s through 70’s, eh? you mean jean michel jarre & tangerine dream, right?”, or “pierre henry, eh? have you heard this really obscure one; ‘messe pour le fin du temps?’” or my personal favorite: “is lego feet one of them? because i have a cdr of a dupe of a copy that i can burn for you”) ... you can probably guess what a couple of them are :: ”electronic panorama”, karel appel’s “musique barbare”, paul panhuysen & john goedhart’s “long string installations”, “electronic music from york”, the self-released desmond leslie 10”, paul boisselet’s “robot”, parmegiani’s “chants magnetiques”, etc ... but right up there in the top 3 is this obscure gem :: anestis logothetis’ “„hör!-spiel” necrologlog 1961 fantasmata 1960.” said lp, originally “pressed on behalf of the musical youth of austria” in 1975, consists of two text-sound pieces from 1971 / 1961 and an absolute monster of an early tape-piece : the side-long “fantasmata 1960.” this was composed, you guessed it, in 1960 in the “institut für elektroakustik der musikhochschule in wien” (which translates, oddly enough, as “institute for electro-acoustics of the music high school of vienna”) so ... what makes this a “holy grail” record? i’ll tell you ... two things actually ; for one, this record was never distributed or even made available in any real way. once a year, somewhere in the world, behind closed doors in expensive offices with much finely polished oak / cherrywood furniture, pipes are smoked and a single copy changes hands for more money than i pay per month in rent ... secondly, “fantasmata 1960” was hand-picked by günter brüs, rudy schwarzkogler, et.al as the soundtrack to their earliest aktionist performances in vienna in the mid-60’s... mainly as, at the time, there just plum weren’t any other violent, jump-cut, noise-oriented tape music from austria (or... anywhere in the world for that matter) ... listening to “fantasmata 1960”, in all 20 minutes of its coarse, scrabbly, short-attention-span glory, it’s an easy parallel to make to the reckless public endangerment and bodily harm of the akionists ... moreso than any other early (and this is, really, quite early) electronic piece i’ve heard, “fantasmata” really echoes the stop-start contempo-noise jank of wiese, kites, et.al... for a piece of music executed in 1960, it’s pretty damn brutal; just full-on, greasy, and super-inviting ... ... “fantasmata” really is one of my all-time favorite tape-pieces ; it’s a rare example of a truly transgressive, aggressive electronic collage-piece from before (way before) the psychedelic era ; this disc is well worth it for this alone (listen to the sound-sample for an extended segment) ... the early 80’s ems piece is an excellent addition (13 minutes of almost upic-like swarming electronic malaise) & the “coloured noise tape” is a revelation (further grimy input-overload surging ala “fantasmata”) ... ... an incredible disc, finally “made honest” via thomas gorbach’s work via the electroacoustic project ; if you’re at all interested in proto-noise, aktionism, or “outsider” tape-music, this is pretty much the be-all, end-all ... highest recommendation !!!

lecoq press release...

anestis logothetis cd out now! this is the first official digital release of anestis logothetis electroacoustic works to fantasmata & meditation, tape 91 fantasmata is the first tonal composition created in austria, realized in 1960 at the, back then, newly established institute of electroacoustic music at the vienna academy of music and the performing arts with the assistance of recording director hellmut gottwald. fantasmata is a key word in the parlance of western philosophy. aristotle describes “fantasmata” as images that have their origin in the reminiscence of what has been perceived, and are created through the experience of the sensual perception of individual objects and occurrences. logothetis thereby meets the core theme of electroacoustic music. several years later, françois bayle describes acousmatic music as a music of fictional spaces and phantom figures – a world between real and imaginary causes. as sound material, logothetis uses ecstatically shouting voices from congo dances and several concretely recorded sounds. with the technical means of the 1960s (tempo variation, ring modulation) a work with a high inner tempo emerges, in which the listeners become groping characters in an unknown sound universe. this river of known and unknown sounds flows into a sounding stream, that of meditation – a raw, granularly circling soundscape that opens up an archaic world of tonal being. while fantasmata remains logothetis’ only work without visual realization, there is a “score” to meditation, an action symbol which shows the circling on a drum covered with a skin. logothetis carried out this work on his own, and it was performed in 1963 at hermann nitsch’s first public action (aktion perinetgasse – the blood organ”) of viennese actionism in galerie lagergasse to wellenformen (wave forms), tape 91 logothetis pursued a completely different work approach in his opus wellenformen. in winter 1980/1981, he was invited to the elektronmusikstudion stiftelsen, ems stockholm. impac, a graphic program allowing movements started with a joystick to be followed for several seconds, was developed there by michael hinton. logothetis assigned different parameters to the received results for sound creation. these results were then mounted over each other in layers. the tonal possibilities of this program were limited, but the movement possibilities were enormous. this must have been inspiring for logothetis to be able to tonally transpose his aleatoric compositional approach and his knowledge about cybernetics with a computer program. the interwoven waves in a stream of synthetic sounds are audible. in other places, logothetis labels the parameters of his compositions: the multilayeredness of the tonality and the multilayeredness of time, movement, speed, flow and sound density, as well as the dynamization of music. to untitled, coloured noise, tape 226 the audio tape archive contains approx. 250 tapes. logothetis’ constant companion at his concerts was the audio tape recorder. in addition to the acoustic documentation of the performances of his works and speeches, he also collected the most diverse sounds for further processing. tapes 99, 124, 125, 143, 153, 193, 226 and 231 are material tapes. among them, the study farbiges rauschen is to be found. the time frame of the recordings is indicated as between 1962-67. in a calm which is unusual for logothetis, the filtered noise sounds flow by and open up an expansive space to listen to the individual sound occurrences and to imagine their possibilities. nekrologlog, tape 91 (speaker: the author; realized at the institute of electroacoustics at the university of music and the performing arts, vienna. recording: hellmut gottwald). this brief audio play of approx. 10 minutes was created in 1961 and was added as the closing address of my audio play mantratellurium in 1970 – as its linguistic structures complemented those of mantratellurium – but, as an independent monologue, was first performed on january 30, 1974 in my planetarium concert for the musical youth. it is a parodistic speech, which uses the form of a eulogy for someone gone missing in space as an opportunity to ‘proclaim praise’ to societal, political accomplishments in rhetorical strings of sentences. ‘…wir wuchsen uns heran an den span, der die das ich isst nicht du und doch hat ich …’ (lp text of anestis logothetis)