The Avant Garde Project is a series of 20th-century classical-experimental-electroacoustic torrents digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. This is wild stuff, so check it out if you've never heard this sort of music before. The analog rig used to extract the sound from the grooves is near state-of-the-art, producing almost none of the tracking distortion or surface noise normally associated with LPs. 

AGP1-101 are now available for direct download in the archive at dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/AvantGardeProject

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With AGP102, the Avant Garde Project veers wildly off course. This installment is a transcription of an early LP by the avant garde guitarist Henry Kaiser, who has had a long, prolific career playing a remarkably diverse and profoundly strange assortment of musics. My favorite of his many recordings is "Outside Pleasure", recorded live without overdubs in August 1979 in San Francisco and Berkeley, California. Kaiser's guitar style, particularly at this stage in his career, is unlike anything anyone else does. Imagine a combination of Hawaiian slack-key guitar, the songs of humpback whales, and the music of the Krell, and you have some idea what it sounds like. 

The tracks on this LP have been re-released on a now-out-of-print CD entitled "Outside Aloha Pleasure" that also includes most of the tracks from his follow-up LP "Aloha". AGP103 will be a transcription of that CD, but when I transcribed some tracks from my LP copy, I found that the LP transfer actually has more fine detail and sounds more alive than the CD. I'm guessing they used digital noise reduction on the CD re-release to reduce the hiss of the original analog recording, and in doing so lost some clarity as well.

The installment includes two bonus tracks from Henry Kaiser's contribution to the Table of the Elements series (Neon). The torrent includes a PDF file with front and back cover scans from Outside Pleasure. My scanner's bed isn't large enough to scan an entire LP cover, so each cover is scanned in two parts.

Equipment used for A/D conversion: Lyra Helikon phono cartridge, Linn LP12/Lingo turntable, Linn Ittok tonearm, Audioquest LeoPard tonearm cable, PS Audio PS2 preamplifier, Kimber PBJ interconnect, M-Audio Audiophile USB A/D converter. 

01 - Outside Pleasure [7:43]
02 - Punctual as Actual [3:19]
03 - Farmer in Heaven [10:11]
04 - The Stormy Present [7:58]
05 - An Economy of Scale [1:52]
06 - Aquirax Aida [4:14]
07 - Information Mechanics [6:12]
08 - The Blood at the Back of the Harp [2:35]
09 - Table of Elements: Delirium [2:54]
10 - Table of Elements: Homesickness [2:54]

NOTE: To the best of my knowledge, these recordings are currently out of print. If you know otherwise, please let me know ASAP, as I do not wish any artists to be deprived of the royalties that they so richly deserve.