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. 

Most AGP torrents are still available through the generosity of other downloaders (and if you like what you hear, please seed them yourself for as long as you can). A Pirate Bay search for "avant garde project" will turn them up, as long as you restrict the search to audio torrents. Ignore the seeders/leechers statistics, as they often show no seeders when in fact there are some. For the time being, a new AGP torrent is being seeded around midnight each Friday night (GMT), and is advertised on the I Hate Music Forum. 

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AGP 12 is the second of two featuring the work of Aribert Reimann, a gifted German composer born in 1936, whose work combines a stirring lyricism with highly stimulating harmonies and orchestrations. Some of his compositions are in print, including his opera King Lear, and a selection of works for voice and piano that was recorded in the 1970s is scheduled for re-release this month (there is a listing for it at Presto Classical). However, some of his most significant compositions have never been released on CD, including the works that comprise AGP 11 and 12.

This torrent features three works composed between 1967 and 1972. Like most of Reimann's works, two of these are for voice, demonstrating his remarkable melodic sense. Inane was written especially for Joan Carroll, who performs it in this recording. The piano concerto melds the piano with various combinations of the 19 accompanying instruments in a series of chamber ensembles, alternating with dense polyphony in the tutti sections. The text file included in the torrent contains the English notes that came with the LPs, including a long analysis of Reimann's works up to the early 1970s.

NOTE: This torrent can be combined with AGP 11 on two CDs, as follows: Inane fits with the first two sides of the Requiem, and the last two sides of the Requiem fit with the remaining two works in this torrent.

01 - Concerto for piano and 19 instruments [19:26]
02 - Einfuhrung for tenor and piano [20:59]
03 - Inane for soprano and orchestra [23:30]

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 to deprive any artists of their much-deserved royalties (however small).