The Avant Garde Project is a series of 20th-century classical, experimental, and 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. 

AGP1-127 are now available for direct download in the archive at dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/AvantGardeProject

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AGP129 continues our series of electronic compositions from the USA with finalists and award winners from three years (1968-1970) of an electronic music contest sponsored by Dartmouth College. The judges for these contests included leading electroacoustic composers from the United States and Europe, and entrants were received from around the world. Twelve compositions from these contests were included in two LP releases on Turnabout Records. Three of the compositions (from Poland and Czechoslovakia) were featured in AGP38. One composition, by Jean-Claude Risset, is available on a CD of Risset's works that can be bought from www.electrocd.com. The rest are included in this installment. Track 49 is by a Chilean composer, but I have no South American Electronic Music installments planned, so I included it even though there's no obvious US connection.

The LPs that were transcribed for this installment are in excellent condition, but the Turnabout pressings are not surprisingly on the noisy side. Fortunately, it is a constant light "hush" sound (like hiss but with a somewhat lower frequency range), rather than a more annoying variable "woosh-woosh" sound. But tracks like Ambience and Cambrian Sea that are intended to emerge from and return to silence instead emerge from and return to a pillow of light noise. The torrent includes a PDF file with scans of the liner notes from the two LPs transcribed for this installment.

43 - Olly Wilson, Cetus [9:20]
44 - William Hellermann, Ariel [6:56]
45 - Pril Smiley, Eclipse [8:01]
46 - Peter Glushanok, In Memoriam for My Friend Henry Saia [10:31]
47 - Peter Klausmeyer, Cambrian Sea [6:24]
48 - Raymond Moore, Trip Through the Milky Way [6:05]
49 - José Vicente Asuar, Divertimento [7:09]
50 - Richard Allen Robinson, Ambience [6:28]

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. 

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.