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. AGP1-138 are now available for direct download in the archive at dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/AvantGardeProject ======================================= AGP143 is the third in a series of transcriptions of the long out-of-print ReR Quarterly, produced by Recommended Records. Released at irregular intervals of no less than three months, the series continued through three volumes of LP releases, before switching to the CD medium for a fourth volume starting in 1994, and then ending in 1997. Each volume except the third consisted of four issues containing a magazine and either an LP or CD of music. A pair of CDs with selected tracks from the first two volumes were released in 1991, but those are now also long out of print. A complete track listing for the series can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReR_Quarterly. AGP143 is a transcription of the LP from volume 1, issue 3, released in January 1986. The highlights of this issue for me are an electroacoustic piece (track 02), an impressive piece for solo percussion (track 04), and a series of avant-pop pieces composed at the 1983 Montepulciano Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte festival (begun in 1976 by Hans Werner Henze), as part of an improvisational workshop involving Chris Cutler and five other musicians (track 07). It is an excellent pressing in excellent condition, with negligible surface noise or tracking distortion. The torrent includes a PDF file with scans of the pages from the magazine describing the music on the LP. The scans encompass the four issues of volume 1. 01 - Card to Bernard, by The Big Guns [2:47] 02 - Early Rest Home, by Biota [9:43] 03 - Pigs, by Robert Wyatt [2:40] 04 - Sprung from Traps, by Roger Turner [5:08] 05 - Little Red Bombadier, by Kontroll Csoport [4:14] 06 - Woman of Water, by Adrian Mitchell [1:20] 07 - Coste, by Cassix [16:09] 07 - Criota, by Cassix 07 - Religion, by Cassix 07 - The Stanislavsky Method, by Cassix 07 - Tempo di Pace, Bari, by Cassix 07 - Copy Machine, by Cassix 07 - Finta di Nulla, by Cassix 08 - Nadja, by Nazca [4:23] 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 not currently available commercially. 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.