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.

AGP1-150 are now available for direct download in the archive at dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/AvantGardeProject

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The Avant Garde Project returns from its summer sabbatical with an installment of works by Alban Berg. All three works are available in other recordings on CD, but these recordings appear to be out of print. 

The Alban Berg Quartett's reading of Berg's String Quartet, op. 3 is a dynamite performance and recording of this great work. The files in this installment are CD-standard 16 bit/44.1kHz. Their recording of this work is so nice that I'm also making files available in a separate torrent in 24-bit resolution. The recording is from 1974, just a few years after the quartet formed, and features Günter Pichler, Klaus Maetzl, Hatto Beyerle, and Valentin Erben. It was published on Teldec Records (6.41301). The recording of the string-quartet version of Berg's Lyric Suite on side B is available on CD at a very reasonable price in a 5CD retrospective of performances by the Alban Berg Quartett entitled "Hommage".

The recordings of Berg's Violin Concerto and Drei Orchesterstücke feature the Kölner Rundfunk Sinfonie-Orchester conducted by Hiroshi Wakasugi, with Ulf Hoelscher on violin for the concerto. These recordings are nicely detailed and balanced but a bit on the dark side. It is an EMI recording, published by Deutsche Harmonia Mundi in 1979. The recording was produced by Dr. H. Lang and engineered by O. Nielsen and H. Rantz. 

Aside from a few moments of scattered tracking distortion, both transcriptions are very clean. I didn't scan the LP cover notes, because neither of them provides information you couldn't readily find on the internet or in books (remember them?). 

01 - String Quartet, op. 3, movement 1, Langsam [9:22]
02 - String Quartet, op. 3, movement 2, Mässige Viertel [9:48]
03 - Violin Concerto, 1935 [27:11]
04 - Drei Orchesterstucke, op. 6 [20:28]

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 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.