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 continues its nostalgic revue of the early avant garde (one of the works in AGP151 will be a century old next year) with the first of two installments devoted to Die Sieben Kammermusiken, one of the central publications of Paul Hindemith's early maturity. Other recordings of this collection are available on CD, but this one does not appear to be. It is performed by Ensemble 13 Baden Baden, and was published in 1978 as a 3LP set on Deutsche Harmonia Mundi (1 C 65-99721/23). The excellent recording was produced by Paul Dery, Anita Forst, and Wolfgang Wlorczyk, and engineered by Anton Enders and Norbert Klövekorn.

The transcription is very clean and detailed. The torrent includes a PDF file with scans of the extensive notes in German from the booklet that came with the set, including names of the performers in each work. The PDF file also has the notes in English from another recording I have of this collection, for the benefit of AGP partisans who don't read German well. 

01 - Kammermusik No. 1 for small orchestra, op. 24/1 [15:01]
02 - Kammermusik No. 2 for obligato piano and 12 solo instruments, op. 36/1, movements 1 & 2 [11:15]
03 - Kammermusik No. 2 for obligato piano and 12 solo instruments, op. 36/1, movements 3 & 4 [7:45]
04 - Kammermusik No. 3 for obligato cello and 10 solo instruments, op. 36/2 [18:21]
05 - Kammermusik No. 4 for solo violin and large chamber orchestra, op. 36/3 [21:32]

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.