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 search for "avant garde project" will turn them up. 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. 

NOTE: AGP 1-14 can be found here:

http://www.mininova.org/search/?search=avant+garde+project

=======================================

AGP17 features three electroacoustic works by the Spanish composer Luis de Pablo, all created between 1974 and 1976, when de Pablo was working at the electronic music studio at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Luis de Pablo founded the first electronic music studio in Spain, in 1965, and composed a number of electroacoustic works starting shortly thereafter (in addition to his large catalog of vocal and instrumental works). These three have an intriguing reverberatory sound that can be a bit murky at times but conveys an atmosphere of mystery. 

Visto de Cerca is for three musicians and tape, the musicians singing as well as playing a variety of instruments. Chaman appears to be de Pablo's only published work for electronic tape alone. Al son que tocan is an homage to the great Spanish poet Antonio Machado, for voice, instruments, and tape. The LPs from which these were transcribed are in great condition except for a nasty scuff in the first 30 seconds of Chaman. I used the envelope tool in Audacity to take the edge off it. The included text file contains the Spanish liner notes from both LPs. Since I do not speak Spanish, they are an unedited output of my OCR program.

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. 

01 - Visto de Cerca [21:34]
02 - Chaman [22:48]
03 - Al son que tocan, side 1 [16:21]
04 - Al son que tocan, side 2 [16:00]

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).