IMPORTANT NOTE: The Avant Garde Project will be off for the month of August. Please continue to seed as many torrents as you can, since I will stop seeding around August 1. And if any of the torrents become unavailable during the month, be assured that they will be up again when I return. Join us in September for a month of torrents specially requested by AGP patrons.

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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, as long as you restrict the search to AUDIO torrents. 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 8-14 can be found here:

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

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AGP22 continues our month of percussion with a grab-bag of three works. "The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. Erratum Musicale", by Marcel Duchamp, is from the same LP that yielded "26'1.1499" for a Percussionist" from AGP18. Donald Knaack interprets it entirely with instruments made of glass, and it sounds lovely. It's a bit like Glas Spiele from AGP1, but more spare. "Des Imagistes" by William Kraft is a recitation of poems by Ezra Pound with percussion accompaniment. It's from a CRI LP that actually was released on CD many years back, but is now long out of print. I included it because the timbres are delightful and the recording is very nicely done. The LP copy is immaculate, so it's practically like a CD release, but five used copies were available on Amazon last time I checked, if you'd like the CD itself. "Provisoires Agglomerates" by Michel Puig is a work for percussion ensemble, voices, and magnetic tape, left over from AGP21. It depicts the horrors of an atomic explosion, and has something of the emotional intensity of Penderecki's "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima".

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 - Marcel Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even. Erratum Musicale [15:12]
02 - William Kraft, Des Imagistes [23:41]
03 - Michel Puig, Provisoires Agglomerates [29:05]

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).