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. 

AGP1-19 are now available for direct download in the archive at dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/AvantGardeProject
AGP20-23 are available at http://thepiratebay.org/search.php?q=avant+garde+project&audio=on

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. 

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AGP24 kicks off a month of requests by AGP patrons with a collection of works by Toru Takemitsu, one of the most brilliant and fascinating composers of modern music. Most of Takemitsu's major works are available on CD, but a number of interesting ones appear to have fallen through the cracks. This torrent collects all of the out-of-print works by Takemitsu that I could find in my stacks. Tracks 01-12 come from a 4LP celebration of Takemitsu released on the Japanese RCA label in 1970. Tracks 01-06 are electroacoustic works from 1956, 1960, and a four-movement suite drawn from the music Takemitsu wrote for the movie Kwaidan in 1966. Tracks 07-12 comprise the six movements of Arc for piano and orchestra (1963-1966), where the influence of Edgar Varese is particularly evident. Tracks 13 and 14 were written in 1967 and 1968, and come from a US RCA release from 1969. The torrent includes a text file with the liner and booklet notes from both sources.

If you have never seen the movie Kwaidan before, be sure to check it out. It is a collection of four Japanese ghost stories that had been collected by Lafcadio Hearn. The DVD release presents it in glorious widescreen with rich colors. The visual composition is stunning, and the stories are genuinely spooky. The third tells the story of a young monk who sings and plays the biwa, a traditional Japanese lute. He is especially renowned for his performances of the medieval epic describing the struggle between the clans of Genki and Heike, and is asked by a rich family to sing of the culminating sea battle between those clans. Takemitsu's score for that story (the third movement in the suite) makes extensive use of a performance of that piece by Kinshi Tsurita, a renowned singer and biwa player who Takemitsu also worked with on "November Steps". To provide some context for this movement, I have transcribed a performance by Kinshi Tsurita of this whole piece, recorded in the early 1970s and released on LP by Le Chant Du Monde. The sound of singing with biwa accompaniment is not to be missed. The transcription is available at:

!This torrent is just too large to fit on one CD. Tracks 01-13 fit on an 80-minute CD, and there is space for track 14 on an 80-minute CD with AGP25, which will be seeded next Friday. Alternatively, tracks 01-06 can be combined with the Kinshi Tsurita performance of "Dan no Ura" on one CD, with tracks 07-14 on another CD.

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 - Vocalism A.I [4:09]
02 - Water music [9:52]
03 - Kwaidan: Ki [6:01]
04 - Kwaidan: Yuki [6:54]
05 - Kwaidan: Biwa-uta [11:07]
06 - Kwaidan: Bunraku [3:15]
07 - Arc: Pile [4:47]
08 - Arc: Solitude [2:34]
09 - Arc: Your love and the crossing [7:51]
10 - Arc: Textures [7:46]
11 - Arc: Reflection [3:07]
12 - Arc: Coda [3:16]
13 - Green [5:41]
14 - Asterism [11:41]

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 any artists to be deprived of the royalties that they so richly deserve.