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. 

AGP1-29 are now available for direct download in the archive at dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/AvantGardeProject

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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AGP33 features music by Goffredo Petrassi, one of the leading Italian composers of the 20th century, and the least well known of them outside of Italy. In all honesty, I'm not sure I had even once listened to the LPs from which these tracks were transcribed, before an AGP partisan requested an installment of Petrassi. Now having listened to his works, I absolutely love what I hear. Born in 1904, Petrassi was in his fifties and sixties when he wrote the music included in this installment--music that sounds every bit as advanced as the works of his much younger contemporaries, with a dignity and self-assurance that came presumably from two more decades of experience in composition. These works have all of the challenging harmonies and timbres that one expects from that era, with a natural and engaging musicality.

The five tracks in this installment were drawn from two LPs on the Italia label--one devoted to Petrassi and the other an anthology of contemporary harp music played by Claudia Antonelli. Estri (1967) is for 15 performers. Tre per Sette (1966) is for three performers playing seven wind instruments. Serenata (1958) is for five performers, and to my ear compares favorably to chamber works by Berio and Maderna from that decade. Beatitudines, Testimonianza per Martin Luther King (1969) is for baritone and five performers. Flou (1980) is for solo harp. The torrent includeds a text file containing the liner notes from both LPs. The notes in Italian 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 - Estri [14:05]
02 - Tre per Sette [10:29]
03 - Serenata [14:36]
04 - Beatitudines [12:12]
05 - Flou [7:56]

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.