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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AGP34 features music by Stefan Wolpe, who was born in Germany, emigrated to Palestine in 1933, and to the United States in 1938, where he exerted considerable influence on the next generation of American composers. All of the works in this torrent date from his American residence. Wolpe's music has considerable rhythmic, harmonic, and timbral complexity, and can be exhilirating to listen to if attended to closely. Having studied with Webern for four years on his way to Palestine, he sometimes used serial technique, but with tone rows of greater than or less than 12 notes, thus enabling him to emphasize some notes in the chromatic scale more than others. 

Enactments for Three Pianos (1950-53) is an astonishing work--over 30 minutes long and containing an incredible amount of musical content. The other pieces in this installment are all for mixed chamber ensembles. Quartet (1950-54) is scored for trumpet, tenor saxophone, piano, and percussion. Piece in Two Parts for Six Players (1962) is scored for violin, clarinet, trumpet, cello, harp, and piano. The two chamber pieces (1964 and 1965-66) are for larger ensembles. If you like this music, you should also check out Wolpe's String Quartet from 1970--one of his last works--which is available in an excellent and very reasonably priced 2CD set from Vox, with works by a suite of other great American composers. The torrent includes a text file containing the liner notes from the five LPs from which these works were transcribed. 

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 - Enactments I [6:03]
02 - Enactments II [7:23]
03 - Enactments III [4:03]
04 - Enactments IV [3:04]
05 - Enactments V [11:11]
06 - Quartet [12:29]
07 - Piece in Two Parts for Six Players [11:40]
08 - Chamber Piece No. 1 [8:28]
09 - Chamber Piece No. 2 [3:48]

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.