The Avant Garde Project is an effort to make available some of my  favorite pieces of experimental music from the late 20th century. The extremist intellectual climate of that time gave birth to some of the wildest and most challenging sound combinations that human artistry has ever conceived. The pieces selected for this project were released on LP but have never been released on CD, and so they are effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. Using an analog rig and pre-amplification that is near state-of-the-art, I am able to extract the sound from the grooves with almost none of the surface noise and tracking distortion normally associated with LPs. 

I am hoping you will find this material as fascinating and beautiful as I do. My hard disk is small, and so I am seriously limited as to how many torrents I can host at one time. If you find any value in your downloads, I ask you please to seed them yourself for as long as possible, so they will continue to be available to other people. The first three AGP torrents (featuring the music of Josef Anton Riedl, Mauricio Kagel, and Robert Erickson) are still being seeded through the generosity of other downloaders, so check them out if you haven't already.

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The fourth AGP torrent features music by Jacob Druckman--one of the top American composers of his generation. Druckman is highly regarded for his sense of timbre and sound combination. He produced many brilliant orchestrations in a style somewhat reminiscent of Luciano Berio's. His electroacoustic compositions also explored a rich tonal pallet, largely avoiding the more hackneyed electronic sounds of that time. 

The first two tracks make up the two sides of the Nonesuch LP H-71253, which was one of the first electroacoustic records that I came to love. ANIMUS III is an electroacoustic work that derives its sound material largely from Arthur Bloom's clarinet playing. It has an incredibly rich and complex sound, yet largely mellifluous owing to the use of clarinet as sound source. synapse>VALENTINE combines electronic and acoustic sound sources instead by laying them aside one another: synapse is a purely electronic commentary on VALENTINE, which is for solo double bass without electronic manipulation. Incenters is a work from 1968, written shortly after Druckman rejected serialism. It is scored for 13 musicians (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, violin, viola, cello, double bass, piano and electric organ, and percussion), and was released on volume III of the Spectrum: New American Music series on Nonesuch Records (H-71221). Lamia is a work for soprano and orchestra based on texts related to magic. It was written for the gifted mezzo soprano Jan de Gaetani, who performs it in this recording (Louisville Orchestra First Editions Records LS-764). My favorite movement is the third, which is representative of Druckman's luxuriant orchestral style of the mid-1970's. 

In preparing this torrent, I had to exclude a number of other favorite compositions by Druckman, because they are still in print. I can particularly recommend his orchestral works Windows (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972) and Aureole (1979), and his second string quartet (his last serialist composition, from 1966). I believe they are all available on CD through Amazon.com or elsewhere.

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 - ANIMUS III [15:44]
02 - synapse>VALENTINE [18:23]
03 - Incenters [12:36]
04 - Lamia, movements I & II [9:09]
05 - Lamia, movement III [4:35]
06 - Lamia, movement IV [5:34]

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 paltry).