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. 

AGP1-69 are now available for direct download in the archive at dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/AvantGardeProject

NOTE: The AGP69 torrent has been deleted because track 06 is available on a Peter Brotzmann CD entitled "Balls". Since the rest of the installment is still long out-of-print, I have uploaded it to the AGP website, for anyone who didn't get the original torrent download. My thanks to the AGP partisan who called my attention to the Brotzmann release!

NOTE: The Avant Garde Project will be off for the month of August. AGP71 will be released on August 31.

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AGP70 is the first of two dedicated to Peter Maxwell Davies--certainly one of the most notable British composers of the 20th century. Many of Maxwell Davies' compositions are available on CD, including much of his early work. I was, however, able to find a few choice bits in my stacks that have not found their way into the digital universe. This installment includes:

St. Thomas Wake: Foxtrot for Orchestra, from 1969 (Louisville Orchestra First Edition Records LS-770)
Dark Angels for soprano and guitar from 1974 (Nonesuch H-71342)
Psalm 124 for instrumental ensemble, also from 1974 (L'Oiseau Lyre DSLO 12)

The torrent includes a PDF file with liner and booklet notes from these three LPs. It also includes further notes on Alexander Goehr's Two Choruses from Angel S 36387 (AGP68) and notes to Maxwell Davies' Leopardi Fragments from the same LP, which was to have appeared in this installment, but at the last minute I found that the very same recording is available on CD from EMI Classics.

CALLING ALL AGP PARTISANS: I am planning a second Maxwell Davies installment, with the works that appeared some years ago on an out-of-print CD entitled "Renaissance and Baroque Realizations". I have all of those works on two excellent LPs, but if they can be transcribed from CD then so much the better! If you have a copy of that CD and would be willing to get FLAC files to me transcribed from it, please email me at lou@avantgardeproject.org. This second Maxwell Davies installment will appear sometime in September.

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 - St Thomas Wake [20:58]
02 - Dark Angels [17:03]
03 - Psalm 124 [9:37]

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.