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

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CALLING ALL AGP PARTISANS: I've had a request for Peter Maxwell Davies' Eight Songs for a Mad King, which was released on CD but appears to be now long out of print. I could transcribe it from an LP, but it would be better to get it right off a CD. If you have a copy of the CD and would be willing to transcribe it for the AGP, please email me at lou@avantgardeproject.org, and I can walk you through how to do so. Thanks!

AGP72 features the piano music of Milton Babbitt as played by Robert Taub, transcribed from an out-of-print CD that was provided by an AGP partisan and devoted Babbitt aficionado in the USA. The recordings were originally released on a Harmonia Mundi LP (HMC 5160) in 1986. Milton Babbitt was one of the major American composers of the twentieth century, and a pioneer of both 12-tone and electronic music. Supplementing the CD transcription are two works for chamber ensembles, transcribed from LPs (Nonesuch H-71372 and CRI SD 499). The tracks altogether are just barely too large to fit on a CD. Sorry! The torrent includes a PDF file with liner notes from all three releases. 

Equipment used for A/D conversion of tracks 10-11: 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 - Three Compositions (1947-48)
02 - Duet (1956)
03 - Semi-Simple Variations (1956)
04 - Partitions (1957)
05 - Post-Partitions (1966)
06 - Tableaux (1973)
07 - Reflections (1974) for piano and synthesized tape
08 - Canonical Form (1983)
09 - Lagniappe (1985)
10 - Arie da Capo (1973-74)
11 - Paraphrases (1979)

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.