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. AGP1-74 are now available for direct download in the archive at dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/AvantGardeProject ======================================= AGP79 is the second devoted to the electroacoustic works by Jean Dubuffet, one of the major visual artists of the 20th century. Dubuffet sought to create music as, "a man who ignores everything about western music and invents a music for himself without any reference, without any discipline, without anything that would prevent him to express himself freely and for his own good pleasure." In 1960-61, he recorded himself playing a variety of instruments for which he had no training, and used a mixing box to produce musique concrete works. The relative primitiveness of his equipment gives them a raw sound reminiscent of the pioneering musique concrete works of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, from a decade earlier. AGP74 was a transcription of an LP release of selected works from that series. This installment comes from a somewhat different selection released on CD, a transcription of which has been provided through the generosity of an AGP partisan in response to an appeal at the time of AGP74. The booklet notes from the CD were copied from the Ubuweb site. Only three of the tracks are common to both releases (03, 05, and 06). Listening to those points up interesting differences between the two releases. The CD tracks have a brighter sound, revealing more detail in the higher frequencies. To my ear, the high frequencies on the CD sound artificially elevated, but it is possible that instead the high frequencies were damped down in the LP release. 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 - La fleur de barbe [23:45] 02 - Temps radieux [5:01] 03 - Humeur incertaine [7:56] 04 - Coq a l'oeil [6:26] 05 - l'eau [4:18] 06 - Gai savoir [3:36] 07 - Longue peine [11:08] 08 - Terre foisonnante [6:36] 09 - Prospe¦Ēre, prolife¦Ēre [6:27] 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.