26.12.25
Microtonal (M)Usic from tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE
"Last weekend, I attended the excellent "Beyond: Microtonal Music Festival" at the Andy Warhol Museum & the University of Pittsburgh. There were 2 symposia & 3 concerts. It was the 1st festival I'd ever attended dedicated exclusively to microtonal music. I was very stimulated. As a response to this, I decided to post my microtonal music to the Internet Archive. All of this work of mine is almost completely unknown & on the occasions when it was performed for an audience the microtonal aspects weren't emphasized.
I probably 1st became conscious of microtonal music when I acquired a copy of the Columbia Masterworks "Music of Our Time" record entitled "The World of Harry Partch" in 1973. I was 19 or 20 years old. I had possibly already conceived of my own instrument by then & done a line drawing of someone resembling me playing it - but I hadn't built it. Not only had Partch built his instruments, they were beautifully conceived & created AND they were tuned microtonally AND in Just Intonation - which I'd probably never heard of OR heard before. Making matters even more intense for me was that Partch had been a hitch-hiker & drifter, as I had been, &, as I later learned, had even composed music about it ("Barstow" & "Bitter Music" being the 2 examples that spring to mind).
By early 1974 I'd picked up another great Columbia Masterworks Partch: this time the multi-record box-set of "Delusion of the Fury" that featured a booklet & an additional record that demonstrated & explained the instruments. It might've been in 1975 that I learned that a performance of "Delusion of the Fury" was scheduled to occur in NYC but I was too 'old' now to be picked up hitch-hiking as easily as I had previously & too poor to get to NYC otherwise. I missed my chance to witness Partch himself - something I'll forever regret! After discovering Partch, microtonality was on my map & I was looking for other microtonal music recordings - what I subsequently found being beyond the purview of this essay.
My (M)Usic has never really centered around tonality, micro- or otherwise. Yes, I started off taking piano lessons around ages 6 to 10, yes, I started playing rock & folk music as a teenager, yes, I took violin lessons when I was 18, yes, I started improvising when I was 19 - but I don't think I really took off until I started seriously composing when I was 20 & was inspired by things like electro-acoustic music, graphic notation, prose scores, & aleatoric pieces - none of which were centered around tonality.
I was much more interested in the IDEA behind my pieces & in having these ideas be as original as I could make them. I didn't want to advance a tradition, I wanted to make sound pieces that sounded as little like previously existing sound works as I could manage. Of course, that's an oversimplification & I was far from always successful but, still, that's enough of an introduction to my intentions.
During the Beyond Festival I was captivated by how intensely detailed the attention was to tonality in most of the work discussed & performed. It was fantastic! It was also completely different from my own uses of microtonality. It became even clearer to me than it had already been that many of my pieces, especially the larger-scaled ones, are timelines on which events happen (as with all music, I suppose, but the focus on that is more prominent in my own work) & that I create the events to be clearly differentiable from each other in multiple respects. As such, microtonality is just another factor in creating levels of articulation to help keep things audibly separate when simultaneous as well as sequential.
In a sense, this is an analog to my social philosophy. My conception of 'harmony' is not a blending of similar ratios - instead it's a coexistence of dramatically different elements that retain their individuality & 'harmonize' by having equal prominence.
From 1994 to 1997, I worked on a large-scale solo piece called "Triple-S Variety Show". The "Triple-S" referred to the synthesizers, sampler, & sequencer that I was trying to learn more deeply. The synthesizers were 2 Kawai K1m wave-table synthesizers that my friend Sarmad had sold me cheaply & a DX27S algorithm synthesizer that my friend Dave had given me. I'd bought the 'primitive' 8-bit Mirage sampler/sequencer. Additional equipment used were 2 to 4 Radio Shack 4-channel mixers, a MIDI-Patcher, & a Multi-Verb effects unit.
Having spent 1990 to 1994 working with my "Official" Project that had 2 to 17 members & that revolved around a complex aleatoric system of what cofounder Neil Feather & I called "C.A.M.U.s" (Cue Activated Modular Units) I wanted to explore a similar modularity that could be performed by myself alone.
25.12.25
kingdom of noise : japanese noise selection (1993)
Aube, Incapacitants, Dislocation, Masonna, Seed Mouth,
Violent Onsen Geisha, Solmania, Merzbow, C.C.C.C., Hijokaidan
6.12.25
28.11.25
26.10.25
18.10.25
12.10.25
19.9.25
21.8.25
20.8.25
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2.8.25
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Rediscovering the Ambient Beauty of the Legendary
Susumu Yokota
https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/susumu-yokota-album-guide
yuko araki
https://yukoaraki.bandcamp.com/
medium
https://mediummusiclabel.bandcamp.com/
Exploring the Sonic Underground of Japanese Noise
https://www.yokogaomag.com/editorial/exploring-the-sonic-underground-of-japanese-noise
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rave
https://denniscooperblog.com/rave/
ILLUSTRIOUS (Martyn Ware & Charles Stooke) : Mesmerine 111 (CSR357CD)
13.7.25
20.4.25
12.4.25
luigi russolo
@ UbuWeb : music + Robert Filliou’s translation of the futurist manifesto ''The art of noise", 1913 : https://www.ubu.com/sound/russolo_l.html
(thanks to reaktorplayer for the suggestion: https://x.com/reaktorplayer)
11.4.25
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Michael Esposito & CM von Hausswolff : The Ghosts of Effingham : parcevp.bandcamp.com/album/the-ghosts-of-effingham
Raymond Cass : The Ghost Orchid - An Introduction to EVP :
maruosa : wannaBeAExtremer EP :
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Father Murphy : Anyway, your children will deny it : https://fathermurphy.bandcamp.com/album/anyway-your-children-will-deny-it
Andrea Cauduro : Without people you're Nothing : https://chiaerichettiaeditoreraecordings.bandcamp.com/album/without-people-youre-nothing
25.3.25
2.2.25
26.1.25
meredith young-sowers : agartha: personal meditation music (1985)
imprec.bandcamp.com/album/agartha-personal-meditation-music-1985-7-cd-box
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see also the whole discography of important records :
23.1.25
21.1.25
19.1.25
various : peyrere
Cassette compilation with:
The Band Of Holy Joy, Rowland S. Howard, Lydia Lunch, Nurse With Wound, Total, Test Department, Dau Al Set, Total Damage, Derek Jarman, Current 93, Pure, Coil, Robin Rimbaud
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