April 3rd, 2013
Tape Play is a heavily appreciated collection of Kenneth Gaburo’s 10 works for tape alone made from 1964-92. (He produced many more pieces for tape with instruments and multi-media.) “Fat Millie’s Lament” is a “collage, mostly of loops of percussion and voice sounds” with a processed and delayed Morgan Powell big-band climax in the middle. “The Wasting Of Lucrecetzia” is “a crazed, wild piece and is made mostly of scraps of screaming, percussion loops and sax playing. This is a delicious and thrilling piece. I certainly remember it being an inspiration to me when I was an undergraduate in that it used to give me permission to try similarly loud, crass, bad-taste pieces that stick their tongues out with denunciatory glee.” “For Harry” is for Partch and is just the opposite—a chopped-up yet almost relaxing array of notes played on a simple monochord instrument made by KG “showing how Partch’s timbral and pitch world could be derived from a single vibrating string with electronic transformation.”
Read the rest of this entry »
No Comments » | 
Kenneth Gaburo | 
Permalink
Posted by Arcane Candy
March 2nd, 2010
Five Works For Voices, Instruments and Electronics is a CD released in early 2002 courtesy of our fine, feathered friends at New World Records. The works by Kenneth Gaburo contained on it span from 1957 to 1974, and offer much goodness for lovers of strange and gargled sound waves of the vintage variety. “Antiphony IV (Poised)” (1967) is another in a long line of avant-garde classical / electronic crossovers from the later classic era—pitting lone vocal sounds in the left channel and dark, electronic swirls in the right against (or with) a lot of quirky instrumental blat in the soft, chewy center. In “String Quartet In One Movement” (1956), “Sometimes all four instruments make one line, sometimes they split into four completely distinct entities; most often they are balanced into exquisitely formed hierarchies, with one held note on one instrument being temporarily in the foreground—only to be immediately replaced by a fragment of another line in another instrument as the focus of attention. It’s almost as if the music were woven, rather than composed—each line existing both as an object on its own and as part of a larger making of musical gestures.”
Read the rest of this entry »
No Comments » | Kenneth Gaburo | Permalink
Posted by Arcane Candy