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Rarest of the Rare on Postclassic Radio

December 12, 2004 By

I’ve been absent because of school duties and computer problems. (When I moved from a 4GB computer to a 40GB, I laughed at the idea of ever filling it up – now I’m realizing it’s too small to play fast and loose with aiff audio files the way I need to.) But I stumbled across a cache of my rare cassettes, and I’ve put up some recordings on Postclassic Radio that you’d have a hell of a time finding anywhere else. One is the sole work by Conlon Nancarrow that isn’t commercially recorded: his Trio No. 2 of 1990, for oboe, bassoon, and piano, close to being his last work (at least, the last he composed without ransacking previous material). Another is the Wittgenstein Cycle (1980) of the inimitable Jeffrey Lohn, who was the third leg of the art-rock trio he shared with Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca in the ’80s, but who detoured out of history for a decade or two and is now reportedly composing again. Lohn set Wittgenstein’s entire Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to music, in German, in a bouncy, Stravinskian idiom, and this is an excerpt. It’s wonderful. And on top of that I’m uploading a mystery bootleg recording that I’m not even going to advertise, not having any desire to be visited by disgruntled musicians’ union goons. The Mad New-Music Broadcaster strikes again!

12/12/04 5:58 PM | filed under: main |

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