** 300 copies. Color Vinyl. 140gr Audiophile pressing. Including printed inner sleeve housing a Nagaoka anti-static record sleeve, plus an original insert that functions as Obi. Comes with exact replicas of the original postcard graphic scores. **
Following the first ever vinyl release to attend to James Tenney's Postal Pieces, Blume returns with a second volume from the seminal American composer's suite of eleven works, among the most important and quietly radical efforts of 20th Century experimental music. Since its founding in 2014, Blume has issued free-standing works, spanning the historical and contemporary, that represent singular gestures of creativity within the field of experimental sound, building networks of context and understanding that already include works by Werner Durand, Sarah Hennies, Bruce Nauman, John Butcher, Jocy de Oliveira, Mary Jane Leach, Valentina Magaletti, Alvin Curran, Julius Eastman, Alvin Lucier, Jürg Frey, Doris Dennison, Ben Vida, and others. This new collection marks the first appearance on vinyl of four more pieces from the suite - Swell Piece, for Alison Knowles (1967), Swell Piece #2, for Pauline Oliveros (1971), Swell Piece #3, for La Monte Young (1971), and Koan, for Malcolm Goldstein (1971) - drawing upon recordings by the Amsterdam based ensemble The Barton Workshop, under the direction of James Fulkerson, and features newly commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey.
In 1970, Tenney reversed the entropy of his own life and went west. Born in New Mexico, and raised between Arizona and Colorado, he had spent the majority of the post-war years at the centre of cultural ferment in New York. Far from self-sabotage, his generous spirit and radical temperament compelled him toward one of the great social experiments of the era. Alongside the interdisciplinary artists Allan Kaprow, Simone Forti, John Baldessari, Miriam Schapiro, Nam June Paik, and Alison Knowles, and the composers Morton Subotnick, Harold Budd, and Charlemagne Palestine, among numerous others, Tenney accepted a position at the newly inaugurated California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), embarking upon a revolutionary approach to arts education loosely based on Black Mountain College. While the move began an enduring period of relative obscurity, Tenney quietly remained one of the most distinct and groundbreaking composers of his generation, producing a remarkably focused body of work inquiring after the elemental character and perception of sound.
