Various - CMCD: 6 Classic Concrete Electroacoustic & Electronic Works, 1970-1990 (1991 compi)

CMCD (Concrete Music CD) is a 1991 compilation, reissued 2004, of six pieces previously featured elsewhere on the ReR label.  I'm posting this mainly for A Quiet Gathering (1988) by Steve Moore, which I got into thanks to a comment from Peter on the Ivana Stefanović album, and was what made me track down the CMCD disc.  It's a phenomenal 22 minutes of "Chamber music for environmental sounds" - children playing, church bells, birds and so on - deftly stitched together.  In the absence of a reissue of the full album (see Peter's YouTube link) this is the only way to get hold of this masterpiece digitally.

Elsewhere, there's two highly entertaining 'plunderphonic' works from US artists bookending this compilation, one mashing up Erik Satie and the other Jerry Lee Lewis.  And don't miss the much more dark-hued Aide Memoire, composed in East Germany by Georg Katzer in 1983.  The subtitle is "Seven nightmares from the thousand year night...with sound documents from 1933-1945".  Even though some of the most infamous voices are tape-manipulated into dalek/chipmunk grotesques that (presumably intentionally) negate much of their power, the piece still carries an unsettling weight of history that neatly expands on Luigi Nono's Ermittlung from two decades previous.

cover art for first issue, 1991 (2004 cover at top)

mega / zippy