RARE orig. 1961 US LP SPACE ELECTRONIC SALA/GASSMANN/BALANCHINE Avant SCHNITZLER

$

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After graduating from New York’s Eastman School of Music in 1931, US composer, educator and critic Remi Gassmann (1908-1982) relocated to Berlin to study with Paul Hindemith at Berlin’s Musik Hochschule, where he met fellow student Oskar Sala (1910-2002). Back in the US, Gassmann asked contemporary artist Laszlo Maholy-Nagy to create the stage design for some of the Composer’s Concerts Gassman organized at the University of Chicago between 1942 and 1945. Gassmann wrote stage music for ballets like Billy Sunday, 1948, with costume and stage design by Alexander Calder. He first collaborated with Oskar Sala on the electronic music for the ballet Paean, 1960, with choreographer Tatjana Gsovsky. After Gassmann and Sala conceived the score for George Balanchine’s ballet Electronics in 1961, the choreographer introduced the pair to the technical team of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, for which they famously created the eerie bird sounds from Sala’s Mixtur-Trautonium.

? Electronics was premiered by the New York City Ballet in 1961, with ballerina Violette Verdy and choreography by George Balanchine. Gassmann was commissioned to create the stage music, which he recorded in Oskar Sala’s Berlin studio and is entirely played on the latter’s Mixtur-Trautonium. Divided into 11 short sequences, the music plays as a continuous exploration of the instrument’s gorgeous tonalities and goes through various moods and rhythms, from meditative to imposing, from enchanting to glorious. To these ears, it seems well suited to dance performance, but Paean, the other electronic ballet music Gassmann wrote in 1960, was not well received.

Sala’s Five Improvisations showcase both the Trautonium’s potential and the composer’s skills. Here the multi-tracking technique – well, 2 tracks on average –, creative use of reverb and virtuosity are more obvious than on Electronics, but the music retains the typical clarity and playfulness of Sala’s better known compositions. Sala’s unusual pitch system and mastering of studio technique are prominent, as well as striking sounds somewhere between Forbidden Planet and Pierre Henry’s musique concrète with electronics. This LP was Sala’s first appearance on disc.

Remi Gassmann
01 Electronics – Music to the ballet (17:31)
Oskar Sala Five Improvisations on Magnetic Tape
02 #1 (1:41)
03 #2 (1:55)
04 #3 (2:09)
05 #4 (1:39)
06 #5 (3:56)Total time 28:51
LP released by Westminster, ref. WST 14143, USA, 1961.

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NEW PROG/PSYCH + COSMIC ROCK RELEASE: Hear on youtube.

[POKORA'S TOP GREEK PSYCH/PROG BANDS]

BUY NOW THE STRICTLY LIMITED REPRINT OF BOTH 2 GREEK PRIVATE-PROG LPs OF Pete & Royce -YES, both: "SUFFERING OF TOMORROW" + "THE DAYS OF DESTRUCTION"!!!- in 1 CD, on the current and very promising avant/psych label Musicbazz. IT IS THE FIRST -in 30 years- AUTHORIZED Deluxe International Edition of these 2 PRIVATE PRESS albums that could shock the progressive Pink-Floydian world (DELUXE GATEFOLD EMBOSSED SILVER FOIL COVER + POSTER + BRILLIANT "REVINYLISED" PERFECT "ANALOG SOUNDING" MASTER authorized personally by PANAGIOTIS "TSIROS", the leader of PETE & ROYCE!!!). These 2 cosmic-psych masterpieces, from 1980-1981 respectively (sounding mid seventies!!!), are the biggest and better Greek Rock Secret ever!!! BUY NOW YOUR COPY OF THIS LIMITED EDITION (500 copies total): 1 cd $19.99 (FREE SHIP), 2 COPIES $35.00 (FREE SHIP), 10-100 cd $13.00 (FREE SHIPPING)!!!

On the rear side of the big poster (with extremely rare photos of PETE & ROYCE) we find a rather interesting "manifesto", written by the Executive Producer of this official international release, Christos Tsanakas (Tsanakas Archives Foundation): Absence is not the matrix of gloriousness. Uniqueness is. And this is exactly the case with the cult Greek band Pete & Royce and their sought after trippy “spaced out” rock saga. The best progressive rock band in Greece (of any era) and one of the top ones globally (of any era), three decades after its disappearance, is “back” to prove at least that the idiosyncratic and intuitive street forms of beauty live forever. Probably this is the proper time warp for lost heroes like Pete & Royce to jump out of the cosmic oblivion and definitely prove the indisputable reality that sparks in the core of their glorious mythological status or, simply, to confirm their oracles for today!

Finally, the two DIY, pioneer-spirited and rare as hen’s teeth LPs of Pete & Royce, “Suffering of Tomorrow” (1980, their absolute masterpiece) and “Days of Destruction” (1981, an arc of their most appealing songwriting uplifted to Pink-Floydian quality levels), both self-financed and strictly limited PRIVATE editions, are now legally available side by side in a very carefully produced CD (the first ever international edition, authorized by Panagiotis “Pete” Tsiros himself, the mighty leader of Pete & Royce). This digital time-capsule is tenderly mastered to preserve in detail and without any kind of “corrections” the original vinyl sound (sadly, the master tapes have been lost). As a vinyl fetishist myself and executive producer of this CD reprint of these two mind-blowing albums, I had as my main concern and responsibility to give and secure a strict rigid guidance to our highly experienced technicians (among the top experts in the world): “Please, avoid any common digital treachery, like the so called “compressed” technique or any “advanced” re-mastering, and use your know-how and the highest available sound technology just in order to preserve -with laser accuracy- the wide information my mint vinyl copies have stored so elegantly”.

And exactly this happened, offering us at last a crystal clear, very deep and wide, “re-vinylised” digital spectrum of pure rock energy. If you are lucky enough to have the too rare original vinyls, you could easily recognize the success of our efforts. If you don’t, you will just feel it, enjoying these one-off songs (raw enough but juicy and really genius achievements, all recorded during a handful of over-busy, low-rent and exhaustedly empathic nights!), this advanced rock art of the breathless workouts Pete (Tsiros) and the Royce gave away “instantly”, without even imagining that their fiery complex oeuvre was meant to be a (sometimes sharp, sometimes dreamy) example of a fight against phoniness and compromise. Even today, every time I meet the original members of the group, I have the same solid impression of uncompromised, really rocking and unique, characters, as alive and exceptional as their unwrinkled and one-of-a-kind music, this monster collective sound that wraps –mainly- the key music ideas of a very gifted songwriter, guitarist and vocalist, Panagiotis Tsiros, the front-man and the brain of Pete & Royce (also a professional icon painter). “Pete was to Pete & Royce what Fripp was to King Crimson”, stated to me Panos Gekas, a famous multi-keyboard wizard and the latest member of the group, who replaced the mighty Vasilis Ghinos as the right hand of Tsiros in the “unknown” -criminally underrated- third LP of Pete & Royce, an album full of pulsating cosmic funk rock, not drained of progressive complexities and sci-fi sound details!

So, yes indeed, Pete & Royce were a “pack” of hip underground musicians “wired” around Tsiros, giving flesh and blood to his orgiastic rock vision, a blend of trippy space instrumental explorations, hard guitar biting-fuzz explosions, spontaneous communal freak-outs, strong flashy melodies, heart throbbing rhythm-bones, mystical electronic shifts and strange lyrics like oracles from an unknown book of Apocalypsis (very compatibly, two key members of another top progressive Greek group named Apocalypsis were also involved importantly in the recordings of Pete & Royce, the keyboardist Vasilis Dertilis and the vocalist Giannis Palamidas). What better dream to ask for in the rock desert of a dizzy post-junta and pre-socialistic ‘70s era in this eastern suburbia of the West World? Though, then, only a few shared the same gut feeling about the “suffering of tomorrow” and the coming “days of destruction” -Greece’s dystopian present!- with Panagiotis Tsiros and his league of topnotch neuromancers.

Christos Tsanakas, Executive Producer

Suffering of Tomorrow (1980, private edition – 500 copies)

1. Flickering Light (Tsiros)

2. It’s so Unreal (Tsiros)

3. Flowers (Tsiros)

4. Suffering of Tomorrow (Ghinos)

5. Time (Tsiros)

6. Years Before (Tsiros)

a. Maybe

b. Face of the Moon

c. Round Your Grave

Days of Destruction (1981, private edition - limited)

7. It’s up to You (Tsiros)

8. Am I Mistaken (Tsiros – Ghinos)

9. Don’t Break Down (Tsiros)

10. Who Cares (Tsiros – Ghinos)

11. Dream (Tsiros)

12. You Make me Feel (Tsiros)

13. Give me the Wings to Fly (Tsiros)

14. Long Time Ago (Tsiros)

15. Passing Another Day (Tsiros – Ghinos)

16. Days of Destruction (Tsiros)

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