300 copies, fold-around insert, 12-page booklet, colour vinyl
Another swing for the fences from Blume with this first time reissue of the seminal New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media compilation, originally released in 1977 via Thomas Buckner's 1750 Arch label. In the historically revised context of 2024, the tracklisting reads like an avant garde who's-who greatest hits - Laurie Anderson, Annea Lockwood, Laurie Spiegel, Pauline Oliveros, Ruth Anderson++ - but the reality 40-plus years ago would have been markedly different. Like everything else, these female musicians were operating in a male dominated arena, so to hear them all alongside each other working so radically and confidently remains a revelation. Aesthetically, is there anything that marks these works as female? I'm not so sure such a binary distinction is possible (nor instructive or useful for that matter), though it is clear these are important works, marginalised or not. Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson, who we now know as partners but appear separately here, are masterful in their understanding of minimalist composition, Lockwood's 'World Rhythms' in particular an utterly entrancing example of her style of environmental musique concrete. Elsewhere, Oliveros' contribution builds to a uniquely grandiose climax, while Spiegel's 'Appalachian Grove I' undulates with a Berlin School kind of zeal. In turn, the closing two tracks from Laurie Anderson offer something entirely different, vocal-led and narrative driven, radical in a New York downtown way that seems to foretell of No Wave's iconoclasm. Pioneering only halfway covers it. Edition of 300.
