300 copies, fold around insert, colour vinyl
Often sold out at source before we can get a look in, it's a rare moment these days that a Blume release passes through these doors. More surprising still is that on this occasion it should be a James Tenney record, an American composer who despite having studied under both Cage and Partch, and working in tandem with Fluxus while traversing coasts in the late 60s/early 70s, remains a fairly obscured figure in the experimental avant garde. Postal Pieces is considered his most well known work, a set of eleven postcards (or 'scorecards' as Tenney called them) sent to various musician friends - names you will know even if you don't know Tenney's: Pauline Oliveros, La Monte Young, Harold Budd, Philip Corner, Max Neuhaus - that contained obscure compositional instructions to be interpreted as they wished. This five track Blume edition contains versions recorded by The Barton Workshop and James Fulkerson in 2003, primo examples of elemental minimalism that also highlight Tenney's playfulness and provocative zeal. You might even be tempted to view pieces like the unexpectedly raucous 'Maximusic' or the haunted dissonance of 'Having Never Written A Note for Percussion' as iconoclastic forebearers to noise music if they weren't written with such institutionally renowned figures in mind. Best of all is 'For Percussion Perhaps, Or... (Night)' from 1971, a slow-moving, increasingly monolithic drone that you imagine someone like Kali Malone will have spent some time observing. A bigger concept drives Postal Pieces, but its power still exists in its discrete interpretations, which reveals the true legacy of Tenney's vision - the ambiguity of the original scorecard enables its long term relevance as its reimagined and reworked by different people over time.
