Harrison Birtwistle IV, 1970-73 (Avant Garde Project 91, FLAC)

The Avant Garde Project is a series of 20th-century classical-experimental-electroacoustic torrents digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. This is wild stuff, so check it out if you've never heard this sort of music before. The analog rig used to extract the sound from the grooves is near state-of-the-art, producing almost none of the tracking distortion or surface noise normally associated with LPs.
AGP1-84 are now available for direct download in the archive at www.avantgardeproject.org
AGP85-90 and other recent AGP installments are also available at http://thepiratebay.org/user/loudav
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AGP91 is the last of four featuring works by the British composer Harrison Birtwistle. Born in 1934, he came of age with Peter Maxwell Davies and Alexander Goehr, and like them studied in Manchester. Birtwistle's music belongs to no clearly identifiable school. It is characterized by a fine ear for both harmony and orchestration, and some rather unusual approaches to musical structure.
AGP88-90 were transcribed from a number of CDs, and are provided through the generosity of the same AGP partisan that programmed AGP87. AGP91 comprises all of the out-of-print works by Birtwistle that I could find in my stacks. They all come from British LP pressings that are in pretty good condition, but that have more pressing noise than I would like. Normally it wouldn't be noticeable, but there are lengthy quiet passages in these works, so the sound-quality is a bit of a step down from the brilliant CD transcriptions in the previous three installments. Chronometer is a tape composition by Birtwistle. I used mild declicking to clean up the transcription, but there is some pressing noise in the right channel that nothing but radical noise reduction would eliminate.
The torrent includes a PDF file with scans of the CD and LP booklet notes describing the works featured in all four Birtwistle installments.
11 - Nenia, 1970 [18:00]
12 - Chronometer, 1971 [24:17]
13 - Fields of Sorrow, 1971 [9:49]
14 - Grimethorpe Aria, 1973 [13:38]
NOTE: To the best of my knowledge, these recordings are currently out of print. If you know otherwise, please let me know ASAP, as I do not wish any artists to be deprived of the royalties that they so richly deserve.