An Anthology Of Noise & Electronic Music/ First A-Chronology 1921-2001 volume #1

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This a such a totally fckn rckn release - beautifully-packaged, dignified and serene, feels good, smells good. But wait, what happens when you break a tine in the cd-holder of these digipacks? YUO = fux0red. So, much as it is with a chronicling of history - one must be careful and circumspect about one's things.

From the scratchy, faintly grinding notes 'Corale (1921)' of Luigi and Antonio Russolo to Walter Ruttman's amusingly-assembled 1930 piece 'Rochende', with its musique concrete overtures in Deutscher voice, sawing, clipping and crowing and pianoing - an overwhelming sense of discovery and genesis suffuses these sounds. Musique concrete is simply a re-presentation of the life that surrounds the composer. Fitting that Pierre Schaeffer's 'Etude Violette' (part of his 1948 'Five Etudes' series) is the piece that follows that particular explanation. In short order, Henri Pousseur's 'Scambi' follows with its pops and warbles and excoriating gurgles, as does Gordon Mumma's 'The Dresden Interleaf 13 February 1945', replete as it is with its silences and without-warning buzzbomb cacophonies. Angus MacLise / Tony Conrad / John Cale weigh in with their 'Trance #2', a drone-out violin tone, gongs and bells and doubtless other sounds I am unable to identify because I am a dopey dope. But is it all about quantification? Dates and numbers seems to vanish in the haze of a forever tone, and yet until the sounds are actually played, they exist in print, on the page - superceded in their supernality by the desire for a full and honest accounting. Philip Jeck / Otomo Yoshihide / Martin Tétreault bring their records to the fore with low thumps and whines and scrabbling at a prison door but if you weren't told they were playing records, you'd never know. Survival Research Laboratories expose the insidious undercurrent of destruction of cartoon violence, and Einstürzende Neubauten perform what is one of their most interesting pieces in years, 'Ragout: Küchen Rezpt von Einstürzende Neubauten'. It consists of kitchen utensils and their attendant ambiance modified and reinterpreted at the Plank Studios - much like when Ralf und Florian drove down the Autobahn, recorded the sounds as they did, and translated them into the subsequent 'Autobahn'. Literalism in action. The first disc finishes with Konrad Boehmer's 'Aspekt' (1966), a rapidly skiddingskipping vortex of hissing expression explosions and grit, but not Grit, which is more about American life and traditions than all this.

Nam June Paik's 'Hommage a John Cage' emerges from the nearly-hardened musique concrete in its bits and pieces of voice and tone and drone, sensibly preceding John Cage's 'Rozart Mix' of classical orchestral and baby screeching and anthems and so on and so on and so on. Sonic Youth's 'Audience' (1983) brings the squalling squalor of the popmusic audience into bas-relief as the hoots and whistles thereof are slowed and delayed into a wilderness triptych parallelling some coeval work of Vagina Dentata Organ. The very dead modern-day composer Edgard Varèse reappears with his 'Poeme Electronique', and Iannis Xenakis follows with the crystalline metallic crackling of 'Concret PH'. Paul D. Miller's 'FTP > Bundle / Conduit 23' reveals itself like a severed penis - many tendons and tissues and tubes of sound, collective tissues carrying information at varying rates and some of the information is a series of bells; blood flowing in an underlying ambiance that bolsters the piano and the seconds ticking so vitally away. Pauline Oliveros' 'A Little Noise in the System (Moog System)' spits in a lock groove and then smears the evanescent crackling over the course of a half-hour, travelling from a mild crumbling to a speaker-eating, rapidly fluctuating shitstorm of drones. Ryoji Ikeda's 'One Minute' is just that - test tones in the higher pitches, with occasional grumbles that segue nicely into the opening of the cd player tray.

These pieces are a bit like General Custer's horse escaping the battle of Little Bighorn - difficult to decipher and understand but nonetheless a testament to a time of great change whose effects are still felt to this day.