Another fascinating environmental transport from composer and Fluxus member Philip Corner: Coldwater Basin presents “a home recording of water running from a faucet into a sink” that was made on the Lower East Side of New York City “sometime in the 60s”.  Much more than how it reads on paper, it’s more about the sound of a room, the specifics of time and space, and the sound of their collision and unfolding. The recording is hissy and seems to slowly pan towards the delicate sound of the water that increases in volume throughout, with lots of background street noise and the hum of the city somewhere in the distance. The effect is curiously hypnotic as Corner points out in his notes: “... and I had always dreamed of passing an entire night bathed in this. It was never long enough.” Mesmerising, historically potent slice of minimalism, edition of only 180 copies with calligraphic design by Corner himself. 

Phenomenal collection of environmental sound pieces from the composer and Fluxus thinker Philip Corner in an edition of 300 copies. The first side is taken up with a beautifully recorded piece for Korean cymbals in water outdoors accompanying the midnight bell from San Marco on the Fondamenta Giudecca in 1994. The combination of traffic sounds, passing boats, wind, water and bells generates a densely vibrating soundworld that touches on aspects of Mirror and Ora while presenting a seemingly pastoral scenario as something intensely resonant and at points extremely heavy. On the flip there’s another great outdoors ritual combining sounds of thunder and rain with heady gong sounds and a revelatory action for alphorn and gong recorded in the open air that touches on aspects of Albert Ayler and Yoshi Wada. Comes with two inserts, recommended.

Major historic unearthing of the most iconic of all Fluxus pieces, the legendary 1962 premier of Philip Corner’s “Piano Activity” performed by George Maciunas, Nam June Paik, Wolf Vostell, Emmett Williams, Ben Patterson, Dick Higgins and Alison Knowles: compiled from recently discovered tapes of this historic event that took place at the International Festival of the Newest Music in Wiesbaden in 1962, previously only known through photographs and written accounts, this is a stunning, historically potent presentation. Corner’s original directions were for a more ‘organised’ attack on the piano but the pieces here go way beyond the blank into all-out piano destruction. The first piece sees Paik picking out some tentative melodies before the group start to interact with the piano with fists and tools while the second piece is just a total assault that results in the eventual destruction of the instrument, with a sound that comes over like a blunt Neubauten or a big-band New Blockaders, with hammering, twonking, sawing and banging to the point of total destructive epiphany. Corner was shocked when he heard about how far the players had pushed past his initial remit and it’s not hard to understand why. This is a remarkable document, beautifully presented for the first time by Alga Marghen in an edition of only 262 copies, highly recommended!