Charles Amirkhanian: Mental Radio, by Charles Amirkhanian

Charles Amirkhanian: Mental Radio

by Charles Amirkhanian

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1.	Church Car, Version 2 03:00	info	buy track
2.	Dot Bunch 05:43	info	buy track
3.	Dog of Stravinsky 03:30	info	buy track
4.	Hypothetical Moments 05:35	info	buy track
5.	Maroa 05:13	info	buy track
6.	The Putts 05:30	info	buy track
7.	Dreams Freud Dreamed 05:17	info	buy track
8.	Andas 06:59	info	buy track
9.	History of Collage 04:52	info	buy track

about

The title of this album is borrowed from a book by Upton Sinclair, the socialist writer and novelist whose nearly-successful candidacy for governor of the state of California in 1934 took the West Coast
establishment by surprise.

Sinclair’s Mental Radio is a volume of non-fiction on the subject of mental telepathy. The writer had always been fascinated with books on subjects in the realm we now term "parapsychology." He then married a woman who had exhibited what he assured his readers was an indisputable ability to perform telepathic information retrieval. This the book documents in some 239 pages, published by Albert and Charles Boni (New York, 1930).

Mental Radio remains one of Sinclair’s forgotten volumes, and when I recently encountered it by surprise in a collector’s bookshop I realized that the title, in reference to my forthcoming LP, struck a particular resonance because of my long service in the field of radio broadcasting and because of the interior, close-up qualities of word and voice which make these works particularly suited for radio presentation.

In concert, the pieces are performed live by me with tape accompaniment, and often with slide projections by the visual artist Carol Law. The result is a theatrical environment such as the one seen on the front cover of this album - a performance photograph of Maroa. —Charles Amirkhanian

Charles Amirkhanian (b. 1945) can be regarded as a central figure in American music, and on several fronts. As a composer, he's been pervasively innovative in two genres: text-sound pieces, in which he can draw engaging rhythmic processes from wacky word assemblages such as "rainbow chug bandit" and "church car rubber baby buggy bumper"; and natural-sound electronic pieces which go far beyond the usual confines of musique concrète to create long, poetic sound narratives poised between collage and sonic landscape.

credits

released October 8, 2022

Charles Amirkhanian, percussion, bells, ocarina, drum synthesizer, voice, harpsichord; Anthony J. Gnazzo, voice; Charlie Morrow, voice, bells

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about

Composers Recordings, Inc. Brooklyn, New York

CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc.) was founded in 1954 by Otto Luening, Douglas Moore and Oliver Daniel. CRI was dedicated to the promotion of new music by American composers, releasing over 600 recordings on LP, cassette and CD over its 49 year history, New World Records assumed ownership of CRI in 2006, since which time its entire catalog has been digitized for streaming, download & CD-R purchase. ... more

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