RARE BOOTLEG Takehisa Kosugi Group Ongaku LP Fluxus LaMonte Cage Eleh Oliveros

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Takehisa Kosugi MUSIC OF GROUP ONGAKU LP
2011 Japan 180g Seer Sound Archive seer 001

***RARE HTF BOOTLEG*** It is not permitted to sell this LP on Discogs.

Takehisa Kosugi (?? ?? Kosugi Takehisa, born March 14, 1938) is a Japanese composer and violinist associated with the Fluxus movement.

Kosugi studied musicology at the Tokyo University of the Arts and graduated in 1962.

Kosugi is probably best known for the experimental music that he created in 1960–75, first in the early 1960s with the Tokyo-based seven-member ensemble Group Ongaku (music group) and thereafter as a solo artist and with itinerant octet Taj Mahal Travellers (1969–75). Kosugi's primary instrument is the violin, which he sends through various echo-chambers and effects to create a bizarre, jolting music quite at odds with the drones of other more well-known Fluxus artists, such as Tony Conrad, John Cale and Henry Flynt.

In 1963 Takehisa Kosugi composed for Fluxus 1 a musical piece called Theatre Music in the form of a rectangle of cardstock that bore the trace of a spiral of moving feet. This was paired with the instructions: "Keep walking intently".

Since 1995, Kosugi has served as music director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and lives in Osaka, Japan. His 1960s career with Group Ongaku is extensively explained in the 32-page essay "Experimental Japan," which appears in the book Japrocksampler (Bloomsbury, 2007), by author/musician/occultist Julian Cope. The book also features a detailed 12-page biography of Kosugi's Taj Mahal Travellers, the music of which Julian Cope describes as being "reminiscent of the creaking rigging of the un-manned Mary Celeste". According to Cope, Kosugi's finest work is the 1975 solo album Catch-wave (CBS/Sony).

The Theatre of Eternal Music is a multi-media performance group who, in its 1960s–1970s heyday included at various times La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, Angus MacLise, Terry Jennings, John Cale, Billy Name, Jon Hassell, Alex Dea and others, each from various backgrounds (classical composition and performance, painting, mathematics, poetry, jazz, etc.). Operating from the world of lofts and galleries in New York in the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies in particular, and tied to the aesthetics of Fluxus and the post-John Cage-continuum, the group gave performances on the East Coast of the United States as well as in Western Europe. These performances comprised long periods of sensory inundation with combinations of harmonic relationships, which moved slowly from one to the next by means of "laws" laid out by Young regarding "allowable" sequencies and simultaneities, perhaps in imitation of Hindustani classical music which he, Zazeela and the others either studied or at least admired.[18] The group released nothing during their lifetime (although Young and Zazeela issued a collaborative LP in 1969,[19] and Young contributed in 1970 one side of a flexi-disc accompanying Aspen magazine[20]). The concerts themselves were influential on their own upon the art world including Karlheinz Stockhausen (whose Stimmung bears their influence most strikingly)[21][22] and the drone-based minimalist works of dozens of other composers many of whom made parallel innovations including Young classmate Pauline Oliveros, or Eliane Radigue, Charlemagne Palestine, Yoshi Wada, Phill Niblock and many others.[23] Group member John Cale extended and popularized this work in 1960s rock music with the Velvet Underground (along with songwriter Lou Reed).

NM Condition. Pictures are of actual item, please refer to them. From my personal collection. Check my other listings for more choice cuts.
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Tracklist

A1 Automatism (1960) 26:20
A2 Object (1961) 7:34
B1 Metaplasm 9-15 Part 1 (1961) 14:16
B2 Metaplasm 9-15 Part 2 (1961) 11:26
Credits

Performer – Genichi Tsuge, Chieko Shiomi*, Mikio Tojima, Shukou Mizuno, Takehisa Kosugi, Yasunao Tone
Notes
180-gram vinyl pressing of the 1996 CD edition collecting a series of live & site-specific recordings from 1960/61.