STRANGE TO YOUR EARS electronic tape LP 1953 J. Fassett
$
80
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Description
Jim Fassett -- Strange To Your Ears LP
The Fabulous World of Sound
Original 1953 mono release on Columbia Masterworks Records (catalog # ML 4938, original silver-on-blue labels), with original heavy-duty Columbia illustrated "innersleeve" which is the same material and thickness as a normal record cover.Rare and very compelling LP of experimental tape manipulations and strange recorded sounds from the early 1950's. "The aural awakening that awaits you on this record" provides a sampling goldmine of crazy samples for all you crazed samplers.
spot-on review of this LP mostly courtesy keymap records, eBay id: keymap: Excellent and rare 1953 LP exploring the weird and wacky side of early electronic tape manipulations/musique concrète, presenting an array of sped-up, slowed-down, reversed, cut-up, and montaged found sounds. Fassett (of Symphony Of The Birds fame) narrates this demonstration of the then-astounding capabilities of the newly invented magnetic tape recorder, using a whimsical approach to introduce listeners to the territory pioneered by more serious academic composers like Pierre Henry, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Fassett shows how familiar sounds can be made to oddly sound like totally different ones, how multiple sounds from disparate locations can be collaged together to create utterly alien soundscapes, and how entire universes of sound can be derived from the most unlikely sources, with several truly bizarre moments (perhaps the most hilarious being when he attempts to pronounce his name backwards in order to hear what it sounds like when played in reverse.) But beneath the novelty surface of this recording, Fassett is actually making a revolutionary statement about how we hear, joining with avant garde contemporaries like John Cage in radically calling for a new appreciation of sound as music and music as sound (the liner notes by High Fidelity Magazine editor John M. Conly name-drop Edgard Varèse, Pierre Boulez, and Pierre Schaeffer). This album's content was originally a radio documentary that Fassett produced with engineer Mortimer Goldberg. It is highly recommended as a fascinating period document, as a trove of sound effects, and as a beautiful specimen of outsider musique concrète.Fassett was the director of CBS Radio, a radio show host, music critic, audiophile, and early magnetic tape experimentalist who in the 1950's released several novelty musique concrete recordings. Other references: Jean-Jacques Perrey, Bruce Haack, Raymond Scott, Tod Dockstader, Francois Bayle, Luc Ferrari, Dangling Ganglion, Special Ed, Tape Beatles, Scott Marshall...
CONDITION: Cover VG++ / Vinyl VG+ cover is in excellent shape, nice gloss, very slight wear, price in pencil on back; vinyl is excellent, very small amount of wear and a tiny bit of light surface scratching, strong VG+, plays well. Graded conservatively using Goldmine standards [G / G+ / VG / VG+ / NM / ]grade only used if record is brand new.
Bid with confidence -- over 9000 positive feedbacks selling vinyl on eBay since 1998, with a total 10-year average of 100% positive.
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