VA - Discos Siglo Veinte; Música Electrónica Latinoamericana, Mauricio Kagel (2023)

February 2023; similar to the trajectory the [CP 277 CD] set has taken, this set covering the entirety of the Electronic & Experimental Music as originally issued in 1969 on Discos Siglo Veinte, the "Private" Imprint of Argentinian critic Jacobo Romano has been on the books for ages (a decade and a half by my count) & it was only recently (after scouring virtually every shop in said country) that copies of all three relevant titles were finally sourced: "Música Electrónica Latinoamericana" (#LP 502), "Phantasie 1967 / Antithese 1962 / Montage 1967 / Pandorasbox" (#JJ 015), & "Núcleos - 1a. Serie / Música / Metapiéce (Mimetics)" (#LP 500) - the contents of the first two appearing here en toto (in this order) followed by "Metapiéce (Mimetics)" (as a bonus cut, essentially) tidily across a single 80-minute disc.

Música Electrónica Latinoamericana covers some of the earliest Tape Music from any Latin-American country, offering formative work by José Vicente Asuar (his 1967 masterpiece "Divertimento" as realized in the Studio of Musical Phonography of the Institute of Culture and Fine Arts, Caracas), César Bolaños (whose 1966 piece "Interpolaciones" was composed in the Latin American Centre for High Musical Studies of the Di Tella Institute, Buenos Aires), Francisco Kröpfl (the two-part "Diálogos" from 1965, composed in the Studio of Phonology of the University of Buenos Aires "when that laboratory had only one professional recorder") & Enrique Pinilla (the 1967 "Prisma" made at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center). It ranks as one of the best collections of said, offering copious liner notes and descriptions on the inner panels (as detailed on the included insert; by a conservative estimate around 98% legible despite the clearly apparent water-adjacent trauma making the copy in question aesthetically perfect!)

The second half of the disc covers the early work of Mauricio Kagel, who had left Argentina for Darmstadt a decade earlier, but returned to capture several key works in his home country with formative collaborators Ernstalbrecht Stiebler (incredibly his only appearance on record until a flurry of releases following his "rediscovery" over the past 10-15 years!), the Chilean Composer Juan Allende-Blin (incredible 7" on Wergo if you can find it!) & noted Contemporary-Repertoire Organist Gerd Zacher. These pieces have never sounded better, and are a great forebearer of the theater-adjacent, Improvisation-aware controlled chaos of his contemporaneous work as (well) documented across many now-canonic sides for DG ("Acustica" being a clear favorite & the leading change-ringer for 20th Century music, in general). The disc closes with Jorge Zulueta's intimate reading of Kagel's 1961 proto-Fluxus masterpiece for solo piano.