WOEBOT

Recently I've discovered this exciting and interesting new music format. They are these little silver discs and they are kept in these tiny plastic boxes. (Regains composure) Given that I'm still largely devoted to the long-playing vinyl format, I've found myself mapping my sublimated black plastic desires onto my CD-buying. So for instance, weird electronic music made between 1947 and 1983, you couldn't really get enough of it could you? And as it happens the prices for originals have gone through the roof; indeed if you could find any good examples of the stuff to actually splash your cash on.

Enter the Creel Pone label. Some crazed dude in Iceland who's had the vision to do more than offer mp3s to download or endlessly catalogue and assemble musical phenomena, he's lovingly reproduced the sleeve art of the original records, painstakingly encoded the vinyl, hooked himself up with distributors around the globe and built his own CD label. Genius! But more on the label and its releases in the next week or so.

One of the nice things for me about Creel Pone is the way that its remit brings together a whole load of records which previously were orphans, musical waifs and strays from sound laboratories, library music collections, private press releases and classical music labels. Yet because they're all records of electronic music, they're somehow very special, bold and forward-thinking, in short, in need of a good home. And now that home is Creel Pone. By extension I immediately rooted through my collection and was able to extract the following ten LPs which I guess would be eligible for release on the label. In truth they do verge towards what the hardcore collector of this sort of thing would regard as commonplace. Really! I know for a fact that at least two have been reissued on CD through what might be called "proper channels" ie licensing and the like.

Probably the most famous document of the Scandinavian Avant-garde music scene. Folke Rabe's "Was??" is possibly the loveliest piece of minimalist music there is, and sonically analogous to the back sleeve, a shot of two hippies sitting in a forest, the photo which on closer inspection reveals all kind of things hidden in the foliage...bananas...more bananas...photos pinned to the trees...a gramophone player. Half of this LP has been reissued on Jim O'Rourke's Dexter's Cigar label.

More sheer loveliness on this deeply echoing scape of rolling tablas, infinite flute and undulating analogue synths. Like a number of Library records this one is billed as an aid for interpretive dance. Woops, better keep the electronic quotient up!

One of the very few (the only?) example of Richard Maxfield's music to make it to wax. "Night Music", a darkly synthesized panorama of violently clicking and rasping insects is a bonafide David Toop record. There are great tales of Maxfield who I understand turned Terry Riley onto psychedelic drugs, but who came to a messy, almost classically psychoactive end by jumping out of a window whilst on LSD. The Pauline Oliveros on this is also excellent.

Another very weird Library record for "Radio, Television, Film and Advertising backgrounds." The German Oskar Sala is one of the pioneers of electronic music. Building on the work of Freidrich Trautwein he worked exclusively on their monster synth the Mixtur-Trautonium. Some pieces of Sala's, in the vein of Messaien's "Turangalia Symphony", combined the orchestra with electronic but my LP is solid electronics. And it's a corker!

I first saw this LP in Bristol for something like $40, passed on it, then found it three years later at the music and video exchange for $15. A steal! The Sala record above I bought off that funk stall (the name of which evades me) in Camden market when all anyone was interested in was breaks. Wot a clever dick I am! I popped into Harold Moores yesterday to see if, like back in the day, there were the odd electronic record kicking around. The man behind the counter took no glee at all in telling me the carcass had been picked clean. Pfeiffer was an extremely famous, high-ranking producer of Classical records and "9 Images" (which is like staples and glue compared to most of this extremely advanced stuff) was obviously him being indulged by his bosses.

"Played by IBM 7090 Computer and Digital to Sound Transducer." There's a lot of influence of the Bell Telephone Laboratories on this record, presumably Electronic Music was viewed as relating to Ring(tones) and speech synthesis much as in fashion Haute-Couture relates to Accessories. This record is famous for M.V. Matthews's "Bicycle Made For Two" in which the computer is coaxed to sing the ditty in a unintentionally melancholy way.

I just can't imagine a whole LP of Electronic Music made by women being released in any decade other than the 1970s. This has had an official reissue recently, and even though I sound rather glib, it's a widely respected recording. So there!

A Margouleff, of Tonto and Stevie Wonder fame, oddity. The cover of this is to die for! The very abstract Moog is augmented by the mystical pratings of the most hilarious English luvvie, one Malcom Cecil: "The mother stood sorrowful, near the cross...(big pause, a flick of the fringe)...crying..." This is real Ghost Box stuff I decided.

Drool, drool! A privately-pressed concrete-jazz mash-up library record featuring two of the heaviest Electro-Acoustic Composers of the day.

Ah, now this is a bit of a cheat, for though it belongs here and neatly rounds off my perfect ten, I've actually blogged about it once before. Y'see, much as I'd like to pretend, I don't have thousands of this sort of record. I stopped buying them a while back when I guess I thought I had enough. But like Simon said when I told him I thought I probably had enough Ardkore records: "Does not compute". Even so this and this and this and this and this and this, yeah that might be enough.....