Experimental Music

This LP reveals the extraordinary diversity of research - almost all hidden - by Spanish musicians in the '50s and '60s. Those pieces were composed while the country was under the tyranny of Francisco Franco. It is truly the ultimate grail, developed by musicologist Miguel Álvarez-Fernández, he is its curator, editor and commentator. This undoubtedly marks a major step in the approach and understanding of this music which had to fight to exist before the death of Franco in 1975.

The much-anticipated follow-up to the 2007 compilation (SHAM050) which documented Australia's little-known experimental music scene and garnered worldwide praise. Volume II documents the explosion of Australian experimental music practice from the mid 1970s; from the use of synthesisers and computers, through to the radical fringes of post-punk, and beginnings of industrial and dark wave. This double CD set features South Australian industrial noise/punk cabaret, Melbourne postpunk minimalism, mid-1970s Brisbane Dadaist noise/audio collage, early Sydney aleatoric electronica, and much more.

Michael Nyman's book is a first-hand account of experimental music from 1950 to 1970. First published in 1974, it has remained the classic text on a significant form of music making and composing that developed alongside, and partly in opposition to, the postwar modernist tradition of composers such as Boulez, Berio, or Stockhausen.