This is the digital reissue (reissued as a 3-CD boxed set—with more than two and a half hours of music) of the noted series of seven 10-inch vinyl EPs that Cold Blue released in the early 1980s. Extraordinary music from composers Peter Garland, Rick Cox, Barney Childs, Read Miller, Michael Jon Fink, Daniel Lentz, and Chas Smith. Music for violins and percussion, electric guitar, electronic keyboards with voices, solo and duo pianos, cello, pedal steel guitar, wind instruments of pre-Columbian design, readers, and more.

Although bound together by a common concern with music’s basic sensuality, the pieces collected here are wide-ranging in style—process-driven works, carefully through-composed pieces, ambient soundscapes, and music that draws on influences from around the world. The diverse, free-spirited, genre-bending music in this set was characteristic of certain trends in West Coast music of ‘80s. And, to some degree, most of this music tangentially addressed the lingua franca of ’70s minimalism—embracing certain of its aspects, fleeing others. “[D]efines a certain ‘Southern California sound.” (LA Weekly) “[A]n invaluable resource for what might be called part of the new ‘California School’…a particular viewpoint and consummate good taste.” (Joan LaBarbara, High Fidelity / Musical America)

All recordings were all supervised by the composers and collectively make up an unusual and wonderful musical document of the place and time. (For more information on the composers and performers, visit coldbluemusic.com/cb0014/ )

Tracks 1-6
Peter Garland: Matachin Dances: Nos. 1-6 (1980-81) by Peter Garland

Tracks 7-10
Michael Jon Fink: Two Pieces for Piano Solo (1978), Piano Solo (1976), Vocalise, and Veil for Two Pianos

Track 11
Barney Childs: Clay music

Tracks 12-13
Read Miller: Mile Zero Hotel and The Blueprint of a Promise

Tracks 14-17
Chas Smith: After, Santa Fe, October ’68, and Scircura

Tracks 18-19
Rick Cox: These Things Stop Breathing and Taken From Real Life

Tracks 20-23
Daniel Lentz: Slow Motion Mirror, Midnight White, Solar Cadence, and Dancing on the Sun

Garland’s Matachin Dances for two violins and gourd rattles is a moving and graceful set of six dances. Influenced by the Mexican culture in which he has lived for many years, it shows Garland at the top of his game—uniting contemporary musical forms with hints of the music he encountered on his many global wanderings. Through repetition and variation he weaves simple, enticing structures that almost seem to alter the listener’s time perception. Recorded live at the New Music America’s 1982 festival.

Fink’s music on this recording beautifully represents two stylistic traits that he has cultivated throughout his career: a Feldmanesque consciousness of each note’s weight and decay and a simple lyricism. Fink’s spare, elegant music tends not to impose itself on the listener, but seems to just exist, out of time, awaiting one’s ear. The four pieces collected here are for piano (solo and duo) and cello.

Childs’ Clay music builds wild, swooping and chirping textures from Susan Rawcliffe’s handmade clay wind instruments patterned after pre-Columbian designs. It is music that by its instrumentation alone stands out from the composer’s considerable output. However, it is a classic example of Childs’ wonderfully idiosyncratic mixing of musical styles, notational practices, and degrees of determinacy. Once it starts in motion, the performers interacting with each other and the score, the piece takes on a quirky life of its own.

Miller’s work for speaking voices utilize texts that he derived from messages on old postcards found at rummage sales. These pieces embrace the power of unadorned speaking voices as musical instruments. As they hauntingly develop, the listener becomes keenly aware of the speech rhythms that make up the fabric of Miller’s work.

Smith, labeled “a classic American original” by the Los Angeles Times, marked his debut as a new-music pedal steel guitarist with the release of this music. His shimmering and elegant music for pedal steel and 12-string dobros puts a new spin on these instruments of classic Americana and reflects his long-standing interest in carefully wrought sonic textures that seem to speak of the Southern California deserts, where he spends much time.

Cox’s dark, swirling prepared-electric-guitar music, with its rich harmonies, gritty textures, and melancholy lines also features clarinetist Marty Walker and the composer’s speaking voice. This disc marked the first release of any of Cox’s prepared and extended-technique guitar sounds, which he began exploring in the mid 1970s, and which later found their way into the musical landscapes and textures of many notable Hollywood film scores written by various composers.

Lentz’s intricate music for multiple keyboards and singers churns and pulses with great propulsive energy. The four works here reflect two concerns that have shown up in his music throughout the past 30 years: forms that slowly accrue their final shapes and texts that are cleverly deconstructed and reconstructed. This recording was one of Lentz’s first excursions into music that has clear “pop” influences in its timbres and harmonies. The composer writes about his works of this period: “… the spiraling materials are kept in a state of becoming, rather than a static state of being. The resulting effect can be compared to walking through an orchestra.”


This reissue was named a Gramophone magazine Critics’ Choice 2004: “The sounds are spare, wistful, innocent and soft-spoken, often beautiful in a way no other music is…. Aurally luscious, but thought provoking…the music is so various and the sounds so inviting, that all three discs will be enjoyed in a single sitting.” —Arved Ashbey, Gramophone


The liner notes
New Sounds by John Schaefer
“The early 1980s was a strange time to start a radio show devoted to new and unusual music, but that’s just when I started my New Sounds show. Judging by what many record companies were sending me (note to you kids: in those days there were many record companies), “new music” meant either New Age swill or old-guard Euromodernism. I imagine it was also a strange time for Cold Blue, a record label devoted to new and unusual music, to start. At a time when the music scene seemed to be waiting for the next big thing, the series of 10-inch records (EPs) that are reissued here was definitely not it—this series was something else altogether. To those of us who stumbled upon Cold Blue’s odd little “ism”-skirting discs, they were gold records; and they helped crystallize the direction that my New Sounds program would take for the next (gulp) 20-plus years.

“Cold Blue’s 10-inch series was a musical sleight of hand. Somehow, seven composers, each so different in approach, in instrumentation, in what they considered “musical,” collectively suggested a freewheeling, sensually driven approach to sound—they loved playing with it, and with our expectations of it. This was California—post-Modernism but not yet Postmodern. Daniel Lentz was a revelation, with his witty deconstructions of pop music processes and the inscrutability of the avant-garde. I imagined Peter Garland as a crazed musical shaman, coming out of the desert just long enough to share a peyote-fueled trance vision. And what to make of Chas Smith’s eerie soundscapes? It said “pedal steel guitar and dobro” on the cover, but you just had to take their word for it. And Fink and Childs and Miller and Cox each had something delightfully distinctive to say.

“At a time when pursuing new music seemed a lonely enterprise, this collection of records offered the sense of a musical community—at work and at play. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that around this time people started talking about a “California school.” (I believe there is one; although like pornography, it’s one of those I-know-it-when-I-see-it kind of things.) Maybe the Cold Blue EPs didn’t actually define a school or style, but they did stake out a whole wonderful world of new sounds.”
[John Schaefer is the producer of WNYC Radio’s New Sounds since 1981]

REVIEWS:

“A new three-disc set reissued from the hip southern-California label Cold Blue has me so mesmerized I can hardly quit listening to it…. In the 1980s, like a flash in the night, Cold Blue released seven 10-inch vinyl records epitomizing the then-state of California minimalism…. The Complete 10-inch Series from Cold Blue makes me realize that California minimalism was a broader and richer scene than most of us east of the Rockies ever knew…. I’ve always felt like I ended up on the wrong side of the Rockies, and that I was meant, by nature, to be a West Coast composer. And this gorgeous set of discs makes me feel, somehow—homesick.” —Kyle Gann, Arts Journal

“My favorite item this month…the work of composers whose work might be described as avant-garde but which also exhibited the back-to-fundamentals approach which is so often an aspect of the best American music (the term ‘minimalist’ seems too po-faced in such a context)…. [A] striking set…. This spare, uncluttered music is a compelling listening experience, sounding as fresh to day as when it originally appeared.” —Roger Thomas, Int’l Record Review

“Daniel Lentz’s extraordinarily beautiful music for processed voices meets Chas Smith’s un-country music for pedal steel and dobro. A hootenanny for ocarinas (wish I was playing along with them right now) by the late Barney Childs rubs shoulders with Read Miller’s spoken word vernacular catechisms. Also featured are four compositions by CalArts’ Michael Jon Fink, two treated guitar works by occasional film music composer Rick Cox, and Peter Garland’s six Matachin Dances for violin duo accompanied by the composer himself on a gourd rattle, a haunting Native American-inspired chamber music.…” —Frank J. Oteri, NewMusicBox (American Music Center)

“The reissue of each of these mini-albums is welcome…. It has retained a distinct sense of place, and in these times of ever-increasing uniformity of language and aesthetic in new music, that’s not something to be derided…. It’s all beautifully performed and recorded, and genuinely touching in its simplicity. And that’s not something you find very often anymore in contemporary composition.”—Dan Warburton, Signal to Noise and Paris Transatlantic

“Back in the hazy daze of the early ’80s, a brave little label out of Los Angeles, Cold Blue, was busy working the margins, documenting a new music scene with no name. Label mogul Jim Fox released a series of 10-inch vinyl records that were decidedly cool—in hipness quotient and emotional temperament. Beguiling…the music adhered to the particular ambient Pacific coast minimalist aesthetics of composers such as Daniel Lentz, Peter Garland, and the late, underrated post-Cage composer Barney Childs…. Now, the newly revitalized label has re-released the entire collection of 10-inch records on a wonderfully expansive three-CD set. It’s as if discrete patchwork has been assembled, after the fact, into a logical and generally hypnotic tapestry. In other words, the extended format does this music good. The music also seems to sound even better than it did even back when, or maybe it’s just that our battered 21st-century sensibilities are even more in need of a balm, free of that sentimental aftertaste.” —Josef Woodard, Santa Barbara Independent

“Some 20 years later, the compositions on these three discs seem just as vital as they must have been when they first appeared, and, similarly, today’s Cold Blue seems haunted by the same spirits as when it first began, compelled by the same desire to discover new musical forms, often with the most simple of gestures, but always with the most suggestive and nuanced of results.” —Richard di Santo,Incursion Music Review

“Compositions by some of LA’s finest composers can be found on Jim Fox’s excellent Cold Blue Records label.” —Dean Suzuki, Los Angeles Reader
“The [Cold Blue] label defines a certain ‘Southern California sound,’ uncluttered, evocative and unusual, with a wistful emotional edge.” —LA Weekly

“Music with less affinity to the prevailing camps of modern music than to personal explorations of the human spirit…. And the music stands as timelessly as it did the day each was first issued…. It was a series that was ahead of its time. This time around, the audience may have caught up. Check it out! —Daniel Buckley, Tucson Citizen

“Highly recommended” —Sequenza21

“Those 10-inch singles have been rereleased as a boxed set of three CDs, sounding as fresh as they ever did. From the first seconds of Peter Garland’s Matachin Dances, for violins and gourd rattles, your find yourself taking the musical equivalent of a cold shower. This is bracing music, not only because of the directness of its ideas, but also the appealing starkness of its sonorities. It is not music where you ever ask yourself what the composer means. Other works in the box include Barney Childs’s unearthly Clay music for a group of ceramic wind instruments, Read Miller’s work for speaking voices…Chas Smith’s beguiling pedal steel pieces, and Daniel Lentz’s solar-inspired ensemble music which showers you this time not with cold water, but with brilliant light.” —Andrew Ford, Australian Financial Review

“Scented with a distinctly laid-back, at times lonely, West Coast feel, there’s a wealth of music here, from Michael Jon Fink’s somber, limpid piano music to Chas Smith’s haunting tunes for pedal steel guitar that howl and moan like coyotes in the distant desert.” — Christopher DeLaurenti, The Stranger (Seattle)

“A quietly stunning look back at how a particular aesthetic was formed in Southern California, and how that aesthetic informed virtually everything that came after it…these three CDs make for one of the most delightful and enduring listening experiences of the new music, and do not sound dated in any way. They offer the same challenges and edification to listeners that they did in the 1980s, and perhaps—given the cynicism that greets new works these days—even offer listeners a kind of solace from their own skepticism.” —Thom Jurek, All-Music Guide

“Adventurous music…groundbreaking composers…an unusual and satisfying musical document of the place and time.” —New Classics (U.K.)

“A Cold Blue collection…. The usual high-quality sound and art work, of course…. Garland, a US expatriate residing in Mexico, finds antique, lyrical and violent minimalism in gourd rattles and two violins to striking effects…. Fink’s music…is a pleasure from beginning to end. Likewise it is a pleasure to hear Barney Childs’ Clay music…. Wow! Space whistles! Tuba flutes!… Read Miller’s Mile Zero Hotel, a series of sonic postcards with the laconic ritornello ‘Love, Miriam’…. Chas Smith…Aloha. Amen…. Cox takes other evocative paths…attention-grabbing earie and eerie listening…. Lentz’s beautiful spirals complete the collection…like pop angels ascending…a demented nirvana.” —Mark Alburger, 21st-Century Music magazine

“This is truly manna from heaven.” —Sands-Zine (Italy)

“The Complete 10-Inch Series is abundant with fascinating sounds that offer something unexpected with each disc spin.” —ei magazine

“A very fine collection of a nice cross-over between classical music and the more serious avant-garde pop music of the early 80s.” —Vital Weekly (Netherlands)

“There is a lot to take in here, and even after many repeated listens you can still find arrangements and melodies you didn’t notice before, most likely because the discs pull you in immediately, seducing you to simply listen and experience.” —Michael W Woodring, SONOMU

“Among the elements commonly associated with the Cold Blue label is a propensity for inviting, even mysterious sonic beauty; an appeal to the senses that, strangely enough, seems to reach beyond sound. Collected here on three CDs is the entire series of 10-inch vinyl recordings –seven albums, each showcasing the work of a single composer. Taken alone, each composer presents a compelling sound world. Viewed as a single collection, the context deepens, and the resonance of each artist’s work extends into that of the next…. Obviously, there is a lot to listen to here. One could well get lost for days in the spacious music spread across these three discs, and continue to find sounds that invite, fascinate, and mystify.” —Dusted

“While the artists represented on this set vary widely in approaches and results, their music shares an uncommon simplicity and beauty, far away from any sort of prevailing musical mainstreams.” —Exposé

“This long-awaited re-issue is elegant…we can now hear again this demanding music, cultured and meticulous.” —Deep Listenings (Italy)

“The 2003 release of The Complete 10-Inch Series from Cold Blue brought considerable (and deserved) attention to the Venice, California-based label. Its three discs of extraordinary music by seven composers proved especially satisfying for highlighting their works’ dramatic contrasts. Certainly the two violins and gourd rattles of Peter Garland’s Matachin Dances, for example, sounded completely unlike the pedal steel guitar and 12-string dobros of Chas Smith’s Scircura or the clay ocarinas and pipes of Barney Child’s Clay music. Even more striking, though, was the discovery that this superb music was more than two decades old, having been released originally as vinyl EPs in the early 1980s. If the original cover designs (displayed in an accompanying booklet) look of their time, the music, now made available for the first time on CD, sounds anything but. Heard separately, the works captivated but, assembled, resonate with a grander significance by cohering into an encompassing portrait, essentially acting as an implicit manifesto of purpose for the label’s aesthetic.” —Ron Schepper, Textura and Stylus