Description
Alga Marghen, Italy 2025
Edition of 232 copies
“alga marghen proudly present two previously umpublished seminal works by Bill Fontana. “Suite For Toy Tape Recorder” from 1968 and “Wave Spiral” from the early 70s. These recordings come directly from the archives of Philip Corner who also curated this LP edition and contributed the liner notes.
1968. In the besement Music Room of the New School For Social Research, Philip Corner was teaching “Analysis of New Music”, a class he inherited from Malcolm Goldstein and before him Richard Maxfield and of course all the way back to the famous founder John Cage, present in the spirit of living.history. Bill Fontana, as a student, simply brought in what he had been working on and playing around with… or a similar trip-down-to-Canal-Street undertaked years before by those who will be called Fluxus, a group with whome Fontana shared (as Philp Corner put it in his liner notes) “a spiritual with-it’ness”. But what Bill Fontana had picked up and out in these recordings no one else had! The “Suite For Toy Tape Recorder” was a series of little reels of 1 7/8” tapes, unique experiments by means of “working-with” and so “transcend” by “making use-of” those little cheap tape-recorders. A sensitive ear that listened to hum and hiss and all the other characteristic distortions; and recorded these materials via a kind of physical phonogène of musique-concrete perspective, his thumb’s friction as the reel was running fast-forward in order to create tape loops in contrapuntual collision.
Philip Corner: “With his Sound Sculptures installed around all the world, Bill Fontana has proven his sensitive ear to all of us. He chose to remove all traces of own-doing from installation environment listenings. You have to go there (all around the world!) to get to-into them.
These early pieces instead, real on this new record – to come really home… They will get (in) to you”.
Side B presents “Wave Spiral, for 5 Rin Gongs”, a 21-minute blissful piece recorded in the early-70s and first presented in Australia in 1977. This work shows how Bill Fontana’s research evolved toward working with the distinct physical dimension of different frequencies. An exploration of how sound becomes simultaneously its own material and the force acting upon it.
The piece unfolds as an investigation of how frequency itself become sculptural. Across its 21-minute duration, the rin gongs generate sustained waves that spiral outward and inward simultaneously, their overtones interacting with the listening space that Fontana would describe as a “definition of motion interacting with a particular acoustic environment”.
The spiral manifests itself here not through cycles within cycles of tape loop manipulations like on Side A, but through the acoustic behaviour of metallic resonance in space. This sound is rendered as tangible phenomenon, frequency made visible through its physical impact on the istening environment.
These recordings have remained unheard for decades, only existing in Philip Corner’s archive. Their publication allows us to trace the development of an artist discovering that to work with sound was to investigate its physical dimensions, to understand that frequency and space are inseparable, that sound sculpure begins not with installation but with the fundamental recognition that all sounds exist as waves interacting with architecture itself.
Edition of 232 copies coordinated by Philip Corner who also contributed the liner notes.”
