[CP 184 CD] Frank Garvey; Labyrinth (Prison Walls), Omnicircus

Creel Pone replication of this wonderful pair of Chicagoland "Paste-on" Private Press LPs.

The first, "Labyrinth (Prison Walls)" was self-issued on the Composer's "Warp Records" (no relation) in 1978 & covers the score for "LABYRINTH", a piece created for electronic music and laser light created in 1977-78 & first performed at Chicago's Omega Intermedia Center. LABYRINTH is dedicated to Steve Biko, freedom fighter murdered by South African government.

The second, "Omnicircus", offers a single "Electronic Composition" in two parts, "Kriegspiel" & "Eropoc," intended at the soundtrack "for the first 2 sections of 'OMNICIRCUS', a theatre piece for electronic music, computer graphics, video synthesis, dance, sculpture, architecture, and drama" by one Frank Garvey.

Garvey is an intriguing character; born & raised in Urbana in an artistic family - his father was a close collaborator of Harry Partch's - he studied Video Art & Animation at at the Art Institute of Chicago before heading out to the Bay Area in the 80s & setting up a "Robotic" theater / performance collective under the same name as this piece - albeit 10 years later - before relocating to Pittsburgh to teach at Carnegie Mellon in the late 90s.

The music here would appear to be born out of a post-Industrial fascination with harsh, sliding, mechanistic textures - not too far removed from the tape-echo addled synthesis of Maurizio "M.B." Bianchi - this certainly makes sense given Garvey's later predilections towards Jean Tinguely / Mark Pauline -styled automatons & associated anti-humanistic conceits.

Text on the rear-cover of "Omnicircus" - placed just below a tell-all mushroom cloud - reads:

"The danger of nuclear destruction; the enveloping of the embryo by the womb; the enveloping of the womb by the pelvis; the enveloping of the pelvis by the tissue seared by newstar; the enveloping of the carrion crow; the enveloping of the carrion dog; the enveloping of the carrion itself by the primeval light of hellfire newstar."

Utterly fascinating, grinding, Industrial Noise / Concrète filigree with little compare; an essential inclusion in the Creel Pone program - coming in at the 11th hour of the series' 10-year run.