‘Music is heard coming from Iron Chicken’s egg. The egg breaks and Tiny Clanger plays with all the notes from inside. The Soup Dragon eats most of them, so Tiny takes the last couple outside and plants them. He gets the cloud to rain on them, and they grow into beautiful music trees. Tiny Clanger conducts the first tune.’

With Leadbelly, Ramblin’ Thomas, Charley Patton and co.

This is the summary

This is a great way into Partch, revisiting with gusto three well-known, relatively-compact works — a highly rhythmic dance piece, a cross-cutting film score, and Barstow, with HP intoning hitchhiker graffiti.

The original 1957 performance — kotos and marimbas alongside HP varieties like the Chromelodeon and the Harmonic Canon — with splendid artwork including rare documents and photographs.

‘A diary of eight months spent in transient shelters and camps, hobo jungles, basement rooms, and on the open road’. A collage of readings and musical fragments, this long-lost journal of HP’s wanderings during the Great Depression (from cleaning sewers to tea with W. B. Yeats) is ‘an extraordinary musical portrait of an American pioneer, chronicling his occasionally hilarious and often heartbreaking struggles to forge a new music system outside the classical tradition.’

Thirty-four verses of expanded duets, the prototype of Delusion Of The Fury, thrashed out with the Gate 5 Ensemble over a three year period starting late in 1962, in a too-small space within an abandoned chick hatchery in Petaluma, California.
Plus a section of a rehearsal session, with HP himself giving direction, ending with a fine performance by Danlee Mitchell and Michael Ranta.
And finally a previously unreleased recording of Partch playing Adapted Viola, in one of the Verse 17 duets excised from the final opus.

Their seminal 1979 LP debut with Dennis Bovell at the mixing board. 180g vinyl.

Cooking James Brown Congotronics style, featuring the brilliant teenager Roger Landu on his home-made one-off one-string satonge lute. (Check Youtube.) Championed by Massive Attack, amongst others.

2 CDs and a DVD from Trevor Jackson’s label: post-rock meets electro-punk, meets electronica, meets who knows. Killer cuts from Fridge, Four Tet, Sonovac, Playgroup, Gramme, Mu and the rest.