The opportunity to witness Charlemagne Palestine in long-durational live collaborative interchange with Tony Conrad (and just a day later, with Oren Ambarchi) at the 2011 Melbourne Jazz Festival really crystallised the structural rigour and trance-inducing sublimity of the artist's long involvement with music. During the Conrad/Palestine duo evening (which was more like a "happening" in various respects), a solo drone piece on the Melbourne Town Hall's pipe organ, in which Palestine literally "pulled out all the stops", and whose crescendo lasted at least 40 minutes but it could have been an hour, or perhaps five, elicited striking responses : one friend described it as "all music played at once", another left the building because he felt an overwhelming sense of "primal terror". Curator of the event Joel Stern also organised an offshoot screening of Palestine's 1970s video works, tracing early durational pieces which tested the limitations of physical space and the body in relation to the 'physicalised' camera toward exhaustion, eventually evolving toward giddy mantric celebration.
A two hour radio programme is particularly inadequate for an artist such as Palestine, whose music almost requires the live presence (of both artist and audience) in order to evolve - but that being the usual faustian bargain with recorded media, we still hope you enjoy this show.
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Playlist
1. Strumming for Harpsichord (from 'Strumming Music for Piano, Harpsichord and Strings Ensemble', Sub Rosa, 2010)
2. One Fifth in the Rhythm Three Against Two for Bosendorfer Piano (from 'Four Manifestations on Six Elements', Sonnabend Gallery, 1974)
3. Surrealistic Studies I (from 'Voice Studies', Alga Marghen, 2008)
4. Surrealistic Studies II (from 'Voice Studies', Alga Marghen, 2008)
5. Surrealistic Studies III (from 'Voice Studies', Alga Marghen, 2008)
6. Cataclisma 3 (from 'Etudes to Cataclysms', Sub Rosa, 2008)
7. Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone (from 'Schlongo!!!daLUVdrone', Cortical Foundation, 2000)
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