This is Internet Archive Avant Garde Project installment agp102 "Henry Kaiser, Outside Pleasure LP."

For the previous Internet Archive Avant Garde Project installment, here.

For the next Internet Archive Avant Garde Project installment, here.

Take me (to the Internet Archive Avant Garde Project) Home, Morpheus.

With AGP102, the Avant Garde Project veers wildly off course. This installment is a transcription of an early LP by the avant garde guitarist Henry Kaiser, who has had a long, prolific career playing a remarkably diverse and profoundly strange assortment of musics. My favorite of his many recordings is "Outside Pleasure", recorded live without overdubs in August 1979 in San Francisco and Berkeley, California. Kaiser's guitar style, particularly at this stage in his career, is unlike anything anyone else does. Imagine a combination of Hawaiian slack-key guitar, the songs of humpback whales, and the music of the Krell, and you have some idea what it sounds like.

The tracks on this LP have been re-released on a now-out-of-print CD entitled "Outside Aloha Pleasure" that also includes most of the tracks from his follow-up LP "Aloha". AGP103 will be a transcription of that CD, but when I transcribed some tracks from my LP copy, I found that the LP transfer actually has more fine detail and sounds more alive than the CD. I'm guessing they used digital noise reduction on the CD re-release to reduce the hiss of the original analog recording, and in doing so lost some clarity as well.

The installment includes two bonus tracks from Henry Kaiser's contribution to the Table of the Elements series (Neon), and a PDF file with front and back cover scans from Outside Pleasure. My scanner's bed isn't large enough to scan an entire LP cover, so each cover is scanned in two parts.

To download AGP102 files, right-click on each of the following links and select SAVE LINK AS.

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