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Revolutions Per Minute (The Art Record) (1982)



  1. Jud Fine - Polynesian/Polyhedron (3:12)
  2. Eleanor Antin - Antinova Remembers (4:12)
  3. Margaret Harrison - First Lines (2:46)
  4. Les Levine - Would Not Say No to Some Help (4:10)
  5. Hannah Wilke - Stand Up (3:21)
  6. Douglas Davis - How to Make Love to a Sound (4:21)
  7. Vitaly Komar & Alexander Melamid - Russian Language Lesson (3:21)
  8. Helen & Newton Harrison - Extract from The Second Lagoon: A Memoriam to John Isaacs (2:29)
  9. Vincenzo Agnetti - Pieces of Sound (4:30)
  10. Chris Burden - The Atomic Alphabet (0:31)
  11. Piotr Kowalski & William Burroughs - You Only Call the Old Doctor Once (4:45)
  12. Ida Applebroog - Really, is That a Fact? (3:09)
  13. Edwin Schlossberg - Vibrations/Metaphors (4:52)
  14. SITE - Comments on SITE (2:46)
  15. R Buckminster Fuller - Critical Path (2:52)
  16. Thomas Shannon - Smashing Beauty (4:02)
  17. Conrad Atkinson - The Louis XIV Deterrent (5:20)
  18. David Smyth - Typewriter in D (3:35)
  19. Todd Siler - Think Twice (3:17)
  20. Joseph Beuys - Excerpt from Cooper Union Dialogue (4:07)

2xLP, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts Inc/The Charing Hill Company, 1982

A scarce double disc of the great and the good from the early 1980s NYC art scene, this is a very mixed bag of sound pieces, spoken word and, well, some songs. But there are some gems here too, so this isn’t just notable for its rarity. The Bill Burroughs piece has his voice slowly set out of phase like an early Steve Reich piece. And the Terry Fox excerpt, from recordings made from a show where he wired very lengthy steel springs from the altar to the doors of an Italian church and then twanged them, basking in the glorious reverb, is pretty special.

This was released in a limited run, in a gatefold covered in notes, plus a couple of fold-out posters with further sleevenotes and alternative cover designs. There was also a 500-copy run with prints from may of the contributors as a collector’s item. We ain’t got that one. NB, 320 rip.