[Moshe]

http://www.saucerlike.com/index.php

The legendary TOE label, which has released various sonic projects over the years, opened a new website. Some sonic rarities are available at the site’s online store. After getting them you can discuss about the on the new message board.
More information about the label and the sonic goodies here:

TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS


Everybody loves a mystery. Generations of record collectors have spent valuable chunks of their lives poking through vinyl bins in search of unknown pleasures, or rambling though the piney woods with their ears cocked for a high, lonesome sound. Think of Harry Smith, magical curator of forgotten 78 rpm discs, whose "Anthology of American Folk Music" created a rich mythology out of grooves dusty with neglect. Even revolutionary sounds can come and go with the scarcest trace. That's part of the power they hold over the ardent, would-be listener. The truth is out there.

Since 1993, Table of the Elements has spoken that truth. The label has staked its claim on a massive enterprise: It intends nothing less than to rewrite the history of American music in the second half of the 20th century. And beyond. That's a tall order for even the largest multi-national corporations, whose vaults harbor so much of our cultural data. Imagine, then, the flinty ambition necessary for Table of the Elements to pursue its goal. This modestly funded, cellular organization has thrived on smarts, and pluck, in realizing its projects, which have focused on musicians whose light shimmers outside the frames of convention. The label's 100-plus releases are a vital contemporary archive, a survey of meaningful eruptions across a broad, if sometimes obscured, horizon of improvised, experimental, minimal and outsider musics.

During the past 13 years, the pop world saw grunge give way to crunk and CDs yield to MP3's. Technology has mediated an ever-more globalized marketplace in which music has been made at once ephemeral and privatized, freely traded yet increasingly consumed in isolation. Table of the Elements looked at the longer haul, registering the ripples of music that were too essential to die or dissolve into the common currency. The label went prospecting for the rarest sort of sonic lode, the uncut goods blessed with a hearty half-life. The New York Times praised these actions for single-handedly "rescuing the underworld of 1970s and '80s music from cassette-recorded oblivion."

Count Tony Conrad in that company. The label's signature artist, a violinist whose primal enveloping drones create an oscillating ritual theater, has been prodigiously documented in a series of releases. These range from sumptuous packagings of lost classics (Conrad's 1973 collaboration with Faust, "Outside the Dream Syndicate") to new projects alongside young artists that the composer has inspired ("Slapping Pythagoras") to recoveries of lost concepts given new breath (the epic 4-CD box set "Early Minimalism"). Conrad is joined by other profoundly influential composers whose radical styles defy textbook definitions and challenge accepted notions of the minimalist canon: Rhys Chatham, Arnold Dreyblatt, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, Laurie Spiegel and Velvet Underground co-founder (and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee) John Cale - whose remarkable early recordings made prior to his rock career were compiled in the 3-CD set "New York in the 1960s." These efforts achieved a critical mass in 2000, with the controversial release of legendary "lost" collaborations from 1964 between Cale, Conrad, and La Monte Young. "Day of Niagara: Inside the Dream Syndicate Vol. I" topped numerous year-end "Best Of" lists and was lauded as "the most historically significant music release of the last 20 years."

The label, however, has not been limited to that singular agenda. As minimalism's creation myth has been challenged and outlined anew, there were other demigods lurking in forgotten corners of the pantheon. These irascible, tough-nut characters make their own legends, but their iconoclastic nature often marks them as merely that. The 1990s was a good time to poke around the crumbling brick corners of American music. John Fahey, SRO hotel occupant and record-collecting aesthete, was in the cusp of a latter-day renaissance in the mid-1990s when he collided head-on with Table of the Elements. Fahey finger-picked his way back into the limelight as TOTE presented the guitar wizard and one-man archive of primitive American musics in notable concert settings, performances that also were recorded - and now stand as invaluable moments, a series of last hurrahs, in a life that was too soon winding down.

Europe, too, offered adventure. When a band called Faust decided to reunite, the act prompted Table of the Elements to engage the group for an outrageous series of concerts. Synonymous with "Kraut Rock," the May '68 anarchists were a historical footnote when its members convened again after two decades and hopped over the Atlantic. The band lurched across America on a chaotic 10,000-mile roadtrip that careened from New York to Death Valley. On a more consonant chord, the now ubiquitous studio whiz and composer Jim O'Rourke received from TotE some of his earliest support as both an artist and producer; he was also introduced to indie-rock legends Sonic Youth at the label's 1994 Manganese festival (O'Rourke is now their fifth member and producer), and lent his invaluable gifts to many projects.

The label also has ventured beyond music proper into the art world. Jack Smith, the original "flaming creature" himself, is the subject of two home-recorded artifacts released on Conrad's Audio Artkive imprint. The 1960s legend, a protean filmmaker and Lower East Side bohemian original, is only one of several artistic outsiders to find a comfy spot in the label's catalog. Globally renowned provocateur Mike Kelley has been documented. Avant-rock voodoo daddy Captain Beefheart has been treated to a series of limited-edition releases, as have Sonic Youth guitar monsters Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo.

While other artsy independent labels have emerged in the wake of ToTE's initiative, none can match the verve with which its CDs, LPs and limited-edition sets are designed. Hailed by the leading bibles of American graphic and product design, Jeff Hunt, the label's founder and art director, and his graphics cohort Susan Archie, of the World of anArchie design firm, are prime movers in a new wave of innovative music packaging. Their early, expressionistic use of metallic inks has been co-opted by the majors, while the label's distinctive, elemental iconography has been assimilated into the mass culture through advertising for products ranging from Kool cigarettes to MTV. But there's much more beyond such reverberations. Increasingly encyclopedic creations -- for TotE, as well as for the Revenant and Dust-to-Digital labels -- recall Renaissance-era cabinets of curiosities, or the sublime shadow-box constructions of artist Joseph Cornell -- reliquaries of exotic minutiae, crafted with wood, metal, vellum, cloth, foil, embossed stamping and even pressed flowers. It's the commodity as both miniature museum and theater, in which one can endlessly indulge in wonder, love and, yes, obsession. It's not often that a record label casts an influence on a broader design aesthetic -- think Blue Note in the 1960s, with its hip Reid Miles album covers -- but as a string of Grammy awards and nominations for Archie attest, that's exactly what's happened with Table of the Elements.

Even the label's location was offbeat. Most of its current work was accomplished from the deep Southern outpost of Atlanta, Georgia. Home to hip-hop's biggest, blinging'est names, the city is a capital of American pop, yet as remote from most avant-garde tangents as it is central to the early history of blues and country music. With Spanish moss overhead and kudzu underfoot, it's a place where the fleeting façade of contemporary life is constantly eroded by nature's deliberate encroachments, where the ghosts of other times float in the limpid air, and expend their wrath in the afternoon thunderstorms that create thrilling percussive spectacles in the summer sky.

Table of the Elements is likewise spectacular: A conduit for history exploding in the present moment. As the next millennium unfolds, the label continues to spin forward, embracing the radical delights that fall before its springheeled path. Current projects include such imaginative leaps as sound artist Leif Inge's "9 Beet Stretch," excerpts from a massively slowed-down version of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. "What you hear in normal time as a happy Viennese melody lasting 5 or 10 seconds becomes minutes of slowly cascading overtones; a drumroll becomes a nightmarish avalanche," wrote the New York Times. The label also has a livewire in drummer Jonathan Kane, whose CD "February" represents thrilling possibilities for its future. The music's tintinnabulatory rush is hypnotic and bracing, an evocation of the blues that harks backwards and forwards at once. It's the kind of music men might gather to play on a moonlit night deep in some rural hill country, with trouble in the distance and whiskey close at hand. It's the kind of music you might hear above a bodega, on an afternoon in the Lower East Side, with trouble everywhere and no end in sight. It's the kind of music Table of the Elements is all about. It thrives outside the barricades, where no one else is looking. Where the truth is spoken.

Steve Dollar
New York City
August 2005

[sonicl]

I love TOTE. It was the first label in years (after Blast First) that I felt, if it's on this label, it must be good.


Moshe - What Sonic goodies have you spotted on there? I can see Lee / William Hooker - The Celestial Answer, which is brilliant, but nothing else.

[Moshe]

information on SY-related titles follows:


GUITAR SERIES VOL. II

TOE-SS-14 LEE RANALDO Smoke Ring #5 b/w Travis 4,5 7" 1994
TOE-SS-16 THURSTON MOORE Starfield Wild b/w Earth/Amp 7" 1994

As auspicious cultural moments go, this one was a little sneaky. No one really knew it was coming. Now, it looks suspiciously like something that had to happen - a cool idea, and like all cool ideas, a little ahead of its time, yet very much of its time, if you were given to wearing the right kind of wristwatch. The year was 1993 - a lifetime ago in pop terms, still the very early Clinton Era, plenty of dreams yet to unwind, and the final commodification of Alternative Nation waving from the near distance - and an independent record label had just set up shop in Atlanta, Georgia. Not exactly the grand locus of avant-garde activity, but still Dixie enough to nourish a little ruckus-raising. And that, from the get-go, was the purpose of Table of the Elements - a fact announced with its very first releases, a collection of 7-inch singles which featured twelve masters of the electric guitar. Not noodlesome masters, or Southern boogie masters, or jazz-wank masters, or new-folk revival masters or any of that. This was more imaginative, more dangerous, more weird, more fun. Here, guitars were not merely played. They were also abused, cheated, lied to, exalted, obliterated, teased, tricked up, toyed with impetuously, trained to jump through flaming hoops, obliged to sit up and behave, targeted for death, elected President, taken for a reckless betting spree at the dog track, used in ways and for purposes few could possibly have imagined. It was like something out of De Sade or D.W. Griffith. If either of them had an affinity for stringed instruments, amplifiers and the act of lunging sun-drunk into the wild thickets of bliss and blister that constitute the realm of free improvised music.

No one would easily have predicted that this was a harbinger of so much to come, a quiet revolution in noisy music (or music about noise, or noise as music, or "rock-based minimalism," or post-rock, or anti-guitar, or sine waves from Planet X). Table of the Elements was the first of its kind on the block, the first American label of its era, to really root itself in a deliberate (yet playfully vague) aesthetic that embraced avant/outsider/iconoclast/overlooked genius musical stirrings while also conjuring a slyly self-conscious philosophical identity that was clearly and cleverly expressed in the way its discs were designed and packaged. There was a whiff of conspiracy about them, a mystique of sorts, that implied a Dispatch from Someplace Else. It's the type of record label that Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo might dream up, as a way to give face to the fact that the world we think we know - the histories they tell us we should accept - is only parallel to many other worlds, each containing other histories. That which appears to be a recondite hymn in one could easily be the populist anthem in another, and Table of the Elements arose on the premise of flipping that script. But with a fine degree of subtlety, elegance even. These releases were curatorial. Like individual pieces of a larger-scale art project, one whose fuller, lasting image would reflect variations on the notion of what music should do (after Cage or after Hendrix or after Ayler), particularly in the hands of performers so peculiarly individualistic that it's hard to imagine all of them fitting comfortably under any umbrella, let alone sharing one.

The Guitar Series was the square root of what has become one of the most impressive and daring catalogs going. It's a road map, in a sense, not only towards the label's subsequent triumphs and gambits, but also of much that would come to greater prominence in the nearly 10 years since its first releases. At the time, the notion of inviting a perversely eclectic array of improvising guitar heroes (some legendary, some unknown) to record for 7-inch vinyl - a genuine, jukebox-friendly single - and not make a full-length CD, was offbeat. Capricious, even. On one hand, there was yet no Vinyl Renaissance in effect. On the other, how subversively tweaky indeed was any gesture that consigned such frequently gnarly, square-peg eruptions to the ultimate in disposably round-hole pop formats, the 45 rpm (or, occasionally here, 33 rpm) record. Was this the arcana, to paraphrase Claes Oldenberg, that helped budding hipsters get across the street?

It proved to be a great dinner party, one whose guest list sparked with unexpected chemistry. Like the Algonquin Round Table, argued with Orange amplifiers. Volume One boasted British table-top guitar pioneer Keith Rowe (of AMM fame), the very model of the postmodern-day avant-garde heavyweight, and Henry Kaiser, a slide-guitar master adept at recreations of Pacific island musics whose travels far and wide had made him a true cult figure; from Japan, the monstrous noise icon Kaziyuki K. Null, making an extremely rare appearance on a U.S. label, and from Alabama, the unjustifiably obscure improviser Davey Williams, a marvelously wicked player who has done much to strip away pretense from the fa?ade of "the scene" with his irreverent Southern sensibility. Germany's Hans Reichel weighs in, a radical innovator from the early 70s' First Wave of free improvisation; and here, also, is Jim O'Rourke, truly a household name these days thanks to his prolific work as a producer, peripatetic collaborator and singer-songwriter, although the Guitar Series single was then only his second solo U.S. release - pre- Gastr del Sol, pre- Sonic Youth, pre- Wilco, pre- Ubiquity, pre- Et Cetera. Quite a prescient call.

Volume Two of the series (assembled at the same time as Volume One and released a few months later - April 23, 1994, to be precise, at the label's near-mythic Manganese Festival) was equally visionary. Derek Bailey, another legend whose pathbreaking procedures utterly reinvented guitar language, shows up in a surprisingly whimsical mood, putting the lie to the clich? that all improv must be dry and high-falutin'. Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore also make their presence felt, lending their downtown NYC seal of approval to the project-at-large, and indulging in the kind of mischievous clamor they've made an enduring stock-in-trade. Another New Yorker, melancholic mood-scaper Loren Mazzacane (later known by the appended surname Connors) offers his distinctively low-key sonic imprint, one that would come to wider appreciation in the years to come. Paul Panhuysen, interpreter of "long string" instumental installations, forecast his future full-length ToTE release. And, in one of those artistic coups that can justify such an exhaustive effort on its own terms alone, the magnificent Keiji Haino makes his U.S. recording debut, certifying for neophytes and addicts alike the vengeful grace of extremely amplified guitar - one roaring with the mystery of a man who fell to Earth, only to hijack its strangest frequencies.

Taken individually, these recordings offer fascinating asides and insights into the creative process of some of the most original musical thinkers of the 20th century, post-Elvis division. Each performance is like a phrase of audible graffiti, an instance of working-out that can either be heard as a response to a novel proposal - record a "single" - or the seizure of a moment in which radical style is given imperious free rein: an E-ticket ride in the Six Flags of Sound. That, in and of itself, is remarkable. But heard as a cumulative shockwave of amplified ingenuity, these short pieces suggest something more, well, elemental. Beneath the surface noise of contemporary culture, the lockstep groove of technology and advertising, the jittery pulse of global anxiety and the new world disorder, there is something unabashedly liberating about cranking the volume behind some deviant fretnoise. Electric guitar, as someone once said, is the enemy of the state. Long live the revolution.

Steve Dollar
New York City
2002

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[Moshe]

TOE-LP-66 TEXT OF LIGHT (featuring LEE RANALDO and CHRISTIAN MARCLAY) 052402 echo 4 LP 2004

The visionary ensemble Text of Light extends free improvisational experiments into an intermedia environment; the result in is a new chapter in the annals of free improvisation and mixed media.

The all-star members first gathered in 1999 to perform music to the films of Stan Brakhage and other members of the American Cinema avant garde of the 1950s-60s Brakhage's film Text of Light was the premiere performance and namesake of the group, whose original premise was to improvise to (rather than "illustrate") works from this under-known era of personal expression and breathtaking visual poetry.

The group features Lee Ranaldo (Sonic Youth) and Alan Licht (guitars/devices), Christian Marclay and DJ Olive (turntables), William Hooker (drums/percussion), Ulrich Krieger (sax/electronics), and most recently Tim Barnes (drums/percussion). To date the group has performed with the following films: Brakhage's Text of Light, Dog Star Man, Anticipation of the Night and Songs; Harry Smith's Mahagonny outtakes, Oz: The Approach to the Emerald City, and Late Superimpositions.

This beautifully packaged LP is the group's first commercial release, and features original artwork by the late, great filmmaker, magician and alchemist, Harry Smith.

"The new 'Text of Light' quintet with Lee Ranaldo & Alan Licht on guitars, DJ Olive on turntable/sampler and Ulrich Krieger on sax accompanied films by Stan Brakhage, which were very strange and constantly in motion. Their sonic soundscapes fit Brakhage's films with a well seasoned and well placed stew of restrained, yet occasionally explosive results."
Downtown Music Gallery

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XER-CD-99 LOREN MAZZACANE CONNORS, JEAN-MARC MONTERA, THURSTON MOORE, LEE RANALDO MMMR CD 1997
XER-LP-99 LOREN MAZZACANE CONNORS, JEAN-MARC MONTERA, THURSTON MOORE, LEE RANALDO MMMR LP 1997

As members of Sonic Youth, Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo continue to pump the most radical tenets of American experimentalism into the heart of rock music; in recent years they have also extended their reputations as world-class improvisers. French phenom Jean-Marc Montera records for the legendary FMP label and has collaborated with an amazing host of free-music luminaries, including Evan Parker, Paul Lovens and Han Bennink. However it is the keening blues wail of Loren Mazzacane Connors that leads this expedition of electric guitars to the furthest reaches of a vast, cinematic soundscape.
Recorded by Martin Stumpf (Phillip Glass, David Bowie) at Sonic Youth's Echo Canyon Studios, NYC.

"This is great improvised music. It is beautiful and complex and, most importantly, it breathes. As good and as moving as anything you'll hear this year."
John Fahey

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XER-LP-99 LOREN MAZZACANE CONNORS, JEAN-MARC MONTERA, THURSTON MOORE, LEE RANALDO MMMR LP 1997 (See XER-CD-99)

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XER-CD-102 LEE RANALDO and WILLIAM HOOKER The Celestial Answer CD 2005

As individual performers, William Hooker and Lee Ranaldo are explosive. As collaborators, they are thermonuclear. A kinetic, avant percussionist and poet, Hooker is one of New York's most important band leaders, having fronted groups that included David Murray and David S. Ware. Ranaldo leads the improv supergroup Text of Light, whose fluid membership includes Hooker, as well as Christian Marclay, Tim Barnes and Mission of Burma's Roger Miller -- and of course, he's a co-founder of the indefatigably experimental Sonic Youth.

With The Celestial Answer, Hooker and Ranaldo have created a work of blindingly brilliant, elemental force. Rays of white guitar noise penetrate clouds of analog synth; molten drumming blasts across free-form poetics. The dynamic is beautiful and inspired -- a simple cold-fusion of intuitive interaction and boundless sonic freedom. These are thoughtful and emotionally attuned artists. Open your ears and they'll take you on a soaring voyage through an ecstatic firmament, into the howling mouth of infinity.

[sonicl]

Are the guitar series ones up for sale, or just listed as releases? I have them both on a "guitar series" promo 2xCD and I have Thurston's on vinyl, but I'd quite like to get Lee's on vinyl.

The stuff on Xeric and the Text of Light vinyl I had overlooked.

[Moshe]

I think that if you contact the label you might get lucky.
The only ToE stuff i manged to get was the celestial answer.

[sonicl]

Originally Posted by Nefeli

thank you for posting all that, since there is no info on those in site at the moment, unless am blind.

How bizarre. I'm sure there used to be a full discography, but now it doesn't appear to be there.

[porkmarras]

The only one i have that's been put out on this label is this one its value is unmeasurable.Great label.

 

[sonicl]

Is that the vinyl or the CD? And how did you get it to levitate like that?

I love those wooden cases they do for some of their releases.

[porkmarras]

I want this for Christmas:

 

[porkmarras]

Originally Posted by sonicl

Is that the vinyl or the CD? And how did you get it to levitate like that?

I love those wooden cases they do for some of their releases.

Yes it's on cd and i didn't get it to levitate for me 'cause i'm at work so i got the picture from google.ok?

[sonicl]

Originally Posted by porkmarras

I want this for Christmas:

 

I was a bit underwhelmed by that when I heard it. But I was a bit underwhelmed by the John Cale in the 60s stuff and the Tony Conrad Early Minimalism stuff too, so don't take any heed of what I say.

[porkmarras]

Go away.

[sonicl]

Originally Posted by porkmarras

Go away.

I think you should know that I'm crying now.

[porkmarras]

Originally Posted by sonicl

I think you should know that I'm crying now.

Come back then.All is forgiven.

[porkmarras]

Do you have both of them?The recordings aren't great but the music is like,wow!

[sonicl]

Originally Posted by porkmarras

Do you have both of them?The recordings aren't great but the music is like,wow!

I heard them, and they just didn't grab me. I'm sure they're artistically worthy and everything, but they just didn't do much for me.

[sonicl]

Originally Posted by Nefeli

wasnt there a link, cool page or smth of toe that looked like map?

Yes, someone else did a site which had the actual Periodic Table and each element that you clicked on linked to details of the release. It's a bit difficult to google though!

EDIT - Found it! It's here.

[porkmarras]

I do wonder if some of Harry Smith's movies have ever been put out on dvd.I have Burroughs's 'Cut up' movies and they are priceless.The rarovideo website has a lot of this stuff.

[Moshe]

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/articl...ments_Festival