Description
This is a pre-order. It will ship on or around 2/5/27
WRWTFWW Records presents the official reissue of long lost Swiss electronic jazz, experimental, computer music gem Controlled Risk by Bruno Spoerri and Reto Weber. There are experimental musicians, and then there are musicians who simply refuse to recognize the border between acoustic and electronic music. Swiss saxophonist, composer and electronic-music pioneer Bruno Spoerri had been crossing that border since the late 1960s, building Switzerland's first private electronic studio in 1970 and moving from saxophone through synthesizers, Lyricon and, by the mid- 1980s, the Synthophone -- a MIDI saxophone developed in Switzerland. Percussionist Reto Weber came from the opposite direction: away from the conventional drum kit and towards an ever-expanding universe of hand percussion, found sounds and instruments discovered through travel and musical exchange. Spoerri and Weber began working together in the 1970s, releasing the astonishing live The Sound of the UFOs in 1978 and subsequently playing hundreds of concerts together. Ten years later, that dialogue reached another level with Controlled Risk, originally released by Konnex Records in 1988. Recorded live to two-track at Powerplay Studios in Maur, Switzerland, on April 20 and 21, 1988, the album catches Spoerri on saxophone, synthesizer and Synthophone opposite Weber's arsenal of percussion, with virtually no safety net between action and tape. This is not polite fusion and not academic computer music. It is physical, funny, raw, hyper-alert music -- technology treated as an improvising instrument rather than a replacement for musicians. If you need coordinates, think less European jazz fusion and more the restless, anything-goes energy surrounding late-'80s downtown New York and the early Knitting Factory: jazz, electronics, global rhythm and new technology thrown into the same room to see what survives. WRWTFWW Records now brings Controlled Risk back into circulation, newly remastered and presented with new liner notes by Swiss jazz writer and curator Rudolf Amstutz. What once sounded like an eccentric collision of jazz, MIDI and percussion now feels uncannily contemporary: an adventurous, joyful and seriously strange document from two musicians who understood that the future of music would not belong to machines or humans, but to the sparks produced when the two are allowed to play together.
Cancellations:
Because many payment processors no longer return transaction fees to sellers on cancelled orders, any orders or pre-orders that are canceled by the customer before shipment will be assessed a 5% cancellation fee.
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Limited and exclusive items are fulfilled in the order received and may be subject to availability. If we’re unable to fulfill your order, you’ll receive a full refund.
Q: When will my pre-order ship?
Pre-orders ship on or around the official release date. If your order includes both pre-order and in-stock items, everything will ship together once all items are available. All orders are charged at the time of purchase.
