Sacred Bordello

2004 Special edition includes a limited CD bundled w/ the book. As one of the most influential figures of experimental music and performance Charlemagne Palestine has remained an enigma. Unlike his illustrious contemporaries Terry Riley, John Cale, Steve Reich and Phillip Glass little has been written on Palestine and his continuing influence. In his own right, he was and remains today a pivotal personality whose research in musical composition and performance has been characterized over the years by it's incantatory repetitiveness, it's flamboyance and it's mysticism, but also by it's violence. Born in Brooklyn in 1947 his first musical experiences were as a cantorial singer in the synagogues of New York. Through his contact with Tony Conrad Palestine was soon introduced to the thriving experimental art scene of the late 1960s. The circles around Andy Warhol and La Monte Young provided a crucial backdrop for Palestine's work which increasingly extended beyond the scope of music. His groundbreaking appearances, which combined violent piano playing, performance, video and installation, were considered to be amongst the most radical musical experiences, leaving a lasting impression on followers such as Arto Lindsay, Glenn Branca, Sonic Youth, and the Sex Pistols as well as Tintin creator Herge. His musical oeuvre escapes any ready categorization Brooklyn, is a synthesized drone mixed with field recordings of a festival. Palestine's epic durations, microtonal trembles and dense overtones are reoccurring features in contemporary industrial and electronic music. Palestine's unique style of singing, Indian singer Prandit Pran Nath 'Charleworld', were crucial influences on artists such as Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. Through recent collaborations with Barcelona based techno duo Pan Sonic and David Coulter (Kronos Quartet) Palestine remains a crucial contributor to today's experimental music scene. A wonderful full color book (size cm. 23,50x18,50), with flexicover, 192 pages including essays, scores, original photos of both performances and installation. The most complete documentation on Charlemagne Palestine art. The compact disc will feature the 60 minutes recordings of a lecture that Charlemagne Palestine gave on March 7th, 1975 at ArtNow Centre in Canada. After the performance of a strumming music concert, the author freely speaks about his music, the philosophy beyond his composition techniques and art involving the students in some kind of magic ritual. Starting as a question and answer conversation, the lecture develops into an intimate speech in which particularly private subjects are discussed. The lecture ends with a particularly touching suspended atmosphere showing how real communication in universities should be. The compact disc also includes a breathtaking multi-layer voice study of the early 1960s never published before on record, very similar in sound and structure to the electronic music studies just issued by Alga Marghen.