Back Issues

All 70 issues of the late, great Experimental Musical Instruments quarterly journal, published 1985-1999, on two CD-ROMs in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. For years we've been selling the complete back issues set in the form of photocopied books, but the printing and shipping was so expensive that we had to charge a rather substantial price. Now you can get the same material on CD for less than a fifth of that price.

To search the contents of Experimental Musical Instruments back issues, click here.

To produce these CDs with top graphic quality and fully searchable text would have been prohibitively expensive, given the limited numbers that this rather specialized collection can be expected to sell. Instead we have produced a not-so-glamorous but far more affordable product. The quality of reproduction in the files is not the best, but the images are reasonably clear and the text is readable. It is not possible to do text searches within the articles in this CD, nor can you do text-based cut-and-paste operations or print selections of text from within a page. However, you can print whole pages just as they appear on your screen. For searches, we have provided an extensive set of synopses of all the articles in the form of a text file that is searchable. You can use this to find references to topics that interest you, and then go to the relevant articles.

In other words, this CD-ROM package has considerably more functionality than the print version, and at a small fraction of the cost.

To see a sample, click here (fairly long download -- several pages) or here (shorter download -- just one page). You'll see a sample page or pages just as they appear on the Back Issues CD.

...and while you're at it, you might also wish to pick up our Early Years and Later Years CDs. These two CDs feature the music of thirty-six selected instruments from among the many that appeared in the pages of the journal. You can purchase either CD, or save a few dollars when you get both.

EMI item #405

The "Add to Cart" button below is for the back issues CD.

Published by Experimental Musical Instruments, 1985-1999. (EMI item #201.)

All of the issues from the Experimental Musical Instruments quarterly journal's 14-year run remain available in the form of fourteen photocopied, paper-bound volumes. Each volume contains all of the issues that appeared over a period of a year (either four or six issues each). You can order any of the 14 volumes at $14 apiece, or order the complete set for $200. (You also have the more affordable alternative of purchasing the complete set on a double CD-ROM package for $35.)

The content is complete and identical to the originals. The reproduction quality is good as photocopies go, but, of course, not as good as the original press run.

To explore the contents of these issues, visit our extensive back issues listing. These searchable pages contain detailed synopses of all the articles ... you can either browse freely or search for articles on topics that interest you. This will help if you're deciding whether you want to by particular individual volumes or the whole set. (Here's another tip for anyone who's considering which volumes to buy: you'll get more for your money if you order one of the more recent volumes, which are fatter than the earlier ones.)

...and while you're at it, you might also wish to pick up our Early Years and Later Years CDs. These two CDs feature the music of thirty-six selected instruments from among the many that appeared in the pages of the journal. You can purchase either CD, or save a few dollars when you get both.

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To order several different volumes, select a volume in the selection box below,
add to cart, and repeat for additional volumes.

Audio CD with 16-page booklet. Published by Experimental Musical Instruments in 2000. (EMI item #410).

Early Years is the first of a pair of CDs containing selections from the Experimental Musical Instruments annual audio cassette series that ran from 1985 - 1999. (The other CD, called Later Years, is described here.) Each CD includes a sixteen-page booklet containing the original notes followed by short updates on most of the artists and their work. The master tapes have been digitally remastered, and the sound quality on the CDs is better than that of the original cassettes.

You can buy either of the CDs separately for $14.00, or the pair for $24.

Complete contents as well as audio samples for the Early Years CD can be found below. But first, here are teasers for a few of the selections:

The Baschet Cristal is the most refined of the extraordinary glass-and-steel instruments created by the Brothers Baschet in France. On the CD, a trio of Cristals are featured in a composition called "Valse" by the French composer Daniel Ouzounoff.

In his piece "47 Whale Raga," Jim Nollman plays guitar through a specially designed underwater speaker system while sailing among a pod of whales. The whales answer the guitar sounds, call-and-response style, with choruses of their own.

Vera Meyer plays a glass harmonica made by the late Gerhard Finkenbeiner, who until his recent death was the leading modern maker of the instrument.

The strangely bent reverberances of the Waterphone can be heard in the hands of the instrument's maker in Richard Waters' "Noncomposition for Three Waterphones."

Warren Burt and Ernie Althoff play a floatingly sustained and otherworldly "Improvisation in an Ancient Greek Mode" on a set of justly tuned, hand-held tuning forks.

In "Improvisations for Feedback," David Myers plays the Feedback Machine - a network of digital delays that bounce anomalous electronic sound-artifacts back and forth among themselves to generate the most improbable rhythmic and textural music.

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COMPLETE LIST OF MUSICIANS, SONG TITLES AND INSTRUMENTS FEATURED ON EXPERIMENTAL MUSICAL
INSTRUMENTS -- EARLY YEARS:

The Glass Orchestra: "Believe It Or Not." All glass instruments
Bil King: "Midnight Sonata" and "Just Kidding." The Board
TUYO: excerpts from Masque and Gamelan. Percussion tubes, tuned shakers, modified accordions and more
Jim Nollman: "47 Whale Raga." Underwater guitar, accompanied by whales
The Boneworks Ensemble: "Ark." Instruments of bone
The Lasry-Baschet Ensemble: "Valse." The Baschet Cristals
Warren Burt and Ernie Althoff: "Improvisation in an Ancient Greek Mode." Tuning forks
Wee Jimmie Scott: "The Barren Rocks of Adden." Abraham's Goliath Rock Dulcimer
Richard Waters: "Non-Composition for Three Waterphones." Waterphones (musical excerpt below)
David Myers: "Improvisations for Feedback." The Feedback Machine
Music for Homemade Instruments: excerpts from Glyptodont. Instruments from throwaways
Vera Meyer: Johann Gottlieb Naumann's "Sonata." Glass harmonica
Hans Reichel: "Thinking." Pick-Behind-The-Bridge Guitar
William Eaton: "Magical-Musical Duet." 26-String guitar and lyrichord
John Hajeski: "The Dentist." Portable Anarchy
Minnie Black: "The Monkey Song." The Gourd Ola (musical excerpt below)
Rick Sanford: "Time and Time Again" (1989). The Sink (musical excerpt below)
Dudley Duncan: "Cosmic Koto." The Cosmic Koto
Robin Goodfellow & friends: "Five Short Improvisations." Balloons, egg shells, soda straws and other homemades (musical excerpt below, featuring the seaweed flute Robin calls Mal de Meer

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Audio CD with 16-page insert booklet.
Published by Experimental Musical Instruments in 2002. (EMI item #412)

Later Years is the second of a pair of CDs containing selections from the Experimental Musical Instruments annual audio cassette series that ran from 1985 - 1999. (The other, called Early Years, is described here.) Later Years covers the years from 1993-1999. Most of the original cassettes from those years are now sold out. This CD brings them back to life by making 17 of the tracks available again, recapturing the wonderful vitality and variety of those early releases. The package includes a sixteen-page booklet containing the original notes followed by short updates on most of the artists and their work. The master tapes have been digitally remastered, and the sound quality on the CDs is better than that of the original cassettes.

You can purchase either Early Years or Later Years for $14, or both for $24.

Complete contents for the Later Years CD are listed below, along with audio samples. But first, here are teasers for a few of the selections:

A mouthbow is a single-stringed instrument analogous to a jaw harp, in which the player uses mouth resonances to bring out melodies in shifting overtones within the string sound. In this CD Wayland Harman plays his specially developed mouthbow, designed to highlight mouth-resonance tones with much more clarity and strength than happens with traditional designs.

John Gzowski's Cat's Cradle is -- well, it has too many distinctive features to describe them all here, but essentially it's a string instrument with an extraordinary electro-acoustic feedback system that recycles pitch-bent string resonances through the sound for an extraordinarily rich and complex timbre.

The Stroh violin was a horned, pivot-and-diaphragm-driven violin developed in the early days of acoustic (pre-electric) sound recording for use with Edison's early recording machines. On this CD you'll hear a Stroh violin as recently recorded on a perfectly preserved Edison phonograph.

The Ex-Pensives were an early-90s grunge group playing archetypally primitive music on homemade instruments with homemade pickups.

In 1904, J.C. Deagan patented his organ chimes, essentially a metal angklung set on a monumental scale. Each chime-frame contained four chimes including the octave and the double octave of the main pitch, all with air-resonance tuning. There were enough of these frames for a range of several chromatic octaves, and the instrument as a whole had a beautiful tone. In this CD, Marion B. Cox plays one of the surviving sets with polyphonic virtuosity.

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CONTENTS OF THE LATER YEARS: CD:

Barry Hall: "Globularity." Globular horns (click for musical excerpt)

Wayland Harman: "String Walk, a Spontaneous Recording." Reeded Mouthbow (click for musical excerpt)

Hal Rammel: "Surge and Shape." Sound Palette

Christopher Lee: "Liebeslied." Stroh violin

Susan Alexjander & ensemble: "Sequencia Intro." DNA tunings recreated on synthesizer

Jacques Remus: "Marche Turque" and "Etude (Gyakorlat)." Automatophones

Richard Cooke: "Return to Misty Mountain." Freenotes

Zeno Okeanos: "Zeno's Drums." Polymorphous percussion

Marty Cox: "I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen." Deagan organ chimes

TakeDake: "Spring Breeze (Haru Kaze)." All-bamboo ensemble

John Gzowski: "Variation #5." Cat's Cradle

One Ring Zero: "Dead Animals." Claviola (click for musical excerpt)

Scot Jenerik: "Modulus of Horizontal Shear." Sublinear

Henry Lowengard: "Software-o-phones (1994)." Software-o-phones

Bakshish: "Curious." Instruments with homemade pickups

Linsey Pollak: "Ousak Sunset." Clarini

The Ex-Pensives: "Angst? (Me Too)." Instruments with homemade pickups

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Audio Samples:

From the Pages of Experimental Musical Instruments, Volumes 11 - 14

During its 14-year run, the Experimental Musical Instruments quarterly journal produced a cassette tape each year. Each cassette contained music of instruments that had appeared in the issues of the journal over the couse of the year. The instruments appearing in the Volume 12 cassette, for example, are those that were featured in articles in the four print issues of Experimental Musical Instruments Volume 12 #1-4. On these tapes you will hear some of the most innovative and intriguing instruments created in recent years. The cassettes are on high quality chrome tape, and included with each is an information sheet on the instruments.

Many of these cassettes are now sold out. We now have a pair of CDs called Early Years and Later Years which contain selections from the cassettes. In the meantime, we're offering the cassettes that we still have in stock at discounted prices. These cassettes contain a lot of material not included in the above-mentioned CDs. Cassettes Volumes 11 through 14 are available. You can order them individually or, for a deeper discount, order the whole set.

The price is $4 per cassette of $12 for all four.

CONTENTS LISTING

Volume 11
# Wayland Harman plays his improved mouthbow,
# Trimpin's computers play his Liquid Percussion,
# Reed Ghazala documents the death of a radio,
# John Herron demonstrates his acoustic signal processing effects,
# Eric Leonardson plays Spring Board;
# The wind plays Richard Waters' bamboo aeolian devices as well as Ken Turkington's aeolian harp of Thoreau,
# Susan Rawcliffe plays exotic ceramic wind instruments,
# Fred "Spacemen" Long and the Troubadores of the 26th Century play the Jokers,
# Bart Hopkin plays rotary rasp,
# Michel Moglia plays his fire organ.

Volume 12
# Colin Offord plays his mouthbow and eagle feather flute,
# Rainer Linz and Alistair Riddell play their synthesizer-control software for gliding tones,
# Keith Spears plays his industrial drum set and sampler table,
# Angel Sampedro del Rio plays his bamboo saxophone,
# tENATIVELY a cONVENIENCE plays the "Terrence Dougherty,"
# Grant Strombeck plays his clock chimes plus and other instruments,
# Jan Jarvlepp plays his junk instruments,
# John Gzowski plays his cat's cradle,
# Nelly van Ree Bernard plays the Citara,
# Q. R. Ghazala plays his Casio SA-2 "Aleatron,"
# Jacob Duringer plays his monolith,
# Mitchell Clark plays his shell trumpets.

Volume 13
# Skip La Plante plays styro-strings and mailing-tube drums,
# Scot Jenerik plays fire sounds,
# Michael Hearst plays Claviolas,
# Paul Rubenstein plays homemade magnetic-pickup instruments,
# The wind plays Uli Wahl's kite flutes,
# Ricardo Arias plays balloons,
# Peter Whitehead plays pan-resonated strings,
# Tak�Dak� plays John Kaizan Neptune's bamboo instruments
# Martin Riches demonstrates his talking machine,
# Frank Pahl's automatic instruments play themselves,
# Grant Strombeck plays diverse oddities,
# Ellen Fullman plays Long String Instrument,
# Niles Hokkanen plays one-foot drumkit,
# Neil Feather plays miscellaneous strangenesses,
# Will Menter plays slate instruments.

Volume 14
* Barry Hall plays globular horns;
* Jacques Remus plays Mecamusique;
* Reed Maxson plays steel thermal storage tanks;
* Walter Funk subverts Casio Sk-1 sampler keyboard;
* Robert Moore plays flute clock;
* Jacques Dudon plays the photosonic disk;
* Jhon Miura Hardy plays the bass hyperbiwa;
* Andy Cohen plays the dolceola;
* John Berndt plays Venetian glass nephew, peasant instrument & dictal robitary;
* Paul Panhuysen plays the machinery of the mind;
* Dwin Craig plays Dwinstruments;
* Zeno Okeanos plays the polymorphous percussion;
* Richard Cooke plays Freenotes;
* Richard Waters and others play Bamboo instruments;
* Curtis Settino plays aquaggaswack and galvanophone;
* Linsey Pollak plays clarini;
* Robin Goodfellow plays instruments for children & teachers;
* John Bertles plays classroom-buildable instruments;
* Martin Riches plays motormouth;
* Angel Sampedro del Rio plays bamboo clarinets;
* Jim Schmidt plays reconfigured saxophones;
* Shane Speal plays cigar box guitar and "BB King's Stolen Mailbox" dobro.

EMI item #301