CCMC - Volume 4 - Free Soap

"From 1974 until the early 1980s CCMC played at least two concerts a week, most of which took place in their own venue, The Music Gallery, in Toronto. The band was and continues to be a "free music orchestra" devoted to spontaneous composition. One look at the cover of the Vol 1 LP and its apparent that CCMC are not your typical hippy free-rock group, slick-suited jazz cats, nor tweed academic weekend composers. In fact, CCMC never really look like typical musicians at all, but rather like visual artists, family men, scholars, Canucks, ecologists, sculptors and radical adults they are. Similarly, their sound can never really be pinned down in the way that other devotees of "free" music usually are; never as dogmatic as AMM, as angry as American free jazz, as bleak as Japanese free jazz or as humorless as European free improv. CCMC are as comfortable playing toys and melodies as they were noise electronics and torrential freak-outs. In the truest sense CCMC were sonic explorers devoted to spontaneous free music, uninhibited by any restriction, be it melody, silence, genre, volume or instrumentation.
\r\nFree Soap is CCMCs masterpiece, especially the incredible real-time tone poem a.k.a. February 13th that takes up the first side of the LP. The piece begins with sparse strokes of marimba, trumpet, synthesizer, bowed bass and piano moving into the brilliant middle section which uses long silences in a way that anticipates Onkyo by over 30 years and then builds into an all out free-scorcher which sounds like it could have been off a Center of the World LP if not for the electronics and steel drum which keep it lifted, weird & diversely Canadian." - B. Hocura.\r\n

\r\n"We would all be playing simultaneously and relationships would appear in equal and respectful side by side running not in commentary, not in fugues/imitations, not in accompaniments, not in team-work but in togetherness of our individual, ultimately alone lives. Being Together. _¢‚Ǩ¬¶ Sometimes with the CCMC the ensemble "running" _¢‚Ǩ¬¶ transcends the pack and the sound becomes so full, so charged, that it becomes a floating speeding electrical cloud. One cant tell what one is playing but one feels it to be ecstatically part of the Unity, one cant account for where any of the sounds are coming from, theyve all become one. Its an Eternity. This happened during a concert in Vancouver. I felt myself floating and the sound became visible light." - Michael Snow. \r\n

\r\nSealed copies of this 1979 release on the legendary Music Gallery Editions label (David Rosenboom, Peggie Sampson, John Oswald, Glass Orchestra, Lubomyr Melnyk, Nihilist Spasm Band, etc..). \r\n

\r\nCasey Sokol: piano, steel drum, Yamaha organ
\r\nMichael Snow: Piano, trumpet, marimba, siren electric piano, aluminum foil, percussion
\r\nNobuo Kubota: siren, strange horn, whistle, cymbals, drums, crackle box, alto sax, duck, glockenspiel
\r\nAl Mattes: Buchla synthesizer, bass, shell casings, horns, marimba, bells, steel drum
\r\nPeter Anson: Buchla synthesizer