frederic rzewski: coming together/attica/les moutons de panurge

Black Sweat presents a reissue of Frederic Rzewski's Coming Together / Attica / Les Moutons De Panurge, originally issued in 1974. This milestone of avant-garde music, first published by Max Schubel's historic Opus One label, was a very significant political statement. With "Coming Together" and "Attica", Rzewski celebrates in music the famous revolt in the American prison in 1971. The texts of Sam Melville and Richard X. Clark make the invocations of the prisoners pulsating and alive. Full of pathos, these fragments of life oscillate between a confessional tone and a hymn to freedom, in a touching emblem of compassion. The fixity of the sound images is incisive, unnerving and melancholic, embroidering a solid minimalist repetition. The different combination of the verses produces a psychosis or obsession towards a cathartic experience, at the same time emotional, physical and mental. Together with great guests such as Alvin Curran, Jon Gibson, Garrett List, Steve Ben Israel and Karl Berger, Rzewski seems to merge his radical vocation with the most meditative and suffered plots of the spiritual jazz; sealing the package with "Les Moutons Des Panurge," an amazing suite for percussion, a timeless masterpiece of polyrhythmic expertise.