Songs from a Prison Diary (Poems by Ho Chi Minh)

recording date Oct 3, 1991 LEO records

Veryan Weston and Phil Minton began their collaboration in 1987 and were commissioned by the Le Mans Festival in 1989 to write and perform Songs from a prison diary, a composition based on the prison writings of Ho Chi Minh for 22 voices.

The work was premiered in 1990 and performed at Musica '91 in Strasbourg and awarded the Cornelius Cardew Composition Prize (more...)

This is music as power - emotional, political, structural, and even economic - as it is the power of a noise to generate forces such as memory, anger, sadness, grief, rage, joy, and transcendence.

And then there is the use of silence in the recording process, where the breaks in the recording (the spaces from selection to selection) take place, breaking up each section seemingly in the middle -- so much so that at times the listener will wonder if there is something wrong with the CD player! (more...)

...The duos with Weston seem much more formalized than Minton's improvised work with Peter Brotzmann and others on a deleted FMP album, and they lack the sheer power of the slightly earlier work with Roger Turner on AMMO,but they are compelling all the same.

• Phil Minton at European Free Improvisation