Early Ambient Music Explorer Joanna Brouk Shows She Covered Many Bases

Lillian

New member
To fully appreciate the breadth of vision by musician, composer and producer Joanna Brouk (pronounced brook), you need to listen to the entire HEARING MUSIC double-CD. This 15-year retrospective shows what a wide-spread of music this pioneering new age musician created from approximately 1970 to 1985 when she was pouring her musical explorations out into the world. She was working back then in the San Francisco area where she got airplay on the underground FM stations and she built an audience who bought every whim that she put out on locally-produced cassettes. And even though her fame spread as an underground artist worth paying attention to, and those cassettes traveled throughout the United states and to Europe and beyond, her music was too off-beat and experimental to garner her a major label recording contract, so only the hip, the collectors of obscurity, and the astute excavators of hard-to-find musical gems had her music in their collections. Until now.

Fortunately the record company called The Numero Group, that actually specializes in digging up exquisite pieces of musical arcana like this, came to the rescue about 30 years after Brouk stopped recording and convinced her to let them put out this compilation of her music which includes at least three pieces that are released here for the first time (and all of this music is digital and on CD here for the first time too).

There are two long solo piano (processed piano) tracks that begin each disc. But do not just stop there because nothing else sounds like those two pieces. There are lots of beautiful flute tracks, often ambient, and sometimes with multiple flutes or flute mixed with synth or with orca whales. There is some male and female wordless vocalizing with synth. Another number features fast-paced ambient industrial synth, ground-breaking for its time.

This is a package for the ambitious, discriminate, adventurous music collector who wants to know what else was going on in the hip San Francisco music scene in the Seventies after the hippies opened the door the previous decade.
 
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