Long before “experimental” hardened into genre, before ambient playlists and sound art institutions gave language to the margins, there was a moment when music began to unmake itself through silence, gesture, and noise. A fracture point, a beginning still taking shape, even as its ethos had already been named.
Deutsche Grammophon’s original Avant-Garde series, released between 1968 and 1971, captured that rupture as it happened. Across 24 LPs, it gathered some of the most pioneering composers of the postwar period - Cage, Stockhausen, Ferrari, Kagel, Ligeti - each approaching sound as something to be dismantled, reoriented, or left entirely alone. It wasn’t a movement in the traditional sense, but a loose, yet interconnected field of ideas: composition without fixed outcome, music without centre, existence without anticipation. Now, that moment is being revisited.
Launching May 1, Deutsche Grammophon’s new Avant-Garde vinyl series returns to the archive not as a mere reissue, but as a deliberate re-engagement with its own past, the first three releases tracing that moment from different angles, each offering a distinct way of thinking about sound while it was still in the making.
Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien No.1 / Société II starts with disappearance.
Presque Rien No.1 remains one of the most radical gestures in 20th-century music: a field recording, largely untouched, revealing itself as composition. Captured in a Croatian village between 1967 and 1970, it rejects intervention entirely -no manipulation, no imposed structure- just the slow accumulation of sound as it exists. In many ways, Ferrari’s approach here aligns with that of a film director; as he himself suggested, he observes sound rather than intervening, letting the scene play out naturally. It’s incredible, a study, piece, and soundscape all at once. As one of the earliest gestures toward using field recording in its pure state, Presque Rien redraws the boundary between music and environment.
But once you flip the record, all that documentary-esque stillness collapses.
Société II, composed in 1967, moves into excitement, drama, and play: it’s social, teeming, physical. Written for piano, percussion, and ensemble, it recalls a kind of unstable sonic theatre, where instruments are pushed to their very limits, bearing clear affinities with free jazz. Born out of France’s political ferment of ’68, Société II is charged with overtones of the same kind, Ferrari himself describing it as “a caricature of a macho society,” a stance that set the work apart, as many of his peers avoided overt political commentary. But beyond being stated, it's enacted within the piece itself. Ferrari extends this idea further by setting the following scene:
“This piece can be described as musical theatre insofar as the four soloists (piano and three percussionists) vie with each other in their interest in the piano’s body.”
The energy is restless, explosive and, edged with confrontation - a fight, egos collapsing into one another, coming to a head and entertaining us in the process. If Presque Rien withdraws from authorship, Société II stages it as conflict
Mauricio Kagel’s Acustica doesn’t resolve that tension; if anything, it multiplies it.
There are many ways to describe what happens within this piece, but it ultimately comes down to this: Sonic Anarchism. Composed between 1968 and 1970, Acustica resides right in the middle of system and improvisation. A rehearsed freestyle, perhaps? The composer's approach is rational: Kagel builds from invented instruments and experimental sound sources - extensions, as he put it, of “currently existent sound-makers.” But the logic doesn't really settle in while listening as the performers seem to be assembling the piece in real-time. “One of the fundamental thoughts behind this composition,” Kagel wrote, “is expressed in the actual invention of the sound-sources.” What results is less of a composition and more of a condition: incredibly eerie, unpredictable, expansive, and deliberately unresolved. A sound performance that leaves us to wonder whether form and freedom ever truly separate - or if they are one and the same.
With Tōru Takemitsu’s work, there is a return to familiar structure.
Quatrain / A Flock Descends Into The Pentagonal Garden, originally released in 1980, marks a shift away from electronics toward acoustics and cultural return. Having once distanced himself from Japanese traditions, Takemitsu begins to fold them back in, describing his approach as moving “in two directions at once, as a Japanese in tradition and as a Westerner in innovation.”
Quatrain (1975) takes on the quality of watching an uncanny image take shape, Takemitsu comparing it to “the tradition of emaki (a series of scenes painted on a long scroll), whereby each musical idea is independent yet permeates its neighbor, keeping an indefinite frame.” A somber, tense tone stretches through the piece, ominous in character, yet equally enticing, holding the listener in search for climactic arrival - a play of desire and denial. But the piece ultimately delivers said grand finale: sharp, volatile, and in perfect harmony with all that came before, then gradually thinning into its close. For the duration of its 17 minutes, parts spill into one another, connected as though they were holding hands, yet standing firm, both in solitude and in unison.
It’s a different story with A Flock Descends Into The Pentagonal Garden (1977). Upon seeing an image of the star-shaped tonsure cut into artist Marcel Duchamp’s hair, Takemitsu dreamt of a flock of white birds, sinking into a pentagonal garden - a vision that would go on to inspire the work. With this piece, Takemitsu largely dissolves time, the listener losing any clear sense of beginning, middle or end, as moments return to one another rather than progressing. “It’s not a linear experience at all. It is circular,” he stated. In another context, Takemitsu framed it more simply:
“My music is like a garden, and I am the gardener. Listening to my music can be compared with walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern and texture.”
If we stay within that allegorical space, listening to the piece might lead one to imagine something mythical, almost fable-like - an Alice in Wonderland garden, full of shadowed pockets. So, although a return to the familiar, Takemitsu’s sonic garden overflows with surprise, proving that recognition does not negate novelty.
Taken together, Ferrari’s, Kagel’s, and Takemitsu’s works are challenging, confrontational, at times even strenuous, yet impossibly interesting, compelling and filled with moments of recognition, beauty, and playfulness. Listening to them offers the chance to retrace the origins of sounds and styles that feel so familiar now, like moving through a sonic museum, returning to the ground zero of the avant-garde itself. Deutsche Grammophon will continue its release of the archive, with more of this series still to come...
Stay tuned!