Avantgarde project

Hi folks,
I’m in the process of inserting a portion of the releases available in the Avantgarde Project, but there are several edge cases I want to discuss with you before starting to do so.

Just a quick introduction to the project:

This is a collection of recordings of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. It derives largely from the now ceased Avant Garde Project.

Therefore most of the material published through this project was already published as LPs (LPs those should be inserted in MB if not already present), while some releases are original.

Single releases composed by mixed sources

The main problem here is that some releases contain tracks from several LPs, and I’m not sure how this edge case should be handled.

  • eg: AGP27 contains tracks from three different LPs, RCA ARL1-2291, RCA ARL1-1674 and RCA LSC-3168.

When an AGP release match 1:1 a complete LP it should be labeled as a bootleg and it should be contained in the corresponing release group which contains the original LP release, right? But what about the releases composed by mixed sources?

Plus, those digital recordings should be assigned to new recordings or should they be assigned to the same recordings assigned to the tracks in the original LP?

Different recordings of the same track

In releases like AGP26 the same track is recorded several times with different parameters, I assume those tracks should be assigned to different recordings, right?

(I just realized that this make the last question in the previous paragraph quite pointless)

Naming

The current naming situation of the releases already present on MB is a little bit of a mess, I don’t think that having the catalog number in the release group title is correct according to the guidelines, right?

Series

The material of the project has been inserted using the AGP as a label, shouldn’t these releases be part of a Series instead?

3 Likes

Cool!!

imo the bootleg status refers more to the legality of the release, rather than whether it is a compilation/new mix etc. Probably safe to mark all of these as bootlegs? (only had a quick look so you’ll be able to make a better assessment)

A recording in MB refers to when a sound/performance is first picked up using a recording device. That recording can be later copied from vinyl > digital > whatever and it will always remain the same ‘recording’ in MB terminology (unless someone actually edits or adds to the sounds within).

Well, if it’s part of the title, then it should be in there! So you have to assess ‘artist intent’ (for the purpose of these releases the ‘artist’ would be whoever is putting out the AGP releases). Usually not… but they do seem to refer to releases by titles like ‘AGP128’ so maybe??

I would consider AGP to be acting in all the functions of a (bootleg?) label.

Series aren’t quite as useful. For instance if you removed the Catalogue number (e.g. AGP128) from the title and swapped the label for a series, you would lose any mention of AGP if you tagged the files with Picard.

2 Likes