About This Item
Irida Associates U.S.A., an obscure and short-lived record tag formed by composer-performer Jerry Hunt, offers a glimpse into the revelatory world of new music and composition in the artist's native Third Coast. Based first in Dallas and later in Hunt's home outside the rural town of Canton, Texas, Irida presented the innovative and daring experiments-into aleatoric methods, environmental acoustics, improvisation, homemade technologies, and more-pursued by Hunt and his select collaborators, primarily working in or near Texas between 1979 and 1986. Irida's brief and compact output-seven non-sequentially numbered LPs released in unknown quantities-shared work by artists whose practices often challenged the limitations of vinyl recording. Hunt called the tag a Inchvanity projectInch and frequently talked of a tax loophole he could claim if it all went belly up, but in it's short lifespan Irida captured a tremendous period of creative experimentation by the artist and his friends and collaborators.This boxed set gathers Irida's complete discography for the first time. These records include early attempts by Hunt to record his generative and highly permutable scores and performances on vinyl in Cantegral Segment(s) 16.17.18.19. / Transform (Stream) / Transphalba / Volta (Kernel), as well as his only composition for piano, InchLattice,Inch on Texas Music (both records 1979). The tag distributed solo and group recordings by those in Hunt's circle as well, including Larry Austin's electroacoustic, syncretic compositions in Hybrid Musics; James Fulkerson's unique, extended techniques for the trombone on Works; a fusion of three overlaid compositions in Dary John Mizelle's Music of Dary John Mizelle; spontaneous pieces and riff-based Inchcharacter improvisationsInch in Music of BL Lacerta by the four piece Inchorchestra in miniatureInch BL Lacerta Improvisation Quartet; and exp
