I just wanted to say that for anyone who is into the more sort of avant end of IDM, a
la recent Autechre, Richard Devine, Otto Von Schirach, etc., and who's curious about
the more "academic" side of electronic music and maybe hasn't ventured into that
field yet, the new Morton Subotnick CD on Mode called "Volume 1: Electronic Works"
would be a great introduction.
The disc features 3 pieces: remastered versions of 2 older pieces - "Touch" (1969)
and (the full version of) "A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur" (1978) - both of which
appeared previously on LP in the 70's ("Touch" did appear on CD on Wergo, but in a
non-remastered version I suppose) and the first movement of a recent work in progress
called "Gestures".
The 2 older pieces were both created on Buchla modular analog synth systems while the
new piece was created on a PowerBook running some proprietary software which from the
liner notes sounds like a mix between Argeïphontes Lyre and SuperCollider.
"Touch" is full of all sorts of squelches, bleeps and boingy sounds which
shouldn't sound too alien to fans of Aphex or Devine for example. It's a well
publicized fact that Devine has been inspired by Subotnick's music and you can
definitely hear it in this piece, especially towards the end of the first movement.
"A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur" is a bit more subdued. The textures tend to be
sparser, but there are occasional outbursts of rich polyphony. At times it sounds
like a precursor to what a lot of the artists on Raster-Noton are doing these days.
The last 5 minutes or so of the second movement sound a slightly like 70's Kraftwerk,
which I guess shouldn't be too surprising since they were using very similar tools at
the time.
The new piece is apparently more of an improvisation on a theme in which he
processes some pre-recorded vocals differently with each performance according to
mouse movements and such. The vocals are mainly used purely as a sound source and a
lot of the time the text is indiscernible. While listening to it I was thinking that
it's the kind of piece you tend to hear at contemporary art museums while walking
through a usually darkened room at one of those installation/multimedia type
exhibitions, especially because of the vocal element. It's not a bad piece and the
process seems interesting, but I have to say that I prefer the older pieces, mostly
cuz the sounds in those pieces are a bit more alien to the ears of someone more
accustomed to music made with digital tools, but also because they feature more
textural and timbral variety.
Nonetheless, all 3 pieces show great compositional control and the 2 older pieces
show a very impressive control of his tools - I'm under the impression that they were
mostly performed in real time.
Besides the regular CD there's also a DVD featuring the same pieces, but with a
quadraphonic mix of "A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur" and a 5.1 surround sound mix of
"Gesture". There's also some interview footage on the DVD.
http://www.mode.com/catalog/097subotnick.html
Andrei
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