Alien Bog / Beautiful Soop

Chronique

This CD contains two wonderful, early electronic compositions by this continually adventurous composer. Alien Bog (1967) was realized at the Tape Music Center at Mills College (now called the Center for Contemporary Music in Oakland, California); this mysterious electronic work evokes a place deep in the natural world, far from humankind's civilizations -- low gentle thumps at ground level, high cycling bird-like sounds, sustained cricket calls, quick side-to-side flights of unknown critters, low calls of immense animals in the distance, all cycling contrapuntally, to create a peaceful yet bizarre environment. This is a sophisticated sonic painting from the early days of electronic music, which employed the classic Buchla Box 100 analog synthesizer series to generate its basic materials. Beautiful Soop (1966) is a charming piece for reciting voices and electronics, incorporating poetic fantasy texts from classic literature -- The Jabberwocky, excerpts from Alice in Wonderland and so on. The voices take on a fantastical aspect when processed through tape-delays (echos and accumulative modulations), and the voices also are continually mixed with surrealistic and often humorous electronic sounds from the legendary (Donald) Buchla Box 100 series of analog synthesizer modules. After twenty-seven minutes, the fantasy build-up reaches an engrossing (and to some listeners, ironic) plateau, and the narrative voice fades, stuck in the repeating groove of a vinyl record. An unpretentious, enjoyable, yet pioneering work.

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