New Sounds In Electronic Music

Chronique

One of the most beautifully pressed vinyls of electronic music with 3 important works: Steve Reich "Come Out" (see Reich's Early Works), Richard Maxfield "Night Music," and Pauline Oliveros "I of IV." Maxfield's "Night Music" is an exquisite pre-synthesizer electronic music made -- like his pieces "Sine Music" (1959) and "Trinity Piece" (1960) -- with only the supersonic bias signal of a tape recorder and a supersonic sawtooth waveform from an oscilloscope producing audio range difference tone "ghosts". Identical in feeling to a response to the sound of birds and insects on a summer night in a city park. "I of IV" is a good example of Oliveros' earlier electronic music using a configuration of tape recorders patched into each other with magnetic tape spliced in loops so that a form of "automatic generation" system was created by feedback. Similar to Richard Maxfield, Oliveros used bias frequencies of tape recorders and difference, or lower "ghost tones" produced by the interference of very high frequencies.

© "Blue" Gene Tyranny /TiVo