All Sound is Music Episode 30
This month’s show includes classic electronic and improvisational music from the 1960s as well as contemporary ambient and electronic music.
Notes on the music:
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Brock Van Wey aka bvdub – the house above the world. Van Wey got his start dj-ing in the rave scene of 1980s San Francisco. Since 2006 he has been producing and releasing ambient recordings for a variety of labels. A prolific composer, he has also released recordings of deep house and drum & bass as Earth House Hold and East of Oceans.
Raymond Moore – Trip Through the Milky Way. Recorded in 1969, Moore worked with a simple sine wave oscillator. He built the piece by speeding up and slowing down the tape recording to create one-voice lines which he then layered to create a dense 64 voice canon. Moore was awarded an Honorable Mention in High Fidelity magazine’s Electronic Music Contest of August 1969. In 1970 the piece was a finalist in Dartmouth’s second annual electronic music competition.
The Feed-Back (Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza) – Quasars. Recording as The Feed-Back, this avant-garde Italian group was formed in 1964 by composer Franco Evangelisti who was described as “one of the most radical minds of the Italian postwar avant garde.” The group also featured famed composer Ennio Morricone on trumpet. Dedicated to what they called “instant composition” the group improvised their music in the moment. They are generally considered to be the first experimental composers collective.
Skadi – Aokigahara. This moody track was taken from a compilation put together by Music Analysis Discussions Records, a label dedicated to supporting (in their words) “music not created for the intention of being corporatised.” Aokigahara is the infamous suicide forest near Mt. Fuji in Japan.
BlankFor.ms – Formal (part one and part two). This Brooklyn-based artist uses degraded tapes, analog synthesizers and an old spinet piano to create ambient soundscapes. His work has been sampled by Bon Iver and he has composed music for independent films and video games.
Robert Fripp – Loop I (Live at The Kitchen 1978). From the recent massive release of material associated with his solo album Exposure, this track was created with his famous Frippertronics set-up, two reel-to-reel tape recorders, some effects and his guitar.
Rust – Ya Habibi. The Lebanese duo Rust’s 2022 recording, Echoes, reimagines classic Arabic songs with contemporary electronic sounds and synthesized percussion. From their Bandcamp description: “Echoes is a rework of traditional Arabic songs by iconic artists such as “Om Kulthoum” and “Asmahan”, into different electronic genres ranging from Electronica to Trip-Hop and Techno. Each track has its own unique take on the classic feel, as well as an updated sound, creating a unique experience.”
Wendy Carlos – Country Lane. This composition is from Carlos’ soundtrack for Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange. Carlos’ version of the soundtrack includes extended versions and pieces, like this one, that went unreleased on the official soundtrack album. Carlos is most famous for her 1968 recording Switched-On Bach. As with Switched-On Bach, the Clockwork Orange music was composed with monophonic synthesizers, meaning that only one note could be played at a time. To create chords, Carlos had to meticulously layer recordings of each note in the chord one after the other. Polyphonic (multi-note) synthesizers wouldn’t make their commercial debut until the mid-70s.
Boards of Canada – Pete Standing Alone. This is from the Scottish duo’s album Music Has the Right to Children, their first studio release. Their music has a hazy, nostalgic quality enhanced by their use of vintage instruments and samples from outdated media, techniques that later came to define the “hauntology” music genre.
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All Sound is Music streams on the third Wednesday of each month at 8 pm MST on Rarity Rock Radio http://rarityrockradio.fm
