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The Drum Machine That Became a Signature

Electronic Pioneer

The Blind Synthesist Building Other Worlds

Pauline Anna Strom recorded a remarkable series of electronic albums during the 1980s, much of it released independently in tiny vinyl and cassette editions. Her work later disappeared into collector culture before being gathered in Trans-Millenia Music, an archival collection drawn from music made between 1982 and 1988.

Strom was blind from birth.

I mention that carefully because it is tempting to turn disability into a simple explanation for an artist’s work. Her music does not need that story in order to be interesting.

What fascinates me instead is the scale of the worlds she created inside a home-produced synthesizer practice that received little mainstream attention at the time.

The titles alone suggest imagined geography: “Virgin Ice,” “Spatial Spectre,” “Rain on Ancient Quays,” “Cruising Altitude 36,000 Feet.”

There is something very modern about this kind of independent world-building.

One person, synthesizers, recording equipment and no requirement for a large institution.

Today Bandcamp and digital distribution make that model ordinary. In the early 1980s, self-releasing cassettes could mean almost disappearing.

The strange thing is that obscurity preserved the music from being fixed to one fashionable moment.

When listeners rediscovered Strom decades later, the future she had imagined was still waiting there.

Pauline Anna Strom – Trans-Millenia Music

#PaulineAnnaStrom #SynthMusic #ElectronicPioneer #MusicRediscovery

The Blind Synthesist Building Other Worlds The Blind Synthesist Building Other Worlds RVNG Intl. Pauline Anna Strom - Trans-Millenia Music (RVNG Intl.) Otherworldly and anomalous, hushed and hallucinatory, Pauline Anna Strom’s unique style of inner space music reaches across time to futures and pasts far from our own. Trans-Millenia Music compiles eighty minutes of Strom’s most evocative work, composed and recorded between 1982 and 1988, for the first authorized overview of the enigmatic Bay Area composer.
Environmental Music

Tokyo Ambient Without Escaping Tokyo

Hiroshi Yoshimura’s GREEN was recorded during the winter of 1985–86 in his home studio. The music uses Yamaha FM synthesizers, machines often associated with the bright and precise digital sound of the 1980s, but Yoshimura uses them to create something restrained, spacious and remarkably soft. He explained that “green” referred not simply to a colour but to the comfortable scenery of a natural cycle.

Yoshimura is interesting because ambient music for him was often connected to actual environments. He made music for museums, galleries, public spaces, television, fashion and other commissioned situations.

That makes ambient less like a genre and more like environmental design.

The composer is not only asking what sounds should occur.

He is asking what sound should do to a place.

I also like the contradiction inside GREEN: digital FM synthesis producing something that feels organic.

There is no attempt to disguise the synthesizer as birds, wind or water. Instead Yoshimura creates an electronic environment gentle enough that the listener begins making those associations independently.

Perhaps natural sound does not require imitation.

Sometimes it requires leaving enough room for the imagination to finish the landscape.

GREEN

#HiroshiYoshimura #JapaneseAmbient #FMSynthesis #EnvironmentalMusic

Tokyo Ambient Without Escaping Tokyo Tokyo Ambient Without Escaping Tokyo Light in the Attic GREEN Barely known outside of his home country during his lifetime, the late Japanese ambient music pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura has seen his global stature rise steadily in the past few years. This edition marks a reissue of the highly sought-after and impossible-to-find album. It features the original mix preferred by Yoshimura himself, previously available only on the initial Japanese vinyl release (a limited edition remixed version of the album, with added sound effects, was released on CD in the US).
ARP2500

One Synthesizer for Three Hours

Éliane Radigue spent years working with the ARP 2500 synthesizer, often producing changes so gradual that they can initially seem almost motionless. Her Trilogie de la Mort consists of three extended works: Kyema, Kailasha and Koumé. Kyema, premiered in 1988, lasts more than an hour and was produced with the ARP 2500 onto magnetic tape. The trilogy developed through Radigue’s engagement with Tibetan Buddhism and the states of consciousness described around death and rebirth.

What interests me technically is the patience.

Synthesizers are often demonstrated through change. New patch. New modulation. New sequence. Another oscillator.

Radigue discovered how much can happen when almost nothing appears to happen.

A sustained electronic tone is never completely still. Frequencies interfere. Small changes alter beating patterns. Harmonics emerge and disappear according to listening position, volume and the acoustics of the room.

The listener begins doing part of the work.

After enough time, attention becomes more sensitive.

That makes Radigue’s music almost the reverse of contemporary digital culture. It does not compete for attention by introducing another event.

It removes events until attention itself becomes audible.

https://elianeradigue.bandcamp.com/album/trilogie-de-la-mort

#ElianeRadigue #ARP2500 #DroneMusic #Electroacoustic

One Synthesizer for Three Hours One Synthesizer for Three Hours Éliane Radigue Trilogie de la Mort, by Éliane Radigue 3 track album
Black Ark

Four Tracks Were Enough for Black Ark

Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Black Ark studio in Kingston became one of the most influential recording environments in reggae despite being technically modest. The studio, built behind Perry’s home in 1973, worked with relatively limited equipment, including four-track recording, yet Perry produced extraordinarily dense records through layering, saturation, echo, re-recording and unconventional studio manipulation.

That feels almost absurd when compared with contemporary production.

Ableton can give me practically unlimited tracks. Perry had four.

Yet Black Ark recordings rarely sound small.

This is where track count becomes misleading. A recorded track is not necessarily one musical event. Something can be recorded, processed, bounced together with something else and returned to tape as new material. The studio becomes recursive.

Dub made the mixing desk creative rather than administrative.

Mute something.

Send a fragment into echo.

Bring it back unexpectedly.

Let saturation accumulate instead of cleaning it away.

The Black Ark is a reminder that a studio does not become powerful because it preserves every option.

Sometimes the opposite happens.

When options are scarce, every destructive decision matters more, and destruction itself can become part of composition.

https://jamaicanmusicatlas.com/entity/studio/black-ark

#LeeScratchPerry #BlackArk #Dub #StudioAsInstrument

Four Tracks Were Enough for Black Ark Four Tracks Were Enough for Black Ark jamaicanmusicatlas.com Black Ark Lee "Scratch" Perry's studio behind his home at Washington Gardens, Kingston, built in 1973 and running until its destruction by fire in 1979. Working with modest four-track equipment, Perry produced a sound nobody has convincingly reproduced — layered, saturated, drenched in echo and unexpected noise — on records for Max Romeo, Junior Murvin, the Congos and The Heptones, and on his own productions. The Black Ark years are the strongest argument that the studio itself, and not only the players, is an instrument in Jamaican music. The studio's 1979-80 destruction followed a period of personal crisis for Perry: his wife Pauline left him, taking their children, and he began covering the walls with dense, handwritten graffiti before eventually trashing and burning the building. People who knew him at the time attributed the breakdown to accumulating strain, extortion, drink and drug excess, and an open-door policy that let hangers-on take over the yard. Twenty years later, Perry gave Bradley a different, more deliberate explanation directly: that he had come to believe everyone around him, family, friends, peers, his record company, was stealing his music, and that destroying the means of making it was the only way to stop them.
Bach Had

Bach Had to Be Built Note by Note

When Switched-On Bach appeared in 1968, the Moog synthesizer was still far from the convenient polyphonic instrument we now associate with keyboards. Wendy Carlos worked closely with Robert Moog and used multitrack recording to construct Bach’s polyphonic music from an electronic instrument that could produce only limited musical information at once. Carlos even built her own eight-track recording machine.

That means a piece that a pianist can perform with ten fingers became something closer to architectural construction.

Voice after voice had to be recorded and fitted together.

Today we can place an orchestral sample library on one MIDI track and play an entire arrangement immediately. Carlos faced almost the reverse situation: extraordinary control over timbre but painfully limited simultaneous performance.

The limitation forced listening at another level.

If every line has to be built separately, orchestration stops being an abstract concept. You have to decide what every note actually is.

Switched-On Bach is often remembered because it helped bring the Moog into popular consciousness. I find the production process more interesting.

Carlos was not using technology to make music easier.

She was using an impossibly cumbersome machine because it allowed music to sound like something that had barely existed before.

https://www.wendycarlos.com/biog.html

#WendyCarlos #Moog #SwitchedOnBach #ElectronicMusic

Bach Had to Be Built Note by Note Bach Had to Be Built Note by Note wendycarlos.com Wendy Carlos Biography A biography of the composer and electronic synthesizer pioneer.
Beatmaking

The Drum Machine That Became a Signature

J Dilla’s Akai MPC3000 now sits in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. It is an extraordinary fate for what was once simply a production machine: sixteen pads, a sampler, MIDI sequencing and a small display. The museum also preserves his Minimoog Voyager.

What interests me is that Dilla became famous partly for doing something machines are normally designed to prevent.

He made programmed rhythm feel unstable.

His beats could place kick, snare and hi-hat in relationships that seem slightly wrong if judged against a perfectly divided grid, yet completely convincing when heard as groove. The result influenced generations of hip-hop, neo-soul and electronic producers who began questioning whether quantisation was actually improving their rhythm.

There is a useful contradiction here.

The MPC is an instrument built around numerical time. Its sequencer knows exactly where every event is.

Dilla made listeners forget that.

That may be one definition of mastering technology: not demonstrating what a machine can do, but making the machine behave as though it has forgotten its own rules.

The Smithsonian has preserved the hardware.

The more important inheritance is probably the permission Dilla gave producers to stop correcting everything.

https://nmaahc.si.edu/object/nmaahc_2014.139.1

#JDilla #MPC3000 #HipHopProduction #Beatmaking

The Drum Machine That Became a Signature The Drum Machine That Became a Signature nmaahc.si.edu J Dilla’s Akai MPC3000 now sits in the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. It is an extraordinary fate for what...
Burial

Burial Made Rhythm Without a Grid

One of the strangest details behind Burial’s Untrue is that its unstable rhythms were not the result of an elaborate generative system or some secret piece of sequencing software. Burial said he deliberately made the album without a sequencer. He assembled sounds directly in an audio editor, forcing pieces together by ear rather than arranging them against a conventional beat grid.

That explains something I have always liked about Untrue. The drums often seem to be remembering a rhythm rather than executing one perfectly. Hits arrive slightly early or late, voices float across bar lines and the whole structure seems capable of falling apart without ever actually doing so.

In a modern DAW it takes almost no effort to make time perfect. Turn on the grid, quantise the drums and duplicate eight bars. Burial’s method removed that convenience.

The limitation became part of the music.

It makes me wonder how much of an artist’s sound is produced not by the equipment they own, but by the functions they choose not to use.

A perfectly capable computer can become an experimental instrument simply by refusing to let it behave efficiently.

Burial, Untrue

#Burial #Untrue #UKBass #ElectronicProduction

Burial Made Rhythm Without a Grid Burial Made Rhythm Without a Grid Hyperdub Burial, Untrue Redesigned for Hyperdub's 20th Anniversary by Burial and Optigram, Untrue gets a new look, stripped down artwork and new labels and inners on clear vinyl, which is available to buy exclusively from us, The CD and Digital remain the same .
Carmen Herrera

Carmen Herrera Waited Decades

Carmen Herrera developed her hard-edged geometric language in the middle of the twentieth century, working between Havana, Paris and New York. She reduced compositions toward straight lines, angles and extremely limited palettes while artists such as Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella were becoming major figures in related areas of abstraction.

Herrera did not receive comparable recognition.

At the Whitney she later recalled a gallery owner telling her that she could paint circles around the men represented there but would not be given a show because she was a woman.

That story is uncomfortable precisely because the paintings themselves need no biographical excuse.

Look at Blanco y Verde. Herrera reduced some compositions almost absurdly far, using white and green forms while treating the edge of the canvas as an active part of the geometry.

Nothing is hiding.

When a work contains so little, every proportion matters.

Herrera is now discussed as an important figure in geometric abstraction, but that late recognition raises a larger problem. Art history often makes success look inevitable after it finally happens.

It was not inevitable.

A major artist can spend decades making strong work while the institutions responsible for recognising it simply look elsewhere.

Rediscovery does not make the work better.

It reveals how incomplete the original map was.

https://whitney.org/exhibitions/carmen-herrera

#CarmenHerrera #GeometricAbstraction #CubanArt #WomenArtists

Carmen Herrera Waited Decades Carmen Herrera Waited Decades Whitney Museum of American Art Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight is the first museum exhibition of this groundbreaking artist in New York City in nearly two decades. Focusing on the years 1948 to 1978, the period during which Herrera developed her signature style, the show features more than fifty works, including paintings, three-dimensional works, and works on paper. It begins with the formative period following World War II, when Herrera lived in Paris and experimented with different modes of abstraction before establishing the visual language that she would explore with great nuance for the succeeding five decades. Many of these works have never been displayed before in a museum.
Abstract Painting

A Painting Built From Studio Dirt

Judit Reigl found one of her painting methods almost accidentally.

To protect the floor of her studio, she placed rejected canvases underfoot. Over time they accumulated layers of paint, dust and other material while she repeatedly walked across them. Instead of treating those canvases as ruined, Reigl eventually began excavating the surfaces, scraping through their accumulated layers with homemade tools.

The resulting Guano works turn studio waste into geological structure.

I love this because it reverses the normal hierarchy of the studio.

The artwork is usually the precious object. The floor covering is disposable.

Reigl allowed the disposable material to collect time until it became more interesting than its original purpose.

There is also something close to sampling here. Existing layers are not erased so the artist can begin again. They become raw material for another work.

Judit Reigl had moved from Hungary to France and was connected with Surrealist and later abstract painting, but her work remained much less familiar internationally than many male painters working at comparable scale.

The technique alone deserves attention.

Sometimes a studio produces art even while the artist thinks she is merely protecting the floor.

https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/collection-areas/modern-and-contemporary-art/judit-reigl-in-memoriam

#JuditReigl #AbstractPainting #GuanoSeries #ForgottenArtists

A Painting Built From Studio Dirt A Painting Built From Studio Dirt metmuseum.org Judit Reigl found one of her painting methods almost accidentally. To protect the floor of her studio, she placed rejected canvases underfoot...
Culture Before Video Oskar

VJ Culture Before Video

Oskar Fischinger was experimenting with multiple projected images before electronic video existed.

During the 1920s, his Raumlichtmusik performances used several film and slide projectors simultaneously to create abstract moving environments. Elsewhere he explored single-frame animation, scratching directly onto film and even experiments in drawn optical sound.

This is where experimental-film history begins to overlap surprisingly well with modern VJ culture.

A contemporary VJ can run several video layers, blend them, map them onto architecture and synchronise them with music in realtime. Fischinger had none of that digital flexibility. Every additional projector was another physical machine, another film path and another alignment problem.

Yet the artistic question was already there.

Why should cinema consist of one rectangular image directly in front of a seated audience?

Once several projections begin occupying space, the screen stops being only a window. Light itself becomes material.

Fischinger later became famous for tightly synchronised abstract animation, but I find these earlier multiple-projection experiments even more interesting today.

The technology is obsolete.

The idea is not.

A century later, Resolume, projection mapping and immersive audiovisual performances are still exploring what happens when moving images escape from a single screen.

https://centerforvisualmusic.org/Fischinger/

#OskarFischinger #VisualMusic #ExpandedCinema #VJCulture

VJ Culture Before Video VJ Culture Before Video centerforvisualmusic.org Fischinger - CVM pages Oskar Fischinger was experimenting with multiple projected images before electronic video existed. During the 1920s, his Raumlichtmusik...
Alice Coltrane

The Alice Coltrane Records Almost Nobody Heard

Alice Coltrane is hardly an unknown musician, yet one of the most extraordinary parts of her catalogue spent years largely outside the normal music industry.

After establishing an ashram in California, she recorded devotional music during the 1980s and 1990s and distributed it primarily within that spiritual community on privately released cassettes. The recordings combined influences from the gospel music she had known in Detroit with Indian devotional practice. They also contain synthesizers, organ, harp, strings, percussion and choirs, and include some of the first recordings in her catalogue on which she sings.

These tapes complicate the familiar version of Alice Coltrane as simply an important spiritual-jazz musician connected to John Coltrane.

She was creating another musical system.

What interests me is the audience for which these recordings originally existed. They were not primarily trying to enter charts, jazz criticism or record-store culture. Music was functioning inside a community and spiritual practice.

When the recordings were later recovered from master tapes and brought to a wider audience, their context changed completely.

The music had not suddenly become important.

The rest of us had finally gained access to something that had been important somewhere else for decades.

https://www.luakabop.com/products/copy-of-xx-world-spirituality-classics-1-the-ecstatic-music-of-alice-coltrane-turiyasangitananda

#AliceColtrane #SpiritualJazz #Synthesizer #MusicArchive

The Alice Coltrane Records Almost Nobody Heard The Alice Coltrane Records Almost Nobody Heard luakabop.com World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda by Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda - Luaka Bop Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s devotion to spirituality was the central purpose of the final four decades of her life, an often-overlooked awakening that largely took shape during her four-year marriage to John Coltrane and after his 1967 death. By 1983, Alice had established the 48-acre Sai Anantam Ashram outside of Los Angeles. She quietly began recording music from the ashram, releasing it within her spiritual community in the form of private press cassette tapes. On May 5, Luaka Bop will release the first-ever compilation of recordings from this period, making these songs available to the wider public for the first time. Entitled ‘World Spirituality Classics, Volume 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda,’ the release is the first installment in a planned series of spiritual music from around the globe; curated, compiled and distributed by Luaka Bop. This powerful, largely unheard body of work finds Alice singing for the first time in her recorded catalog, which dates back to 1963 and includes appearances on six John Coltrane albums, alongside Charlie Haden and McCoy Tyner, and 14 albums as bandleader starting with her Impulse! debut in 1967 with ‘A Monastic Trio.’ The songs featured on the Luaka Bop release have been culled from the four cassettes that Alice recorded and released between 1982 and 1995: ‘Turiya Sings,’ ‘Divine Songs,’ ‘Infinite Chants,’ and ‘Glorious Chants.’ The digital, cassette and CD release will feature eight songs. The double-vinyl edition features two additional songs, “Krishna Japaye” from 1990’s ‘Infinite Chants, and the previously unreleased “Rama Katha” from a separate ‘Turiya Sings’ recording session. Luaka Bop teamed with Alice’s children to find the original master tapes in the Coltrane archive. The recordings were prepared for re-mastering by the legendary engineer Baker Bigsby (Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, John Coltrane), who had overseen the original sessions in the 80s and 90s. The compilation showcases a diverse array of recordings in addition to Alice’s first vocal work: solo performances on her harp, small ensembles, and a 24-piece vocal choir. The release is dotted with eastern percussion, synthesizers, organs and strings, making for a mesmerizing, even otherworldly, listen. Alice was inspired by Vedic devotional songs from India and Nepal, adding her own music sensibility to the mix with original melodies and sophisticated song structures. She never lost her ability to draw from the bebop, blues and old-time spirituals of her Detroit youth, fusing a Western upbringing with Eastern classicism. In all, these recordings amount to a largely untold chapter in the life story of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda. In addition to the recordings, GRAMMY-winning music historian Ashley Kahn has written extensive liner notes on the collection. The package also includes a series of interviews with those who knew Alice best, conducted by Dublab’s Mark “Frosty” McNeill, and an as-told-to interview between musician Surya Botofasina (who was raised on Alice’s ashram) and journalist Andy Beta. 2017 marks what would have been Alice’s 80th year of life, as well as the 10th anniversary of her passing. Alice will be celebrated at events throughout the United States, Europe and South America in the coming year. With this in mind, the time is right to bring this meaningful piece of Turiyasangitananda’s legacy into focus.