Obsolete Systems

[seraph]

Laurie Spiegel, electronic music pioneer, has been working with cutting-edge electronic instruments since the 1970s. She has written software, designed systems, and explored most of the early synthesizers. And she's a wonderful composer! The music on this CD is so talented, beautiful, and fascinating that it becomes a stunning demonstration of how musical and humanly expressive technology can be.

The CD also demonstrates relationships between instruments and the music that can be composed for them. Spiegel writes: "Each musical instrument, whether electronic or not, implies an aesthetic domain and sensibility unique to its design ... These are a few I've personally explored. When it was new, each of these music systems, now long obsolete, was state of the art, visionary, radically new and so revolutionary that it required extended explanations in response to common questions such as 'Why would anyone ever want to do that?'"


The compositions and the instruments are:
'Four Short Visits to Different Worlds', which includes 'Swells' (c. 1972) and 'Crying Tone' (1975), both composed with an Electrocomp 100 modular analog synthesizer; and 'Mines' (1971) and 'A Garden' (c. 1970), both composed with a Buchla 100 modular analog synthesizer.

'Improvisation on a "Concerto Generator"' (1977), composed with a realtime digital audio synthesizer designed by Hal Alles and others at Bell Labs.

'A Harmonic Algorithm' (1981 version), composed with an Apple II computer with Mountain Hardware oscillator boards.

'Three Modal Pieces' (1983) and 'Immersion' (1983), both composed with the McLeyvier computer-controlled analog synthesis music system.

'Drums' (1975), composed with the GROOVE Hybrid System at Bell Labs.

'Voices Within: A Requiem' (1979), composed with an Electrocomp analog synthesizer with classic tape techniques & Echoplex (a tape-delay device of the 1970s).
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