Arcane Candy

The Electronic Works CD contains three more pieces from the same time period as Alien Bog / Beautiful Soop, the 1960s. “I of IV” (1966) was originally released on the New Sounds In Electronic Music LP, which also featured Richard Maxfield’s “Night Music” and Steve Reich’s infamous “Come Out.” It’s a heavy 25-minute dreamville of electric nightmare bleeps, buzzes and pulsations made at the University of Toronto Electronic Music Studio. “It’s a real-time studio performance composition with no editing or tape-splicing, utilizing the techniques of amplifying combination tones and tape repetition. The combination tone technique was one that I developed at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. The equipment consisted of 12 sine tone square wave generators connected to an organ keyboard, two line amplifiers, mixer, Hammond spring-type reverb and two stereo tape recorders.”

“Big Mother Is Watching You” (1966, previously unreleased?) was made in the same time and place as “I of IV” and spreads a huge glob of thick sound way out for over 33 minutes. “The core of this technique is tape delay and super heterodyning. This piece utilizes a variety of sound sources including pink noise bands and some occasional voice imput.” This is an especially nice ’n’ rough electronic dronescape—corroded almost to the point of sonic breakup. “Bye Bye Butterfly” (1965, previously released on an old CRI LP?) is much shorter—clocking out at a mere eight minutes—and vaguely similar, but with eerie electronic whistling and wailing with minimal echo-pulses and “sampled” classical records smeared underneath. Another sublimely realized deep space dream, “Bye Bye Butterfly” is a “two-channel tape composition utilizing two Hewlett-Packard oscillators, two line amplifiers in cascade, a turntable with record and two tape recorders in a delay setup. The composer arranged the equipment, tuned the oscillators and played through the composition in real time.”—Pauline Oliveros

Label: Paradigm Discs Catalog Number: PD 04 Format: CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: 3 Total Time: 67:16 Country: England Released: 1997 Related Artists: Stuart Dempster, Morton Subotnick More Discogs, MySpace, Official, Wikipedia

This is one of two companion CD reissues of Pauline Oliveros’ electronic works of the 1960s, made when she was the first director of The Tape Music Center at Mills College. “Alien Bog” (1967) was previously excerpted on the old Music From Mills 3-LP and is presented here for the first time in its entire length of 33 minutes. It provides an appropriate soundtrack for 3:00 a.m. refrigerator visits with video game-like bleeps and bloops over a frayed, dark landscape of buzzing and echoing electronics. “Beautiful Soop” (1966, debuting here) is similar, but with some distinguished British voices that are echoed and delayed from speaker-to-speaker reciting absurd surrealist poetry: “He thought he saw a buffalo up on the chimney piece. He looked again and found that it was his sister’s husband’s niece.” Both tracks were produced using the original Buchla Box 100 series created for The Tape Music Center by Don Buchla, along with Pauline’s tape delay system, which consisted of running the tape from one machine to another. “I was deeply impressed by the sounds from the frog pond outside the studio window at Mills. I loved the accompaniment as I worked on my pieces. Though I never recorded the frogs, I was, of course, influenced by their music.”

Label: Pogus Productions Catalog Number: P 21012-2 Format: CD Packaging: Jewel case Tracks: 2 Total Time: 61:04 Country: United States Released: 1997 Related Artists: Stuart Dempster, Morton Subotnick More Discogs, MySpace, Official, Wikipedia