Pauline Oliveros – Electronic Works
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
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