Arcane Candy

“Pauline Oliveros (born 1932) is an American accordionist and composer who is a central figure in the development of post-war electronic art music. She was a founding member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center in the 1960s, and served as its director. She has taught music at Mills College, the University of California, San Diego, Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Oliveros has written books, formulated new music theories and investigated new ways to focus attention on music including her concepts of Deep Listening and sonic awareness.”—Wikipedia. Flowing from the same vein as her Alien Bog / Beautiful Soop CD on Pogus and Electronic Works CD on Paradigm, No Mo brings three more long (and lost) tape pieces from the 1960s kicking and screaming into the fright of night.

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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.”

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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