CRIzy about those Space Guitars and Synthesised Voices!

Luke Owen from Death Is Not The End has launched into a run of releases reissuing electronic music  put out by CRI  - Composers Recordings, Inc., originally co-founded by Otto Luening in 1954 and active right up until 2003. 

This is an obsession close to my heart, having picked up a lot of CRItronica as vinyl over the years, chased down others through the Cal Arts record library, and found still more on the internet. CRI put out an even larger amount of non-electronic music, 20th Century compositions that are rather astringent to my ears. But the electronic and tape-music is a bit of a motherlode.  One thing I like about the label is the record design, some of which is genuinely good while others falls into the "ugly but interesting" zone. This below is a beaut, though.

That's Allan Bryant's Space Guitars,  which is one of the first in Death Is Not The End's reissue program, and which by strange coincidence I wrote about recently in this Quietus Baker's Dozen on Reinvention of the Guitar: 

When they shoved screwdrivers and drum sticks under their guitar strings, Sonic Youth were obviously aware of John Cage’s prepared piano experiments and similar things done by composers in his wake. I wonder, though, whether –  being obscure vinyl foragers in the used record stores of Manhattan – they had also heard the handful of avant-gardists who had done that kind of thing with guitars. For instance, there’s a 1975 album called Guitar Extensions. On ‘Extensions II’ Robert Bauer uses a detuned classical guitar augmented with paper clips and pipe cleaners, creating unstrung tones not far from the decomposed guitar tones that Lee Ranaldo collated for his From Here To Infinity side project.  

But the record that seems to have most in common with Sonic Youth – while not actually resembling any of their records – is Space Guitars by Allan Bryant. A former member of the electronic ensemble MEV, Bryant here inflicts drastic modifications on his guitars and explores self-invented playing techniques. The results are deranging – yet at times as comical as they are cosmic. Which Bryant acknowledges with his track titles, like ‘Bouncing People Planet’, which he described as “a humorous image of some strange people on another planet who bounce-talk nervously and then get excited and bounce even faster”.  The original 1977 LP was expanded for a 1995 CD reissue and things get even wiggier. The  tremolo wobbles of ‘Space Storm’ induce the astronautical equivalent of seasickness. 

Talking of queasy listening, the first time I had Covid, I had some intense fever dreams. One night I woke up and I thought, “well,  I feel like I’m tripping, why waste these sensations lying in bed in the dark?” So I went into the living room, put on headphones and found Space Guitars waiting for me on my iPod. One of the more out-there experiences with music I’ve had in my life.

Another CRI fave of mine that Luke has unearthed is Charles Dodge's Synthesized Voices.

Here's the Death Is Not The End release rationale along with Dodge's original release rationale:

DINTE reissues Charles Dodge’s 1976 LP collection of synthesised speech music, 1972-1975. Using mainframe computers at Bell Laboratories, Dodge analysed and dismantled audio recordings of surrealist poetry by Mark Strand, mathematically and meticulously reconstructing them in synthetic form - resulting in these uncanny, landmark pieces that spearheaded early computer speech synthesis as a form for musical composition.

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The compositions recorded here are a product of work with computers in synthetic speech, song and vocal sounds and were created between 1972 and 1975. The music was realized on two different computer music systems and takes advantage of, and attempts to extend and explore their features. The system employed to realize speech songs was created at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for research in synthetic speech and speech communication. Since the system was not designed for musical purposes, its limitations were severe and its musical use a great (and often rewarding) challenge. The system used for In Celebration and The Story of Our Lives was designed with the expressed purpose of creating synthetic musical voices, and was therefore much better suited to the task at hand. As with any high technology project, there was extensive collaboration in the production of the works.

The works on this disk are called computer music because the sounds were created numerically in a computer before reaching magnetic tape and loudspeakers. The computer did not compose the music. However, it was only used as a sound synthesis and analysis medium. In order to hear the sounds which are represented in the computer as successions of numbers it was necessary to attach a digital-to-analogue converter to the computer. The converter transformed the succession of numbers into a fluctuating voltage which was recorded directly on to audio tape.

The technique used to create the synthetic voices is called speech synthesis-by-analysis. For this method of speech synthesis, only those words, phrases and sentences which have been spoken into the computer previously (via an analogue-to-digital converter) may be synthesized. First the digitally-recorded speech is analyzed by programs which extract the attributes (parameters) of the speech for short time segments (.01 sec.). From these parameters the speech may be recreated in a form which resembles the original recording very closely. But for musical purposes the parameters are most often altered before synthesis. It is possible, for example, to change the natural pitch contour of the speech into a melodic line or to change the speech speed without altering the natural pitch level.

The variety of musical patterns which may be created from the analytic parameters is limited only by the composer's imagination. Most of the speech sounds on the recording were created by changing the pitch and duration attributes of the original on resynthesis, but for a few, the resonances (the formants) of the speech were altered as well. The voice of the book in The Story of Our Lives was created by replacing the program which simulates the sound of the human vocal cords with one consisting of 64 sine tones glissandoing at different rates. All the textures in which more than one voice is heard were obtained by mixing the synthetic voices together digitally.

— Charles Dodge, 1976  

And ditto for Allan Bryant's Space Guitars

A pioneer of underground American electronic music, Bryant helped push the boundaries as a founder member of Musica Elettronica Viva alongside Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum. Following his departure in 1968 he continued to independently compose, record, and archive live vintage MEV sets on his own IRML imprint until his death in 2019.

During a period in the early to mid 1970s, Bryant channelled his obsession with self-made instrumentation and raw electricity into the solo works collected here on Space Guitars - originally released on the CRI label in 1977 it’s now reissued on vinyl for the first time, revised and expanded on this 2LP.

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"One way to find new ideas and to make music a little different from anyone else's, is to make your own instruments. They automatically supply you with sounds and techniques you probably never could have imagined otherwise. The new instruments I use in Space Guitars produce unusual virtuoso effects that are sometimes similar to those of electronic music. They are not electronic instruments however. Aside from amplification, there are no electronics used to produce or modify the sound, and there is no tape manipulation. They might be called "bridge" instruments — something between the traditional manual ones and new electronic ones. They are amplified string instruments, each constructed in a different manner in order to make use of varying new and unusual techniques, sounds, and effects.

"That many of these effects sound electronic is probably due to the fact that I made these instruments originally for concerts that were billed as Musica Elettronica Viva (Live Electronic Music). In these concerts we purposely created electronic sounding music even when we used normal instruments. But for the last few decades a great deal of music, both pop and serious, has been electronic influenced. For serious music, the electronic influence has provided a valuable exit from '12-tone alley.' There's an entire new organisation and logic made possible with these new sounds. I consider the orchestral music of Penderecki and 2001-Ligeti to be striking examples of this; there are strange new electronic influenced effects and combinations, including blocks of sound that are held for a long time or that slide in different directions, often with a lot of internal movement, with irregular rhythms, tremolos, trills, bubbling, bouncing, waving, wobbling, etc.

"This list of effects can give some impression of what these pieces are like. Also, the titles give some clue since they are an attempt to match the sound of the pieces as well as possible with some external sound or program. The titles make space-impressionistic music out of what was originally written as just abstract music, but who knows whether something similar wasn't in my subconscious at the time? From working at Cape Canaveral for a year, I certainly have the magnificent sound of a rocket take-off still in my ears. An earlier piece in this series, Pitch Out, has a beginning that I only recognized later as an attempt to imitate that sound. I wonder how far I can go in equating titles with just finding out what was supposedly there in intent all the time? Whatever the case, the listener is free and welcome to create his or her own titles if they have more suggestive meaning."

— Allan Bryant 

There's already another CRI reissue from DINTE -  Music By Earle Brown

Can't wait to see what else Luke digs up... hopefully some things that have eluded my search so far