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On Early Modulations: Vintage Volts (Caipirinha) the makers of the concise 1998 electronica documentary Modulations have compiled a wonderful, if disjointed, overview of early electronic music. Max Mathews’s 1961 voice-synthesis experiment “Bicycle Built for Two” anticipates Kraftwerk’s man-machine vocals, while “Etude aux chemins de fer” (“Railway Study”), a 1948 piece by Pierre Schaeffer, anticipates Pro Tools: he painstakingly spliced tapes of huffing, puffing locomotives into a cogent, imaginative, musical composition that decontextualizes the source material, a little trick he decided to call “musique concrete.” In his 1958 “Piece for Tape Recorder,” Vladimir Ussachevsky manipulates more conventional musical sources, including piano, into spooky sound clouds–no wonder electronic music found its first commercial usage in sci-fi sound tracks. Cage’s own “Imaginary Landscape no. 1,” from 1939, combines varied-speed turntable manipulations–35 years before Kool DJ Herc–with ominous piano plinks and hydroplaning cymbals. The CD also includes key works by Iannis Xenakis and Luc Ferrari, plus Morton Subotnick’s 1967 “Silver Apples of the Moon”–an obvious source of inspiration for the seminal space-rock band Silver Apples, among others.
A variety of works by Cage and some of his artistic progeny are also featured on the double CD Goodbye 20th Century (SYR), a remarkably listenable tribute to late-20th-century composition by Sonic Youth and some prominent guests, including composer-pianist Christian Wolff, composer-violinist Takehisa Kosugi, percussionist William Winant, turntable deconstructionist Christian Marclay, and Chicago star Jim O’Rourke. The primary instrument being electric guitar, this isn’t what most people think of as electronic music, but conceptually the record is a page right out of Cage’s book. Coco Hayley Gordon Moore, the five-year-old daughter of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, screams her way through Yoko Ono’s very brief “Voice Piece for Soprano,” while James Tenney’s “Having Never Written a Note for Percussion,” written for tam-tam in 1971, gets retrofitted for guitar–its gradual rise-and-fall structure seems custom made for Sonic Youth’s feedback mastery. Other pieces emphasize the music-making process: for Steve Reich’s “Pendulum Music” Gordon, Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Steve Shelley swing microphones over loudspeakers to create whirring swooshes of out-of-phase feedback, while in the execution of page 183 from Cornelius Cardew’s 193-page graphic score Treatise, seven musicians translate geometric shapes and designs into sound.
Supersphere.com also features film and record reviews, a viewable archive of experimental film, information about and a selection of articles reprinted from zines, and a “23.999-hour” Internet radio station. Most of the content is put together by Ed Marszewski, a cofounder of Lumpen magazine, but the site so far has been financed by Lou Manousos, owner of the local Internet consulting company Outlook Technologies, who came up with the idea along with two former employees, Mike Evans and Jon Evans (no relation). Currently the only ad on Supersphere.com is for UHF Records, a new on-line record store run by former Reckless Records manager Bryan Smith, but Jon Evans says next month they’ll undergo a redesign and begin to focus on marketing the site and attracting advertisers.
