| $15.21
back in stock as of
december 19th, 2008
first in stock on
november 28th, 2007
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| | | new world (usa) #nw 80671 cd “league of automatic music composers 1978-1983” compact disc - tim perkis, john bischoff, jim horton - dense drone (3:21) 1980
- tim perkis, john bischoff, jim horton - martian folk music (7:41) 1980
- rich gold, paul de marinis, jim horton - finnish hall (3:37) 1979
- tim perkis, john bischoff, jim horton - oakland one (5:38) 1980
- tim perkis, john bischoff, jim horton - radio air check (2:58) 1981
- tim perkis, john bischoff, jim horton - oakland three (3:21) 1981
- tim perkis, john bischoff, jim horton - oakland four (4:22) 1981
- david berhman, rich gold, john bischoff, jim horton - blind lemon (5:16) 1978
- tim perkis, john bischoff, jim horton - pedal with twitter (11:23) 1980
- tim perkis, john bischoff, jim horton - oakland two (6:53) 1980
| | click the play button to hear an excerpt of "martian folk music" |
| superb and eye/ear-opening collection of music recorded at the tail end of the 70s & early 80s by this collective of bay-area “improvising computer musicians” including john bischoff, james horton, tim perkis, david behrman, paul demarinis, and rich gold. check this out ::
... that image speaks volumes !!! obnoxious, speaker-shredding stuff (for the most part) rivalling today’s new breed of raw computer-speak blat; i’m flabbergasted that the majority of this music has been ignored until now; kudos to jon “wobbly” leidecker for his work here... this feels like one of the early electronic music reissues of the year; highly recommended !!! |
| | new world press release... |
| producer’s notes
by jon leidecker
the story of how this music came to be released nearly thirty years after it was performed has a simple enough beginning. after an afternoon spent recording improvisations with my friend tim perkis at his home in the summer of 2004, i asked him why the infamous league had never released an album—surely some of that music had been recorded. he laughed, walked across the room, took a small shoebox off the top of his bookshelf and brought it back over to me, opening it to reveal perhaps thirty tape cassettes and a small walkman with a built-in speaker. popping a tape into the walkman and pressing “play,” he said “the problem was that there were too many recordings.” less than thirty seconds of automatic music had sounded before i offered to produce a compilation for release—this was not merely music of historical interest, it was very much alive and ready to be heard. i took the shoebox home with me, and soon afterward procured another fifteen cassettes after a visit to john bischoff’s office at mills college.
it wasn’t impossible to understand why they hadn’t managed to compile an album for release during the actual lifespan of the group. the focus needed for musicians to improvise often precludes the ability to confidently choose from recordings of those same improvisations for a definitive representation, especially with so many recordings to choose from: for every cassette document of a public performance, there were three more recorded at home during one of their countless sunday marathons. several extremely well-engineered tapes from professionally recorded studio sessions do exist, including their contribution to the lovely little records compilation released in 1980. but nothing matches the performances or the mix of sounds that i found on the later cassettes from 1980 and 1981, which, fortunately, had held up quite well over the years.
choosing the selections for this release was an extended process. first, roughly forty hour-long cassettes were transferred into a pro tools hd system over several weeks. the tapes ranged from audience and board recordings of concerts, radio interviews on kpfa-fm that often featured carefully chosen excerpts from pieces, set pieces with fixed durations performed live in studios, and home recordings of long improvisations. many of the more interesting tapes were simply filled with nonstop music, often leader-to-leader—someone had been just alert enough to occasionally remember to turn the cassette over and press “record” again. as the tapes were being transferred, i’d leave the music to play while going about other tasks, occasionally taking down notes whenever the music appeared to peak or take on a particularly distinctive texture. using those notes, the forty hours were quickly pared down to ten. sustained listening to those ten hours revealed stretches which seemed self-contained enough to be excerpted, and these sections were lifted out to join the discrete compositions from the radio and concert tapes. these candidates and a potential track sequence were then mailed to john and tim, and after several changes we settled on the material featured on this album. though there’s a lot to be said for the fully immersed listening offered by the many hours of unedited music, this disc’s goal is simply to present a selection of the group’s best performances and the widest variety of approaches and sounds taken from the cassettes.
as this is improvised music, almost all of the pieces here are presented with no internal edits. two invisible cuts were made to martian folk music to include all the material of a fifteen-minute composition within an eight-minute track. a handful of coughs and other audience noises were carefully removed from the room recording of pedal with twitter (though this piece was performed and recorded many times, there was no way around including this version, without a doubt the definitive take of one of their most evocative pieces). the improvisation from may 25, 1981, stretches with no break in sound over tracks 6 and 7, though the transition between tracks represents a cut of about seven minutes. save for a minimum of equalization and noise-removal processing, all other tracks are presented as they were recorded onto the cassettes in real time.
by the late seventies, computer music was more than twenty years old, decades since the pioneering work done at bell labs, and years since john chowning’s discovery of fm synthesis. pieces by james tenney, jean-claude risset, curtis roads, michael mcnabb and françois bayle (among others) had already established the extended computer sound palette to such a degree that the league’s embrace of machines only capable of 8-bit synthesis seemed to some like an unacceptable loss of two decades of progress. but in a discipline that required musicians to code their compositions entirely in advance, sound unheard, and then wait for hours, if not days, for the computer to produce an audible result, the freedom to control and play with sounds in real time (and in collaboration with other living people) might have seemed more like a forgotten luxury than one of the most important prerogatives of musical practice. if the league had returned to the initial vocabulary of computer music’s first sounds made in the late fifties, they did so to regain the use of the computer as a musical and social instrument. even in recorded form, it is clear that this was music that had been performed live.
in the decade that followed the work of the league, those “primitive” 8-bit sound engines were adopted by the first wave of arcade and home video-game consoles, and the character of the tunes and sound effects of these games embedded themselves in a generation of listeners. the sounds in the williams’s games berzerk and defender, the home game systems by atari and nintendo, and the infamous sid chip designed for the commodore 64 home computer then infiltrated electronic dance, pop, and hip-hop music of the nineties in sampled form, usually for simple nostalgic effect but often appearing in abstract contexts—for the sake of the sounds themselves. the cult of 8-bit went into overdrive in the early 2000s, with an explosion of artists, cd compilations, hardware and software simulators, and even annual festivals exclusively devoted to music made from 8-bit technology. the sounds the league used by necessity have been vindicated by the broadened tastes of the generations that followed.
against this background, it shouldn’t be surprising that when software synthesis programs such as max/msp and supercollider found a wider user base in the late nineties, low bit rate and digital aliasing techniques made a huge return to the vocabulary of experimental computer music. the work showcased by the austrian record label mego, as exemplified by composers such as florian hecker and peter rehberg, explicitly utilizes and explores these basic sounds as raw material—taking a direct interest in the basic characteristics of digital audio sound reproduction. if newman guttman’s pitch variations, composed at bell labs in 1957, was a nascent shot in the dark that unearthed a range of glitchy digital sounds that his colleagues instantly shied away from in favor of other techniques allowing greater control and smoother sounds, the aesthetics unearthed with that piece were investigated again by the league using their kim-1s as musical improvisers, and again later by modern digital computer music artists designing sound-generating patches from scratch on their laptops. the improvised recordings of the league most likely sounded more primitive in 1981 than they do now, given how familiar these sounds have become to modern ears. but not too familiar—for all we’ve heard before, these recordings suggest a trio of video game consoles, all jamming their way through a burning brain, playing just intonation free jazz and beyond. i love listening to these tapes and i’m happy they’re finally available for other people to listen to as well. |
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