| $16.95
back in stock as of
july 10th, 2008
first in stock on
april 14th, 2008
threads:
1950s-electronic
1960s-electronic
1970s-electronic
electro-acoustic-composition
musique-concrète
analogue-synth
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| | | melon expander (usa) #me 005 cd warner jepson “totentanz and other electronic works 1958-1973” double compact disc set - bugs at large (2:43) 1967
- blood knot (7:27) 1970
- skate date (0:41) 1970
- laughter after (4:37) 1958
- rirlwa (2:00) 1970
- good humor man (2:34) 1967
- jacks (1:36) 1967
- jail gate crazy (1:03) 1958
- splace (1:20) 1967
- totentanz (35:05) 1967
- the dog (1:53) 1970
- for trying out loud (0:42) 1958
- the big purr (0:58) 1958
- the awakening (20:03) 1968
- see is never all the way up (24:44) 1973
| | click the play button to hear an excerpt of "totentanz" |
| ... by far the most anticipated early-electronic music reissue around these parts since it was announced a year or so back ; this double-disc collection of just about everything by bay-area outsider / composer warner (ne “warren”) jepson, including his totemic (... and previously creel pwned) lp “totentanz” ::
... now why the melon expander didn’t use that image on the cover is beyond me ... but i digress. what we do get here : a bunch of amazing bedroom-lineage electro-acoustic experiments dating back to 1958 (!!!) - most invoking mysterious bleep-infused landscapes with tons of psychedelic organ (played on an instrument hand-painted by bruce conner !!!) & tape mangling, prepared piano / strings & a few fairly harsh early/primitve synth-stunners done on the buchla @ mills & the experimental television center ... these lead up to the album’s centerpiece ; the full 35-minute “totentanz” - of which i described (in reference to the o/p creel pone version) thusly ::
... this one that has “nurse with wound list” written all over it; yet - nary a mention in the notes to said 1979 lp and just about anyone anywhere on out on our global interweb... purportedly the score to a 1971 ballet by carlos carvajal, totentanz overwhelms us with its mystery while revealing only the most gratifying collection of sounds from the early electronic music canon imaginable ...
the a-side piece contains a long section of tape-based concrète; lo-fi pre-industrial thudding, dissonant piano stabs. and much repetition (you’ll want to crawl inside this bit and never come out...) - this gives way to a great blast of weird-synth patterns that closes out the side... on the flip there’s even further mystery layers, which slowly give way to the most amazing bit of terry riley lineage repetitive minimal synth figuring and blasted spring reverb & gated riffing. completely awe-inspiring (with a demonic-looking cover depicting some sort of skeletons-and-ghouls-as-wedding-processional ceremony no less.) |
the second disc continues on in the same trajectory, with a few shorter pieces giving birth to the epic, 20+ minute “the awakening” & “see is never all the way up” ... of course, i’m going to go ahead and highly recommend this to just about anyone with even a passing interest in early electronic music’s dalliance with 60s/70s psychedelic culture - it’s a landmark release & mitchell brown has done a bang-up job w/the reissue, including contemporary liner notes from jepson & copious information as to his modus / motivations ... essential. |
| | melon expander press release... |
| warner jepson
“totentanz and other electronic works 1958-1973” 2xcd
melon expander 005
the act of dusting off old forgotten master tapes, and old people too, can reveal a myriad of results. crappy music that sounded great to the stoned performer at the time, crappy music that sounded great before time ate away at the tapes, great music trapped behind various complications, or, in the case with warner jepson, great music from a composer enthusiastic about revisiting it.
jepson recorded over 200 ” tape reels full of electronic sounds at the san francisco tape music center, mills college and the national center for experiments in television (ncet). some of them were used as soundtracks for theatre productions and art films, and some were heard ephemerally at art galleries, parties and “happenings” in the late 60’s and early 70’s. only one document was ever released - the soundtrack to totentanz, a theatre work by carlos carvajal, on an lp that yielded a circulation of only 300 copies in 1971.
this 2xcd release is a reissue of that totentanz lp plus many other pieces that vary in content from his late 50’s “musique concrete” experiments to rhythmic prepared piano and tape pieces to sprawling meditative sound paintings done on the 100 and 200 series buchla synthesizers. the opening track “bugs at large” might bring to mind synthetic rhythms that weren’t commonly heard until 20+ years later in the “techno” genre of late 80’s detroit. aside from totentanz, none of these works have been heard by anyone in well over 30 years.
he worked with many people who may be on the radar of folks buying this cd. whether it was taking photographs of steve reich or john cage, playing piano in terry riley’s first ensemble of “in c”, or scoring the soft-core porno “luminous procuress” starring the cockettes, jepson kept busy in a vital time for creative art and music. though somehow it seems he’s slipped through the cracks of time and needed a healthy dusting off. this release happily rides the coattails of his re-emergence: inclusion in the “visual music” exhibit at the los angeles moca in 2005 (the 1973 video work “illuminated music” with stephen beck) and spring 2008’s “california video” exhibit at the getty center (a 50 minute solo video/sound work made at the ncet in ’75).
the cd booklet features liner notes by the composer as well as paintings he made in the late 50’s.
sounds have always been attached to some real and material object that emanated them, followed the same course as their source. but with the advent of tape and recorders after wwii, this was no longer true. sounds no longer would be derived from what one saw or could see. with the tape recorder musicians could revel in unknown worlds of sound. and that we did, splicing, re-ordering, reversing, speeding up and slowing down sounds to see what we could find or create. with the sounds a tape recorder could make, the mind would imagine new unseen objects with unheard-of-before sounds because the sounds did not come from an object one could see. unknown objects would be evoked from new sounds and these new unknown objects lay in the mind's imagination.
furthermore, inertia and speed always had a hand in the shape of sound, how it began and ended. thanks to magnetic tape, a sound could start and stop and last longer and be louder than could a sound from a real object. to this extent it paralleled what a musician did when he made a musical sound, struck one or shaped one into a melody. but musique concrete were sounds drawn from non-musical things, any thing, and could be altered to resemble no thing anyone had even known, seen, or heard. then there were rhythms, new and strange, beyond what a human could accomplish. manipulating tape sounds produced accidentally and unpredictably incomprehensible and unimaginable rhythms. it was in 1957 in ann halprin's basement studio that i put together my first musique concrete piece for her branch dance.
around this time i started taking and printing photographs, explored oil painting and entered the sfmoma annual with a 4x4 ft painting/construction of piano keys, undershirts and paint tubes. 1961 saw a 6 month run of helen adam's ballad opera san francisco's burning for which i played my piano score of 60 songs.
this new world of sound was expanded further when don buchla created in 1963 his first and glorious 100 series synthesizer and installed it in the sf tape music center at 321 divisadero st. the sequencer--the name meant something completely different from later sequencers-- hooked me. it made rhythms that were fast, rare, and instantly changeable. the syncopations possible were terrific. my first small piece was used for ''the lovers" scene in totentanz.
soon after, the tape center and the buchla box were moved to mills college where pauline oliveros and then tony gnazzo became its caretakers. the doors to the studio there were never locked then; i would reserve the 8pm time slot and stay as long as i wanted. occasionally i would find nothing and go home early and dejected. i had no mastery over this magical machine.
i took my first discoveries to a party; everyone was fascinated. the sf art institute asked me to play them at noon for the students. painter lee adair asked if i'd play them at her opening, leading to a long stream of openings including two very large ones for the museum of modern art. the usual string trio was now replaced by four huge rock and roll speakers in the four corners of the marble rotunda; the sound spread out into the halls and galleries. i found one man dressed in a business suit sitting smack in front of one of those behemoths; god knows what he was experiencing. one elegant elderly lady passing me said the music was 'sexual'. i would never argue the point.
in my nights at mills over the next three years i recorded 200 half hour reels of sounds that i would use at parties, openings, exhibits, films, theater, ballet, even a saks 5th ave fashion show by oscar de la renta. i have used only a fraction of these reels. so much needs to be transferred to semi-permanent medium.
james broughton, not long after i'd scored his film the bed, put me in touch with a fellow student, carlos carvajal, who needed a composer for the work he was choreographing for the sf ballet. he described the scenes i would score and explained a time-sensitive situation. i spent the following nights into the mornings at mills combining musique concrete and buchla synthesized sounds into the 40 minute score, taking segments into carlos's sessions with his dancers to see if they worked. in a month, during which my son was born, we were done. totentanz opened april 1 st, 1967 at the s.f opera house. a few patrons walked out in the third section, as i expected, where the sounds were mostly sine waves and not very rhythmic. carlos left the sf ballet to form his own company, dance spectrum. he revived totentanz in the spectacular space of grace cathedral in feb 1971 and repeated it every other year until '82. the gothic atmosphere and 7 -second echo did wonders. after the show i hawked my lps of the music. only somewhere near 300 copies circulated.
in the mid 60's hi-fi manufacturers added quadraphonic sound to home systems. so i decided to make my next ballet for carlos quadraphonic. since the mills tape studio had only two, not four, ampex machines, it meant recording sounds from one machine to the other to make tape i, then doing the same to make tape ii, keeping in mind the sounds of the two tapes, for they had to mesh when played together. to check the mesh i had to play the two tapes on the two machines making sure they started together precisely. if something didn't mesh, i had to go back, record or erase sounds on one tape and then put on the other tape to listen to them again to check the mesh. things got even hairier further into the 20 minute score. a lot of time was spent lifting off and placing on the source tapes and the two master tapes; sometimes i'd lose track which recorder had which tape. on this cd the 4 tracks of the awakening have been combined down to two.
in 1973, the national center for experiments in television had an opening for a composer-in-residence. when i inquired, it was suggested i score a video that stephen beck, inventor of his beck direct video synthesizer, was working on. one day i remember, pierre schaeffer, practically the founder of musique concrete, was visiting the n.c.e.t. the next day i was hired. the buchla synthesizer there was the next generation, the 200 series. it inspired me much less then the 100 series, whose sounds seemed to reflect the earth and nature, animals and primitive mysteries from the ground. the 200 series made more electronic, pure sine waves, cold. it was difficult finding satisfaction; still i ended up scoring a 40 minute piece of scenes in the woods, then five more works which were broadcast on pbs.
one, "see is never all the way up" was by artist william roarty. it was dark with an amorphous form, with little color and little movement except for its outline of shimmering dots. what to do? serve music with its own momentum or serve the momentum of the image? since sound relates to its source, i chose the latter, and made a sound that shimmered and barely moved. the sound made me think i was on a train listening to the track. i kept tied to roarty's image longer than i expected i could or should, but as often happens, what first seems too odd eventually can become intriguing and attractive.
just before the n.c.e.t. died in 1975, i hooked 2 wires from the buchla box to larry templeton's fantastic video mixer and discovered images of extraordinary color. some of them are in the la getty california video exhibit of 2008.
one evening i thought to do what many before me have done: stick something into the strings of the piano-maybe an eraser--to have a different sound. "rirlwa" & "the dog" came from these sessions. around this time bruce conner gave me his farfisa organ that he'd painted on. i'd mix it up with the prepared piano tunes. they were never to be heard by anyone until 30 years later by mitchell brown, the producer of these cds.
- wj 2007
...
disc 1 tracks 1, 6, 7, 9 are from tullium, the score to david william's environmental sculpture, hansen-fuller gallery, 1967
disc 1 track 2 is from the score for blood knot; american conservatory theatre 1970
disc 1 track 10 is the complete score for totentanz, a ballet by carlos carvajal 1967
disc 2 track 4 is the score for the awakening, a ballet by carlos carvajal 1968
disc 2 track 5 is the score for the roarty video see is never all the way up, national center for experiments in television (kqed) 1973
all tracks performed and recorded by warner jepson 1958-1973
laughter after, jail gate crazy, for trying out loud & the big putt assembled by mitchell brown, fall 2006
mastered by thomas dimuzio at gench studios, san francisco, ca, 2008
produced by mitchell brown
all paintings (1957-1960) and photographs (2006) by warner jepson
video synthesizer photos are stills from a video made at the ncet, 1975, by warner jepson
design by ben wolfinsohn
special thanks: ben wolfinsohn, thomas dimuzio, erik hoffman, joseph hammer, ken lee, don buchla, larry templeton, and rodney and his fantastic plastic record shop (where in 2002 the $100 totentanz lp was acquired, planting the seed for this release) |
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