Obsolete Systems

Obsolete Systems

Track Listings

1. Four Short Visits to Different Worlds: Swells

2. Four Short Visits to Different Worlds: Mines

3. Four Short Visits to Different Worlds: Crying Tone

4. Four Short Visits to Different Worlds: A Garden

5. Improvisation on a "Concerto Generator"

6. Harmonic Algorithm

7. Three Modal Pieces: A Cosmos

8. Three Modal Pieces: A Legend

9. Three Modal Pieces: A Myth

10. Immersion

11. Drums

12. Voices Within: A Requiem

Tracks:

Swells
Mines
Crying Tone
A Garden
Improvisation on a "Concerto Generator"
A Harmonic Algorithm
A Cosmos
A Legend
A Myth
Immersion
Drums
Voices Within: A Requiem

Product Description

Laurie Spiegel, electronic music pioneer, has been working with cutting-edge electronic instruments since the 1970s. She has written software, designed systems, and explored most of the early synthesizers. And she's a wonderful composer! The music on this CD is so talented, beautiful, and fascinating that it becomes a stunning demonstration of how musical and humanly expressive technology can be. The CD also demonstrates relationships between instruments and the music that can be composed for them. Spiegel writes: "Each musical instrument, whether electronic or not, implies an aesthetic domain and sensibility unique to its design ... These are a few I've personally explored. When it was new, each of these music systems, now long obsolete, was state of the art, visionary, radically new and so revolutionary that it required extended explanations in response to common questions such as 'Why would anyone ever want to do that?'"

Customer Reviews:

Analogue synthesis retrospective.......2002-03-13

"Obsolete Systems" is a fascinating retrospective of works by pioneering programmer and composer of computer music, Laurie Spiegel. The title derives from the fact that all of the works result from the use of electronic sound synthesis systems which are all now completely defunct. The disc is partly a testimony to how rapidly the field of electronic music changes but also acts as an invaluable record of former times, providing a series of snapshots through the 70s and 80s sound synthesis scene. It thus documents the rise and the decline of the analogue sound synthesis systems, and gives a glimpse too of the earliest days of experimental digital synthesis under the control of desktop microcomputers. As well as providing a historical dimension, though, this release also demonstrates how timeless is the aesthetic which underlies even high-tech music-making, showing beyond all doubt that while the technology may move on, and centre of the soundworld shift slightly as a consequence, the products of those older technologies remain every bit as valid and as vital today as they ever were.

The disc presents more than an hour's worth of material, all of which comes across as pioneering or exploratory in nature. None of this is idle or pointless experimentation, though, so much as a series of deliberately studied forays into vast and (at the time) completely unexplored territories. Many of these works were the very first to be produced using the systems they feature, systems that were, in fact, often the result of this particular composer's own programming and design work.

While many of the works presented here may have started life as sketches, none of them sound to be in the slightest incomplete. And while there is nothing on the disc that may be regarded as particularly penetrating, there is much to admire and enjoy, especially for those interested in more introspective studies of timbre and texture - or, indeed, love wallowing in the enormous sonic landscapes that these bygone systems could so beautifully invoke.

Laurie Spiegel's dedication to her particular field of artistic endeavour cannot be doubted and it is good to see that the worth of her music has at last been given sufficient recognition to warrant a disc to itself. I hope that this will be but the first of many such releases of tapes from her loft.

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