Remi Gassman/Oskar Sala - Electronics/Five Improvisations On Magnetic Tape

German Oskar Sala and American expat Remi Gassmann met as students of the renowned German composer Paul Hindemith, and they both turned out to be pioneers of electronic music. Sala worked closely with Frederick Trautwein on the latter's invention, the Trautonium, an early (late 1920s) electronic instrument that can be seen as a precursor of the first modular synthesizers. Sala helped develop and modify the instrument over the years, composing and performing numerous pieces for it. Outside of electronic music circles, Sala and Gassman are best known for creating the electronic score for Hitchcock's film The Birds. This album has one side dedicated to each composer, both working on the version of the Trautonium that had by that point (1961) developed into a full-blown electronic music studio. Gassmann's piece Electronics was the music for a contemporaneous ballet by George Balanchine, and Sala's side consists of Five Improvisations on Magnetic Tape. Both are solidly in the old-school electronic music tradition, strictly non-melodic and based around expolorations of variation in timbre. Gassmann's piece is more minimalistic, with angular bursts of pointillistic sounds, and a great variance in dynamics. Sala's is, as its title implies, much more spontaneous and freewheeling, making excellent use of effects that process the sounds to create a greater feeling of physical space. Both illustrate the enormous possibilities that were available to electronic composers even before the advent of synthesizers.

Barry Schrader/George Todd - Trinity/Voicemask/Emergence

This one came out in 1983 on an avant-garde/new music indie label called Opus One. One side is devoted to each composer. Schrader had already been around the electro-acoustic music block by the time this came out, and he's done a lot more work since. His piece was created entirely on a Buchla 200, which was a bigass modular synthesizer, one of the first, most innovative, and most unusual of such designs. The piece, "Trinity," is non-tonal rather than atonal; it doesn't really deal in conventional pitches per se. Instead, it deals almost exclusively in changes of electronic timbre. Schrader's no serialist, he's a pure electronic composer in the strictest sense, and his piece has a very natural, organic ebb and flow. Todd's pieces utilize technology that was much more cutting-edge at the time; they're done on a Synclavier, which was one of the first samplers, and he uses the then-new device in a pleasingly unconventional way. His first piece, "Voicemask" uses various non-verbal vocal sounds as its source material, but it's not some gimmicky, Art Of Noise-style thing, it's very striking and original. Not without a sense of humor, either, which is a quality all too rare in "experimental" music. His second piece, "Emergence," uses the Synclavier to modulate the voices of a group of dancers caught in candid discussion (both of his pieces were commisioned by dance companies). It's more subtle, sophisticated, and nuanced than its predecessor, with vague echoes of Robert Ashley's "Automatic Writing," Joan La Barbara, and some of Luciano Berio's compositions for Kathy Berberian.