WOEBOT

Fairly recently at at Blissblog Simon was cautiously celebrating the crew he was calling the "second-tier avant-classical/electronic guys", no not some university-based off-shot of the Hardcore 'nuum, but an aggregate of nutty professors and the probing early moog opuses of their fevered brows . Simon insisted that part of the charm in this music was its affordability, I know this was a self-professed "half-baked" assertion, Simon in blogging mode casually tossing off observations, but it really stuck in my throat. I think the remark opened the way for a daft one-upmanship across the blogosphere foundered on who could find the cheapest records. OK, permit me the slightest self-indulgent paranoia, but er, was this all about me?

I couldn't help but factor in the Blissblogger's later remarks about the preposterousness of my even considering paying $250 for a record. Well I didn't buy the wax in question, but I have paid more than that for a record. If you skirt round the auctions on eBay, or the racks of GEMM you'll see hundreds of deals going down like this the entire time. Put more strongly, if you're perusing the catalogues of serious international-level record dealers, you'll not find much you can buy under that price.

I know I'm lucky to be able to spend as much money as I do on records; but I work hard, and I choose to put some of that cash into music (thank fuck someone is buying it...) not on clubbing, booze or fags, though I ought to get out more often. But really this isn't what stuck in my throat, what irritated me was the idea that the price tag on a record had anything whatsoever to do with anything. I mean, it's totally fucking immaterial isn't it? Money is nothing more than impediment to laying one's mitts on good music, it pisses one off that sometimes the hurdle is much higher than one would like, but what can you do? To create a strategy by reverse logic, to deliberately buy records because they're cheap, well it's sheer bloody nonsense isn't it? It's just the same as succumbing to the logic that somehow expensive records are the only ones you want.

I believe that Simon is being much smarter than he gives himself credit for. Fifteen or twenty years ago the records of what one might (equally casually) call the "first-tier avant-classical/electronic guys" were clogging up the bargain bins themselves. It was only circa 1996, around the ripening of IDM, that my dealer friends started selling the works of Parmegiani, Xenakis and Bayle to the likes of The Aphex Twin, Autechre, The Chemical Brothers and Andy Weatherall. Before then you couldn't give those records away. What was it Simon paid for his Pierre Henry record on the Prospective 21 siecle label back in the day, 15 pence?

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The records he's been picking up, as far as I can fathom, are by in large on the Nonesuch label. I contacted Nonesuch about three months ago to ask them to give me a tiny bit of assistance writing this piece, and they didn't even bother replying. So if anyone from the label reads this I'd just like to say thanks for nothing you bunch of idiots. You've left me stumbling around in the dark. As per usual. Anyway I've gleaned enough off the web to be able to fill in the history impasto.

Jac Holzman, the genius behind Electra records, The Doors, The Stooges, Tim Buckley, Nuggets etc became restless in the conventional rock marketplace. He decided it'd be a great idea if there was a label that would, in his own words, cater for "music lovers with more taste than money." His idea was to undercut labels like Vanguard and the majors and put out the cream of classical music at $2.50 a disc. He cut straight to the chase and went to Europe with three notebooks full of his ideas on what to sign, cold-called the finest labels of their kind like Paris's "Club Français du Livre et de la Disque in Paris" and clutching a brace of blank cheques cut unconventional deals with them to license their classical music recordings in the USA.

That would have been that, were it not for Holzman's catholic taste. He went on to release not only some of the absolute stone classics of Ethnographic recordings on the Nonesuch "Explorer" series: David Lewiston's "Bali: Music from the Morning of the World", Lewsiton's "Tibet: Tantra's of Gyoto", the Rhythm of the Grasslands records and many more besides but also a whole slew of of records of electronic music. The labels's first big hit was Morton Subotnick's "Silver Apples of the Moon" and its success must have spurred on Holzman. Julian Cope tells the story at Head Heritage: "It was around this time that Subotnick received a visit by a representative from Nonesuch Records (a recently formed offshoot label of Elektra specialising in classical and ethnic field recordings) who offered him a record contract and advance. Having no previous knowledge of either him or the label he claimed to represent, Subotnick was wary and refused (only to discover later that day a Bach album in his own collection on the very same label.) Fortunately, the representative returned the following day with the advance doubled and a thirteen-month deadline for a finished album. This time Subotnick accepted, and set about working on compositions that would soon coalesce into his debut album."

Beaver and Krause's "Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music" is perhaps the label's other notable LP. The legend of it being that it was conceived by Krause and Holzman on a Leer jet to the Monterey Pop Festival, where Beaver & Krause were slated to demonstrate their Moog synthesiser. Holzman comments: "It didn't take much genius to figure out that the record was the ideal medium for electronically generated music. I had been aware of the possibilities for years. My dad had a lawyer named Abe Frisch whose hobby was creating tapes of music, synthetically generated, only Abe did it with a massive inventory of tiny magnets which he pressed, one by one, onto the tape, re-arranging the ferrous oxide tape particles into something resembling a sound." The idea behind it was that the lavish box-set, with its prodigiously detailed booklet, was a guide to the technicalities and possibilities of synthesisers. It turned out to be a huge hit for the label, and was lodged in the Billboard charts for twenty six weeks.

The cultural background to these recordings is I think the answer to grasping their true worth, because not only as Simon notes are they cheap today, they were cheap when they were issued in the first instance. The Nonesuch electronic records are the proverbial Faust tapes in this way. Musically the progeny of Vladimir Ussachevsky and Milton Babbit, America's pioneering electronic composer and its protagonist for 12-tone serialism as derived from Schonberg, these cats were cut from a different cloth than the minimalists (though Terry Riley studied alongside Subotnick at The San Francisco Tape Music Center). Rather than being plugged into the Minimalist's influences (Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, Richard Maxfield, Peyote, Avant-Garde Jazz, Indian Classical and amplification in Rock) they were like enlightened college professors very much in the mould of Timothy Leary or Marshall Mcluhan*. Indeed the preoccupations of Mcluhan and Leary, which we could condense to one single idea, the electrification of the nervous system via Technology or LSD (cf The Global Village or Leary's Neuropolitique**) is the key to grasping this cavernous, introspective music. Identifying this has really clarified for me the extent to which both German and French Avant-Garde Electronic music is a spare limb of Existentialism. This distinctly American music is quite unique, very special.

These are nearly all the examples of Nonesuch electronica I could lay my hands on. The only two records I didn't care to pursue (which may also be excellent) are Gaburo's "Music for Voices, Instruments and Electronic Sounds", and Rudin's "Tragoedia for Electronic Music Synthesiser". In succinct Christgau style and in no particular order:

Charles Wuorinem: Time's Encomium

Which has no inflective dimension apparently! Plinky-plonky events occur in time durations linked to their own internal logic. Charles borrows Milton Babbit's RCA synth and doesn't mess with Miton's 12-tone presets, therefore serial by default. Side A moves along quite pleasantly, though never terribly unexpectedly, rather like a blind man vamping upon a hammond in an empty ballroom. Side B more manic and aleatory. Charles has a Guggenheim fellowship yet, I believe, isn't pretentious. B+

Iannis Xenakis: Electro-Acoustic Music

Klaxon! WOEBOT cheats. This is neither American nor Nonesuchian but Holzman licensing ace European electro totty. Gigantic, echoaic, clangorous soundworld, pots and pans turned in cement-mixer at bottom of well. Concret P-H: Icicles falling off cave ceiling. One of Xenakis's very finest recordings. A+

Computer Music: Randall, Vercoe and Dodge

Lots in the rubrick about the 3 sorts of synth software they're using. Randall in 12-tone delights in pinpoint precision of computer music and makes fidgety racket on "Quartets in Pairs". However his "Quatersines" beguils and the transparent switching of line between machine and voice on "Monologues by a mass murderer" is gripping. Barry Vercoe doesn't have the intensity of Stockhausen. Charles Dodge "Changes" like the Jazz band in Star Wars. B-

Eric Salzman: The Nude Paper Sermon

Gah! I been cheated! Hardly any electronics at all! Voiceover by actor Stacey Keach the kind of thing I'd find fascinating in British. Consort wheezes. Appallingly pompous. C-

Morton Subotnick: The Wild Bull

Heard this first at The Glasgow University Library. Patrick Gleeson must have clocked this on Herbie's "Sextant". Great moaning expanse of desolate plains. A

Charles Dodge: Earth's Magnetic Fields

I wanted this for ages! Find it impossible to believe this is an accurate transcription of Magnetic Data. Liner-notes bluff: "(Bartel's musical diagrams) are largely responsible for providing the motivation for the music contained in this album." Not Hardcore like Cage's "Atlas Eclipticalis". Disappointing, impressionistic, lo-fi noodling. B

George Crumb. Makrokosmos Volume One

Piano Amplified just a little bit louder than normal. Nice but no electric banana. C

Jacob Druckman: Animus III, Snapse, Valentine

Staggeringly good, sophisticated, fluid electronics. From 1971 showing huge leaps forward in programming grace. Side B sees subtle shift into skronky clarinet and contrabass. A

The Nonesuch guide to Electronic Music

Recently reissued on CD. It's not all dry illustration there are a number of bad tunes within. A whole heap of fun. A

Morton Subotnick: Silver Apples of The Moon

Title deriving from Yeats poem. Though Side A is jazzy alap, Side B is justifiably classifiable as the original techno record, grasping before (m)any recordings electronics' motorik power. A+

Donald Erb: Music for Instruments and Electronic Sounds

Electronics in a live setting reduced to sounding a little too like flava for contemporary orchestral music. B-

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Michael Czajkowski: People the sky

Not on Nonesuch but Vanguard however (slightly more than something like Tonto's Expanding Head Band "Zero Time") this qualifies as being an honorary Nonesuch Electronica record. Composed on the same synth as Subotnick's work and in cahoots with him, Czajkowski's career was like many of these other composers tied up in education. There is an excellent review and interview with Michael by The Seth Man at Head Heritage. Organic, poetic, narcotic. This too, with its eldritch blocked-out rhythms, like "Silver Apples", is light years ahead of its time. A+

* I always think Leary is more like a college professor than one might think and McLuhan (confusingly) more like a mystic.
** The ideas in which illuminate one's understanding of Kraftwerk
*** In case you're interested I paid an average of $13 a piece for these records. I only bought four online, amongst which the Nonesuch box cost me a paltry $13.