When Miles Davis released Live-Evil in 1970, fans were immediately either taken aback or keenly attracted to its raw abstraction. It was intense and meandering at the same time; it was angular, edgy, and full of sharp teeth and open spaces that were never resolved. Listening to the last two CDs of The Cellar Door Sessions 1970, Sony's massive six-disc box set that documents six of the ten dates Davis and his band recorded during their four-day engagement at the fabled club, is a revelation now. The reason: it explains much of Live-Evil's live material with John McLaughlin.
Issued in 2020, ‘Bubblerock Is Here To Stay’ shone a spotlight on the lost and often murky world of early 70s British Pop, a scene largely controlled by old-fashioned, Denmark Street- based production/songwriting teams as the Rock world concentrated on the album market. Another four-hour 3CD set, ‘Bubblerock Is Here To Stay Volume Two’ treads the same neglected path to deliver more mouldy old dough from the era's backroom boys: crack songwriting teams (Cook/Greenaway, Carter/Lewis, Chinn/Chapman), hit-or-bust producers (Phil Wainman, Jonathan King), session singers (Tony Burrows, Sue And Sunny), and writers-turned-performers (Lynsey de Paul, Barry Blue, Phillip Goodhand- Tait).
Composing and generating sound via computer technology as early as the mid-'60s, Gottfried Michael Koenig was a pivotal force in cementing the emerging relationship between music and electronics. Born in Magdeburg, Germany in 1926, Koenig studied composition at the Detmold School of Music before relocating to Bonn, where he pursued his interest in computer engineering. Between 1954 and 1964, he worked alongside Karlheinz Stockhausen at the electronic music studios of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne, collaborating with other aspiring composers including György Ligeti and Mauricio Kagel; in 1956, Koenig completed his first major electronic piece, Klangfiguren II, followed a year later by Essay.