Electronic

The electronic music emanating from the Scandinavian region encompasses a vast universe and has a long tradition behind it. In 1964 the electronic music studio EMS in Stockholm opened as a conventional analogue studio, its primary intention being to build the world’s most advanced hybrid studio and to conduct an international research program into sound and sound perception. Since then the Scandinavian electronic music scene has continued to flourish decade upon decade, culminating in the most recent ambient and minimalistic sound shapes. Unexplained Sounds Group, started researching Scandinavian electronic and experimental music in 2015 when it published the Scandinavian experimental underground 015 survey.

Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner have a unique musical companionship. Both artists bred the '80s British music scene into pop candy delight thanks to Marr's charming guitar hooks while fronting the Smiths, and Sumner, whose ingenuous lyrical poetry pushed New Order's dance-oriented sound into the new wave mainstream. But since their musical collaboration began back in 1991, the duo continues to make music for themselves, uninhibited by current norms and marketing success. Twisted Tenderness, the band's third album, is certainly a vast improvement over their sophomore effort, 1996's Raise the Pressure. Twisted Tenderness steps back into Marr's talented guitar work: carefree, a bit rollicking at times, but in classic Electronic fashion…

Both more and less than what a partnership of Sumner and Marr would promise, Electronic's debut has weathered time much better than might have been thought upon its release, but ultimately only half works. When it does, though, it's fantastic, sometimes shifting from okay to fantastic within the same song. Opening number "Idiot Country" is a bit like that - the beginning sounds a little too rushed, Marr's heavy wah-wah riff OK enough but Sumner's semi-rap/semi-sung vocals a bit ham-handed. By the time the full combination of gentle keyboards, crisp rhythms, and the gentle, reflective chorus comes to bear, though, everything feels just great. Perhaps understandably Electronic leans much more toward New Order than the Smiths - Marr had already proven his desire to work in dance-crossover since his previous band's breakup, while Sumner's immediately recognizable, melancholic vocals call to mind New Order's rich history…

Johnny Marr and Bernard Sumner have a unique musical companionship. Both artists bred the '80s British music scene into pop candy delight thanks to Marr's charming guitar hooks while fronting the Smiths, and Sumner, whose ingenuous lyrical poetry pushed New Order's dance-oriented sound into the new wave mainstream. But since their musical collaboration began back in 1991, the duo continues to make music for themselves, uninhibited by current norms and marketing success. Twisted Tenderness, the band's third album, is certainly a vast improvement over their sophomore effort, 1996's Raise the Pressure. Twisted Tenderness steps back into Marr's talented guitar work: carefree, a bit rollicking at times, but in classic Electronic fashion. The obvious rock-laden riffs carry the typical synth-generated backdrops, and Sumner's cheeky lyrics are stylish and breezy.

In 1950, the Columbia University Music Department requisitioned a tape recorder to use in teaching and for recording concerts. In 1951, the first tape recorder arrived, an Ampex 400, and Vladimir Ussachevsky then a junior faculty member, was assigned a job that no one else wanted: the care of the tape recorder. This job was to have important consequences for Ussachevsky and the medium he developed. Electronic music was born. Over the next ten years, Ussachevsky and his collaborators established the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, which Ussachevsky directed for twenty years. It was the first large electronic music center in the United States, thanks to the path-breaking support of the Rockefeller Foundation and encouragement from two of the country's leading universities. The Center became one of the best-known and most prolific sources of electronic music in the world.
All of the music on this historic reissue is the result of the pioneering work of the Center and its composers.

A.Shields - from the attached booklet

Vladimir Ussachevsky was one of the most significant pioneers in the composition of electronic music, and one of its most potent forces. Born in 1911 in Manchuria, China, Ussachevsky was the son of a Russian Army captain. His childhood was spent on the windswept and sparsely settled Manchurian plain, visiting with the nomadic tribesmen in their tents, and singing Old Slavonic chants as an altar boy in the local Russian Orthodox church. By the time he arrived in California, at the age of nineteen, he was a skilled pianist gifted in the interpretation of Romantic music, and a fluent improvisor. ……….
Unknown to Ussachevsky, the first experiments in tape and electronic music had begun two or three years earlier in France with the "musique concrète" of Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry and, one year before, in Germany with the founding of the Cologne electronic-music studio by Herbert Eimert. Ussachevsky's first experiments began in 1951 when the Columbia Music Department acquired an Ampex 400 tape recorder, which together with a microphone, a pair of earphones, and a borrowed Magnecord recorder, constituted the entire equipment of the first American electronic-music studio. ……..
It is perhaps not far-fetched to describe Ussachevsky as one of the most enigmatic and self-effacing figures in new American music after World War II. He was an intensely personal man who combined Old World charm and courtliness with humor and American get-up-and-go. He talked little about himself or the fact that he had been brought up in an unusual time and place that had already ceased to exist.

pout-pourri from the attached booklets

Slated as the final volume in Sub Rosa's long-running, much-lauded series, An Anthology of Noise & Electronic Music #7 collects 39 additional rare and unreleased pieces, focusing on electronic experiments, tape loop manipulations and works of musique concrète. Although the anthology contains just a handful of known names (Henry Cow, Justin K. Broadrick and John Oswald), the compilation focuses more on the performance and process than the artist.

Roland Kayn - Electronic Symphony I-III (1997) {2CD Set, Reiger-records-reeks KY-CD 9701-2}
EAC rip (secure mode) | FLAC (tracks)+CUE+LOG -> 694 Mb | MP3 @320 -> 335 Mb
Full Artwork @ 300 dpi (png) -> 13 Mb | 5% repair rar
© 1997 Reiger-records-reeks | KY-CD 9701-2
Experimental / Modern Classical / Cybernetic Music / Electronic / Musique concrète

In Kayn's Electronic Symphony series, the past and present continually encounter each other anew, each time casting new reflections on the given moment. Kayn's autonomous studio processes remove context from what he termed (markedly in the language of synthesis) the "carrier" material, for the most part music of the orchestral tradition at its most texturally oriented – even drone-like – but alternately seething and volcanic in its drama.