Synthesize Various Artists

In Cape Verde, we had no access to electronic instruments, said Tchiss Lopes, a Cape Verdean singer based in Rome. In Europe, we had access, but we had to adapt. Audiences expected electronic sounds, but we still stayed true to our sound. In the 1980s, that feeling transpired across Lisbon, Paris, Rotterdam, and Boston, as one the largest waves of migration from a single country, propelled by political instability and economic uncertainty, sent thousands of Cape Verdeans to the West’s cities.

February 2023; one of the longest-in-the-works titles in Creel Pone history has been this set, covering the four flexi-disc records originally issued in the back "pocket" of the 1969 titular book, co-edited by Harmonic-Tone Generator Inventor James Beauchamp & "Second-Order Cybernetics" Pioneer Heinz Von Forester (architect of the "Doomsday Equation" & proponent of eschatology, in general). I fortuitously came across a fairly thrashed copy in the upper wings of Avenue Victor Hugo Books on Newbury (R.I.P.; both to the shop & the street) during my first month of embarking on a Computer Music/Synthesis Degree in the early 90s & vowed to include it in the program… but it took until now (30 years later!) for archival-quality copies of the records to surface & cross the C.P. Framleiðsluskrifborð & the rest is (now, finally) history.

While twentieth century Swiss composers often synthesize the Latin and Germanic sources of their country’s inspiration in their aesthetics, it is to France that Pierre Wissmer (1915-1992) is resolutely attached, both in his life’s journey as in his artistic ideals. Imbued at first with a post-Ravellian neoclassicism, over the years his style has shifted toward a more distanced relationship with tonality and a more inner language. However, the refinement of the contrapuntal writing and instrumentation will always remain a constant feauture of his art.

In November 2016 The Cosmic Range released their debut record New Latitudes and immediately critical ears across the globe pricked up in response. Pitchfork described the record as "an intoxicating swirl of ambient drones, hypnotic Afro-funk, synth-powered psychedelia, and drifting piano reveries". The Wire claimed that New Latitudes "…makes bamboozling leaps back and forth between prog, krautrock, funk, Afrobeat and free jazz" and Electronic Sound contextualized The Cosmic Range thusly: "If Kamasi Washington is spiritual apprentice to sorcerer John Coltrane, then The Cosmic Range are the bastard offspring Seers of Miles Davis and Alice Coltrane, raised on George Clinton's mothership. Get some."