Tales From The San Diego Chargers Sideline

In the early 1970s San Diego was a sleepy Southern California Navy town on the Mexican border and a seemingly unlikely gathering point for some of the most innovative, unclassifiable American artists of their era. Yet the presence of Harry Partch - hobo composer, iconoclast and inventor of instruments such as the Harmonic Canon and Quadrangularis Reversum - and a newly established and highly experimental music department at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) ushered in a revolution that was as much social as it was musical. Drawing from the occult, self-realization and radical political movements of 70s Southern California, these artists sought to dismantle the established control systems of American life, looking to the future even as they sometimes referenced a distant, idyllically imagined past. In their pursuit of “Irrelevant Music” - Kenneth Gaburo’s term for an untainted music free of constraint and compromise - these disparate artists constitute a shadow history of American experimental music far removed from the European and East Coast models of the time. Sonic Meditations, compositional linguistics, microtonality, invented instruments, cutting edge electronics, underwater synthesizers, Tibetan throat singing, environmental sound and pure noise were their tools. My 2023 book, Alien Territory: Radical, Experimental and Irrelevant Music in 1970s San Diego, presents the story. In this collection are the sounds.

In the early 1970s San Diego was a sleepy Southern California Navy town on the Mexican border and a seemingly unlikely gathering point for some of the most innovative, unclassifiable American artists of their era. Yet the presence of Harry Partch - hobo composer, iconoclast and inventor of instruments such as the Harmonic Canon and Quadrangularis Reversum - and a newly established and highly experimental music department at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) ushered in a revolution that was as much social as it was musical. Drawing from the occult, self-realization and radical political movements of 70s Southern California, these artists sought to dismantle the established control systems of American life, looking to the future even as they sometimes referenced a distant, idyllically imagined past. In their pursuit of “Irrelevant Music” - Kenneth Gaburo’s term for an untainted music free of constraint and compromise - these disparate artists constitute a shadow history of American experimental music far removed from the European and East Coast models of the time. Sonic Meditations, compositional linguistics, microtonality, invented instruments, cutting edge electronics, underwater synthesizers, Tibetan throat singing, environmental sound and pure noise were their tools. My 2023 book, Alien Territory: Radical, Experimental and Irrelevant Music in 1970s San Diego, presents the story. In this collection are the sounds.

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