Brian's Got Some Electronic Avant Garde Music

(Scott....me first please)-Brian has been probably my most consistent helper since I've been doing this, the amazing stuff he has contributed (go back and look) are wonderful, unique, and should be welcome additions to anyone who has a taste for something a bit different than what we tend to see on those other "We are SUPERIOR to YOU blogs" (oh YES they are out there)......take it away my great friend Brian!

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I wanna tell you guys about a search for a song, and how it led me to an entire genre of music....

I've been a big F-Z fan for a long time. If you're around Frank's music long enough, eventually you hear the name of French composer Edgard Varèse. And while his classical pieces are easy enough to find, I was always looking for his song "Poem Électronique". After much digging, I came to find it had only ever been released on a few compilations, one of which is this one...

OHM: The Early Gurus Of Electronic Music was released in 2000 on Ellipsis Arts. It wasn't in print very long, and it became quite expensive. Luckily my search for it was around 2005, when it got a reissue and anUPGRADE (the new version included a DVD). I snapped it up quickly (from BestBuy.com of all places), and it went back out of print.

And an entire musical world opened up to me! I had never heard names like John Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Tod Dockstader, Pauline Oliveros, Pierre Schaffer, Milton Babbitt, and the like. I mean, all of this music is off the damn grid! And the title can be a little misleading; the word "gurus" carries hippie connotations that really don't apply here. 

And when they say "electronic" music, they don't mean techno, per se. Most of this material comes from the first two decades of the post-war period, with the rise of both technology and the avant garde. These innovations were based around places like the Columbia-Princeton EMC and the GRM studios in Germany. It wasn't all academia, though: there were plenty of homemade knob-twiddlers out there, too.

Summing up this massive 3 disc set would tax even my writing powers right now. There will be some pieces you like, and some you won't. This is definitely a "journey through sound", to use a hackneyed phrase. And if modern MIDI mix masters think they're good, see what these guys could do with tape, oscillators, and sequencers that fill a room! Really cool stuff. And if there's enough interest, I got plenty more where this came from.

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Again I gotta thank Brian, he keeps the  stuff fresh and original, he hasn't done any cover projects in a while (hint?), but what he brings to the table is indescribeable.....another tremendous submission, as ALL of our tremendous submissions tend to be.......

WHAT THE FUCK ELSE DO YOU EXPECT FROM THE BEST FUCKING MUSIC BLOG IN THE FUCKING UNIVERSE????????