Dockstader, Todd & James Reichert - Omniphony 1
SKU
RERTODD1
"In the early 1960s Tod Dockstader was a young maverick composer of electronic organised sound, and James Reichert a film composer and music supervisor. They met in New York in 1963, and launched one of the most extraordinary collaborations in modern music, a unique attempt to integrate electronic sounds and the classical orchestra. Unlike Vareses Deserts, and Stockhausens Kontakte, it does not merely have the orchestra play along with a tape, or even process orchestral sounds live. What makes this project unique is that the orchestra was transformed by electronic processes at a fundamental level, and organically fused with the purely electronic sounds. Dockstader started by providing taped cells, short electronic phrases made up of both purely electronic sounds, and processed recordings of natural sounds. Reichert then composed orchestral music around these cells. The orchestra was recorded at a session at Gotham Recording studio in New York and next the recordings were taken to Robert Moogs studio, where the composers spent two days running the tapes through his filters and ring modulators, matching the orchestral sounds with the electronic cells. The final edit was done by Reichert, piecing together the processed orchestra and the original cells. The piece was finally completed in 1967, four years after it was begun, and released on the Owl label. The completed work is a bizarre blend of Dockstaders fundamentally intuitive approach to sound, and Reicherts more conservatoire-based feeling for melody and orchestration. It's not simply an important historical document, but an intriguing and entirely convincing listen; a truly extraordinary combination of electronic and orchestral textures, in which the orchestra seems to have been drenched in Technicolor, and dragged through a cartoon sound studio. The disc contains two other compositions by Tod Dockstader. Study no.7 dates from 1961. Past Prelude dates from 1990." "The finest composer who ever worked in the medium of sounds assembled on tape"-OP