The future of home listening pleasure literally yellowing before our eyes.
(Who did they think had the money to buy a whole extra set of speakers and wotnot?)
That's the inner sleeve to this record
The music's futurism hasn't yellowed one bit though - hear it here uploaded from a quadraphonic 8-track tape!
I must say I am curious what this avant-electronic stuff would have sounded like in quadraphonic, through the system suggested here.
A lot of your Stockhausen / Xenakis types created works designed to be heard in the concert hall environment through multi-speaker surroundsound systems - octophonic or more. Sound-clusters panning and veering and encircling the audience...
Eno didn't go far as quad but he did suggest using a triple-speaker system to get the most out of On Land.
Now that's a record I would love to hear exactly as its creator envisaged...
Then - not exhausting the subject, by any means - there is Flaming Lips's Zaireeka. Which is meant to be played on four CD players simultaneously - four different discs, four players, presumably eight speakers in total?
Mark Richardson wrote an interesting monograph on this album, as part of the 33&third series. He has actually heard Zaireeka, more than once if I recall, in the way that Flaming Lips suggested. But I should imagine it's not something that has happened very often with this album.
Someone has attempted to squish the four-becomes-one Zaireeka into a YouTube, with I suspect, unsatisfying results, given that the listener is hearing it through just 2 speakers.
Psychic TV used "Zuccarelli Holophonics" recording technology on their Dreams Less Sweet LP (1983). I picked up the cassette version second-hand around this time and had a listen. Can't remember any mind-expanding listening experience. Might've been my crappy personal stereo though . . .
ReplyDeleteYes I have that album - it's underwhelming, isn't it?
DeleteThere's other groups that have used it, I'm blanking on who, though. Pink Floyd? Or just other industrial / esoteric-underground type outfits?
Pink Floyd used Zuccarelli on "the final cut". Zaireeka, like it or not, it must be experienced as instructed, with sounds coming from different spaces, plus the inconsistencies due to the different speeds and timings of CD players. The stereo fold-down is awful.
ReplyDeleteIt would be great to listen to Stockhausen or Xenakis or Amacher (et al.) in dedicated halls with multiple speakers mixing. I have no idea if the possibility exists.
ReplyDeleteI think the first-time performance with quite a few of these works was in that kind of multi-speaker environment. Works by Xenakis and Varese's "Poeme Electronique" were played in public first at the Philips Pavilion, involving hundred-plus tiny speakers (or thereabouts) distributed through the interior. And there's a Stockhausen work that was aired at a world's fair style Expo in Tokyo in I think 1970, involving a kind of geodesic dome style auditorium, with the listeners located at the 'equator' and speakers both above and below the plane at which the listeners were situated. A total surroundsound thing.
DeleteCharles Ives was experimenting with polyorchestral music about half a century before Stockhausen did. Sadly, what would have been his most ambitious foray into the spatial aspect of music, his Universe Symphony, remained significantly unfinished at his death. Here's Charles Ives on his vision:
ReplyDelete"I started something that I had had in mind for some time: trying out a parallel way of listening to music suggested by looking at a view.
First, with the eyes toward the sky or tops of the trees, taking the earth or foreground subjectively (that is, not focussing the eye on it), and then
Second, looking at the earth and land and seeing the sky and the top of the foreground subjectively. In other words, giving a musical piece in two parts, but both played at the same time... the whole played through twice, first when the listener focusses his ears on the lower or Earth music, and the next time on the upper, or Heaven's music."
Here's another Charles Ives quote you might appreciate:
"Keep up our fight - art! - don't quit because the ladybirds don't like it."
(Ladybirds was Ives' name for the masses who preferred "pretty sounds" and accessible melodies).
Ah, that is interesting.
DeleteI believe Varese had similar ambitions with one of his pieces.