200e

i recommended this release to the list a few months ago.
it's worth reiterating the recommendation; this is some great music.

mitch brown who runs the label is a very excellent dude, he sorted
through literally 100's of hours worth of tapes to find the best of
the best...

On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 8:44 AM, amnesia <amni56@tpg.com.au> wrote:
> I assume quite a few of you collect and love early electronic music......
>
> I just bought Warner Jepson double CD on melon expander
>
> warner jepson "totentanz and other electronic works 1958-1973" double
> compact disc set
>
> * bugs at large (2:43) 1967
> * blood knot (7:27) 1970
> * skate date (0:41) 1970
> * laughter after (4:37) 1958
> * rirlwa (2:00) 1970
> * good humor man (2:34) 1967
> * jacks (1:36) 1967
> * jail gate crazy (1:03) 1958
> * splace (1:20) 1967
> * totentanz (35:05) 1967
>
> * the dog (1:53) 1970
> * for trying out loud (0:42) 1958
> * the big purr (0:58) 1958
> * the awakening (20:03) 1968
> * see is never all the way up (24:44) 1973
>
> ... by far the most anticipated early-electronic music reissue around
> these parts since it was announced a year or so back ; this double-disc
> collection of just about everything by bay-area outsider / composer
> warner (ne "warren") jepson, including his totemic (... and previously
> creel pwned) lp "totentanz" ::
>
>
> ... now why the melon expander didn't use that image on the cover is
> beyond me ... but i digress. what we do get here : a bunch of amazing
> bedroom-lineage electro-acoustic experiments dating back to 1958 (!!!) -
> most invoking mysterious bleep-infused landscapes with tons of
> psychedelic organ (played on an instrument hand-painted by bruce conner
> !!!) & tape mangling, prepared piano / strings & a few fairly harsh
> early/primitve synth-stunners done on the buchla @ mills & the
> experimental television center ... these lead up to the album's
> centerpiece ; the full 35-minute "totentanz" - of which i described (in
> reference to the o/p creel pone version) thusly ::
>
> ... this one that has "nurse with wound list" written all over it; yet -
> nary a mention in the notes to said 1979 lp and just about anyone
> anywhere on out on our global interweb... purportedly the score to a
> 1971 ballet by carlos carvajal, totentanz overwhelms us with its mystery
> while revealing only the most gratifying collection of sounds from the
> early electronic music canon imaginable ...
>
> the a-side piece contains a long section of tape-based concrète; lo-fi
> pre-industrial thudding, dissonant piano stabs. and much repetition
> (you'll want to crawl inside this bit and never come out...) - this
> gives way to a great blast of weird-synth patterns that closes out the
> side... on the flip there's even further mystery layers, which slowly
> give way to the most amazing bit of terry riley lineage repetitive
> minimal synth figuring and blasted spring reverb & gated riffing.
> completely awe-inspiring (with a demonic-looking cover depicting some
> sort of skeletons-and-ghouls-as-wedding-processional ceremony no less.)
>
> the second disc continues on in the same trajectory, with a few shorter
> pieces giving birth to the epic, 20+ minute "the awakening" & "see is
> never all the way up" ... of course, i'm going to go ahead and highly
> recommend this to just about anyone with even a passing interest in
> early electronic music's dalliance with 60s/70s psychedelic culture -
> it's a landmark release & mitchell brown has done a bang-up job w/the
> reissue, including contemporary liner notes from jepson & copious
> information as to his modus / motivations ... essential.
> melon expander press release...
> warner jepson
> "totentanz and other electronic works 1958-1973" 2xcd
> melon expander 005
>
> the act of dusting off old forgotten master tapes, and old people too,
> can reveal a myriad of results. crappy music that sounded great to the
> stoned performer at the time, crappy music that sounded great before
> time ate away at the tapes, great music trapped behind various
> complications, or, in the case with warner jepson, great music from a
> composer enthusiastic about revisiting it.
>
> jepson recorded over 200 " tape reels full of electronic sounds at the
> san francisco tape music center, mills college and the national center
> for experiments in television (ncet). some of them were used as
> soundtracks for theatre productions and art films, and some were heard
> ephemerally at art galleries, parties and "happenings" in the late 60's
> and early 70's. only one document was ever released - the soundtrack to
> totentanz, a theatre work by carlos carvajal, on an lp that yielded a
> circulation of only 300 copies in 1971.
>
> this 2xcd release is a reissue of that totentanz lp plus many other
> pieces that vary in content from his late 50's "musique concrete"
> experiments to rhythmic prepared piano and tape pieces to sprawling
> meditative sound paintings done on the 100 and 200 series buchla
> synthesizers. the opening track "bugs at large" might bring to mind
> synthetic rhythms that weren't commonly heard until 20+ years later in
> the "techno" genre of late 80's detroit. aside from totentanz, none of
> these works have been heard by anyone in well over 30 years.
>
> he worked with many people who may be on the radar of folks buying this
> cd. whether it was taking photographs of steve reich or john cage,
> playing piano in terry riley's first ensemble of "in c", or scoring the
> soft-core porno "luminous procuress" starring the cockettes, jepson kept
> busy in a vital time for creative art and music. though somehow it seems
> he's slipped through the cracks of time and needed a healthy dusting
> off. this release happily rides the coattails of his re-emergence:
> inclusion in the "visual music" exhibit at the los angeles moca in 2005
> (the 1973 video work "illuminated music" with stephen beck) and spring
> 2008's "california video" exhibit at the getty center (a 50 minute solo
> video/sound work made at the ncet in '75).
>
> the cd booklet features liner notes by the composer as well as paintings
> he made in the late 50's.
>
> sounds have always been attached to some real and material object that
> emanated them, followed the same course as their source. but with the
> advent of tape and recorders after wwii, this was no longer true. sounds
> no longer would be derived from what one saw or could see. with the tape
> recorder musicians could revel in unknown worlds of sound. and that we
> did, splicing, re-ordering, reversing, speeding up and slowing down
> sounds to see what we could find or create. with the sounds a tape
> recorder could make, the mind would imagine new unseen objects with
> unheard-of-before sounds because the sounds did not come from an object
> one could see. unknown objects would be evoked from new sounds and these
> new unknown objects lay in the mind's imagination.
>
> furthermore, inertia and speed always had a hand in the shape of sound,
> how it began and ended. thanks to magnetic tape, a sound could start and
> stop and last longer and be louder than could a sound from a real
> object. to this extent it paralleled what a musician did when he made a
> musical sound, struck one or shaped one into a melody. but musique
> concrete were sounds drawn from non-musical things, any thing, and could
> be altered to resemble no thing anyone had even known, seen, or heard.
> then there were rhythms, new and strange, beyond what a human could
> accomplish. manipulating tape sounds produced accidentally and
> unpredictably incomprehensible and unimaginable rhythms. it was in 1957
> in ann halprin's basement studio that i put together my first musique
> concrete piece for her branch dance.
>
> around this time i started taking and printing photographs, explored oil
> painting and entered the sfmoma annual with a 4x4 ft
> painting/construction of piano keys, undershirts and paint tubes. 1961
> saw a 6 month run of helen adam's ballad opera san francisco's burning
> for which i played my piano score of 60 songs.
>
> this new world of sound was expanded further when don buchla created in
> 1963 his first and glorious 100 series synthesizer and installed it in
> the sf tape music center at 321 divisadero st. the sequencer--the name
> meant something completely different from later sequencers-- hooked me.
> it made rhythms that were fast, rare, and instantly changeable. the
> syncopations possible were terrific. my first small piece was used for
> ''the lovers" scene in totentanz.
>
> soon after, the tape center and the buchla box were moved to mills
> college where pauline oliveros and then tony gnazzo became its
> caretakers. the doors to the studio there were never locked then; i
> would reserve the 8pm time slot and stay as long as i wanted.
> occasionally i would find nothing and go home early and dejected. i had
> no mastery over this magical machine.
>
> i took my first discoveries to a party; everyone was fascinated. the sf
> art institute asked me to play them at noon for the students. painter
> lee adair asked if i'd play them at her opening, leading to a long
> stream of openings including two very large ones for the museum of
> modern art. the usual string trio was now replaced by four huge rock and
> roll speakers in the four corners of the marble rotunda; the sound
> spread out into the halls and galleries. i found one man dressed in a
> business suit sitting smack in front of one of those behemoths; god
> knows what he was experiencing. one elegant elderly lady passing me said
> the music was 'sexual'. i would never argue the point.
>
> in my nights at mills over the next three years i recorded 200 half hour
> reels of sounds that i would use at parties, openings, exhibits, films,
> theater, ballet, even a saks 5th ave fashion show by oscar de la renta.
> i have used only a fraction of these reels. so much needs to be
> transferred to semi-permanent medium.
>
> james broughton, not long after i'd scored his film the bed, put me in
> touch with a fellow student, carlos carvajal, who needed a composer for
> the work he was choreographing for the sf ballet. he described the
> scenes i would score and explained a time-sensitive situation. i spent
> the following nights into the mornings at mills combining musique
> concrete and buchla synthesized sounds into the 40 minute score, taking
> segments into carlos's sessions with his dancers to see if they worked.
> in a month, during which my son was born, we were done. totentanz opened
> april 1 st, 1967 at the s.f opera house. a few patrons walked out in the
> third section, as i expected, where the sounds were mostly sine waves
> and not very rhythmic. carlos left the sf ballet to form his own
> company, dance spectrum. he revived totentanz in the spectacular space
> of grace cathedral in feb 1971 and repeated it every other year until
> '82. the gothic atmosphere and 7 -second echo did wonders. after the
> show i hawked my lps of the music. only somewhere near 300 copies
> circulated.
>
> in the mid 60's hi-fi manufacturers added quadraphonic sound to home
> systems. so i decided to make my next ballet for carlos quadraphonic.
> since the mills tape studio had only two, not four, ampex machines, it
> meant recording sounds from one machine to the other to make tape i,
> then doing the same to make tape ii, keeping in mind the sounds of the
> two tapes, for they had to mesh when played together. to check the mesh
> i had to play the two tapes on the two machines making sure they started
> together precisely. if something didn't mesh, i had to go back, record
> or erase sounds on one tape and then put on the other tape to listen to
> them again to check the mesh. things got even hairier further into the
> 20 minute score. a lot of time was spent lifting off and placing on the
> source tapes and the two master tapes; sometimes i'd lose track which
> recorder had which tape. on this cd the 4 tracks of the awakening have
> been combined down to two.
>
> in 1973, the national center for experiments in television had an
> opening for a composer-in-residence. when i inquired, it was suggested i
> score a video that stephen beck, inventor of his beck direct video
> synthesizer, was working on. one day i remember, pierre schaeffer,
> practically the founder of musique concrete, was visiting the n.c.e.t.
> the next day i was hired. the buchla synthesizer there was the next
> generation, the 200 series. it inspired me much less then the 100
> series, whose sounds seemed to reflect the earth and nature, animals and
> primitive mysteries from the ground. the 200 series made more
> electronic, pure sine waves, cold. it was difficult finding
> satisfaction; still i ended up scoring a 40 minute piece of scenes in
> the woods, then five more works which were broadcast on pbs.
>
> one, "see is never all the way up" was by artist william roarty. it was
> dark with an amorphous form, with little color and little movement
> except for its outline of shimmering dots. what to do? serve music with
> its own momentum or serve the momentum of the image? since sound relates
> to its source, i chose the latter, and made a sound that shimmered and
> barely moved. the sound made me think i was on a train listening to the
> track. i kept tied to roarty's image longer than i expected i could or
> should, but as often happens, what first seems too odd eventually can
> become intriguing and attractive.
>
> just before the n.c.e.t. died in 1975, i hooked 2 wires from the buchla
> box to larry templeton's fantastic video mixer and discovered images of
> extraordinary color. some of them are in the la getty california video
> exhibit of 2008.
>
> one evening i thought to do what many before me have done: stick
> something into the strings of the piano-maybe an eraser--to have a
> different sound. "rirlwa" & "the dog" came from these sessions. around
> this time bruce conner gave me his farfisa organ that he'd painted on.
> i'd mix it up with the prepared piano tunes. they were never to be heard
> by anyone until 30 years later by mitchell brown, the producer of these cds.
>
> - wj 2007
>
> ...
>
> disc 1 tracks 1, 6, 7, 9 are from tullium, the score to david william's
> environmental sculpture, hansen-fuller gallery, 1967
> disc 1 track 2 is from the score for blood knot; american conservatory
> theatre 1970
> disc 1 track 10 is the complete score for totentanz, a ballet by carlos
> carvajal 1967
> disc 2 track 4 is the score for the awakening, a ballet by carlos
> carvajal 1968
> disc 2 track 5 is the score for the roarty video see is never all the
> way up, national center for experiments in television (kqed) 1973
>
> all tracks performed and recorded by warner jepson 1958-1973
> laughter after, jail gate crazy, for trying out loud & the big putt
> assembled by mitchell brown, fall 2006
> mastered by thomas dimuzio at gench studios, san francisco, ca, 2008
> produced by mitchell brown
>
> all paintings (1957-1960) and photographs (2006) by warner jepson
> video synthesizer photos are stills from a video made at the ncet, 1975,
> by warner jepson
> design by ben wolfinsohn
>
> special thanks: ben wolfinsohn, thomas dimuzio, erik hoffman, joseph
> hammer, ken lee, don buchla, larry templeton, and rodney and his
> fantastic plastic record shop (where in 2002 the $100 totentanz lp was
> acquired, planting the seed for this release)
>
>
> ------------------------------------
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