Early ElectroMIX #30

Recorded (on 10/04/2021) for our series broadcasted on Modular-Station
https://modular-station.com

Tracklist:

Ivo Malec – Dahovi (1970 / Philips) 00:00 > 06:33
Alvin Curran – Canti Illuminati [For Voice, Synthesizer, Tape] (1982 / Fore) 03:19 > 29:34
Bruno Maderna – Continuo (1958 / Limelight) 25:10 < 32:50
Dub Taylor – Lumière For Synthesized & Concrete Sounds (Medley) (1972 / Varèse) 32:45 > 38:36
Val Stephen – Abstractum The Electrogenic Music of Val Stephen (1972 / Dual Planet) 38:02 > 49:20
Henri Pousseur – Seismogramme I-II (1956 / Sub Rosa) 46:38 > 51:15
Luc Ferrari – Visage V (1968 / Limelight) 50:49 > 01:00

Ivo Malec – Dahovi (1970 / Philips)

Ivo Malec was a Croatian-born French composer, music educator and conductor.
The young Croatian who moved to Paris in 1959, thanks to the hospitality of Henri Dutilleux, was not as young as his slim and elegant silhouette suggests. At the age of 34, he was already an experienced composer, having already composed a piano sonata, various chamber works, a symphony, and works for the stage and ballet. Coming from a rather ‘classical’ background, he met Pierre Schaeffer who turned him into one of the most important leaders of the Groupe de recherches musicales.
The creation and manipulation of objets musicaux (“musical objects”), as Pierre Schaeffer named them, did not put Ivo Malec on a new path of composition so much as on a new path of thinking about music, starting with a closer listening and a greater understanding. This new experience was particularly rewarding in the hands of a “traditionally” trained classical musician. The composer’s second realisation was no less fundamental: drawing upon the methods of organisation of the musique concrète sounds developed at the Groupe de Recherche Musicale, Ivo Malec discovered that these could also be perfectly applied to instrumental composition. Thus arrived Sigma in 1963, a dazzling composition only ten minutes in length that was performed throughout Europe and is opening this great album try in the famous Prospective 21e Siècle series. In 1972, Ivo Malec was entrusted with the composition class of the Conservatoire de Paris. All the composers who studied under him until the beginning of the 1990s (amongst them Philippe Leroux, Gérard Pesson, Frederic Durieux, Eric Tanguy, and Denis Dufour) share the same memory: this was not a class in the traditional, but rather a place for meetings and exchanges about music in general.

« Dahovi » was composed in 1961, and the title means “breaths” or “respiration” in Croatian. The piece grew out of Malec’s work with the filmmaker Piotr Kamler for the film « Reflets » (1961) and employs as its basic material “white noise … in a poetic sense” with great games of constant mixing, agglomerations and tensions. It stands at an early stage of Malec’s electroacoustic output, an example of his “Études” around sound objects, building on the techniques and conceptual framework inherited from Schaeffer’s musique concrète.
The main “object” in Dahovi is breathing (inspiration and expiration) and white noise — that is, a broad-spectrum noise. The piece manipulates this source rather than layering many different sound types. Because of this reduced material palette, texture, density, and transformation become central: subtle variations, superpositions, filtrations, temporal shifts. According to commentary: “the sound material … tries to express itself more by its own variation or multiplication than by the addition of new elements.” The term “agglomerations and tensions” suggests that the piece builds clusters of sound, overlapping breaths/noises, perhaps with slight delays or echoes, shaping a sound-mass rather than a linear melody or rhythm.
Breathing is both life-giving and fragile: by turning attention to breaths, Malec perhaps evokes life, presence, vulnerability. At the same time, the white noise base evokes void, emptiness, air. The interplay suggests existential or metaphysical resonance.
The transformation of breath into material sound suggests a transmutation: the human gesture becomes abstract, becomes “sound matter”. One could interpret it as reflection on the boundary between human and nature, life and sonic atmosphere.
The absence of “new elements” (only variation of existing material) points to a meditative, introspective approach — less dramatic contrast, more subtle evolving scenario. Obviously « Dahovi » is a foundational work in Malec’s electroacoustic oeuvre: it marks his early engagement with the studio, sound objects, and concrete techniques + also illustrates how he adopted Schaeffer’s ideas of “objet sonore” (sound object) and applied them in a pure studio piece, moving away from purely instrumental traditions. It precedes his mixed-media and orchestral works which bring studio methods into instruments; thus Dahovi is a laboratory piece, but one that sets the ground for his later “studio → instruments” synthesis.

Alvin Curran – Canti Illuminati [For Voice, Synthesizer, Tape] (1982 / Fore)

Alvin Curran is an American composer, performer, improviser, sound artist, and writer. A genuine pioneer who – in the mid 60s – was the co-founder, with Frederic Rzewski and Richard Teitelbaum, of Musica Elettronica Viva using Synthi AKS and Serge system from the early 70s. Following his involvement in the live electronics performance group MEV, Curran composed his third album embarking on a more personal pursuit utilizing his own voice and a patchwork of minimal synthesizer and field recordings. Curran’s music often makes use of electronics and environmental found sounds. He was a professor of music at Mills College in California until 2006. He still releases music today and stayed curious and open-minded, we @ Modulisme even had the great privilege to release his music on our Session 35…

« Canti Illuminati » is described as one of Curran’s major works of his “golden era” of solo and mixed media works, combining voice, choir, synthesizer, tape and piano. The title itself suggests “illuminated songs” or “enlightened chants” — and Curran explicitly states it is “a tribute to the human voice, the most natural source of music” and an exploration of the origins of music itself. It sits at the intersection of American experimental music (minimalism, improvisation) and European electroacoustic / voice-music tradition.
The texture is layered, with multi-stratifications of vocal lines, sustained tones, ripple‐effects, repeated or evolving patterns, synthetic low pulses or voice fragments creating a temporal sense of expansion and suspension, rather than fast development or frequent contrast. While influenced by minimalism (e.g., loops, drones) the piece extends beyond pure repetition into emotional, layered, almost spiritual terrains. Furthermore the term “canti” (songs/chant) and “illuminati” (illuminated, enlightened) suggest ritualistic, meditative, or sacred connotations which offer a vision of voice in the electronic age: not simply sampled or manipulated, but embedded in texture and ritual.

Bruno Maderna – Continuo (1958 / Limelight)

Many Moons ago I was collecting every release in the Prospective 21e Siècle series, buying at first sight as they weren’t yet expensive… I wasn’t ready to fully understand the music back then, but returning to each, decades later, I certainly was blissed I had gathered so many. Here’s another glorious entry offering 4 essential composers and this time let’s welcome Bruno Maderna who played a crucial role in the early postwar development of Italian music both as a teacher and conductor. In 1955 he co-founded the Studio di Fonologia Musicale at RAI in Milan (with Luciano Berio) for exploration of electronic music. He presided over the early careers of Luigi Nono, Luciano Berio, Franco Donatoni, Aldo Clementi and others. In his conducting career he specialized in the performance of new music which led him to regard West Germany as his second country and eventually he settled in Darmstadt, which he first visited in 1951. He taught conducting, composition and analysis at a number of educational facilities, including: the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music, Darmstadt, Germany; Milan Conservatory, while creating an incredible body of work at the Studio di Fonologia Musicale della RAI Radio televisione Italiana in Milan from 1956 to 1962, using magnetic tape, traditional instruments as well as a Melochord (a monophonic electronic keyboard instrument, invented in 1947 by Harald Bode).
From 1961 to 1966, Maderna and Pierre Boulez were the main directors of the Internationales Kranichsteiner Kammer-Ensemble in Darmstadt. In 1972 he won an Italian Prize and in 1974 he was posthumously awarded the Beethoven Prize from the city of Bonn.

« Continuo » emerged at a pivotal moment: between serial/instrumental avant-garde and the newly forming world of fixed-media (tape) electronic music. Maderna used it to investigate time, transformation, and texture rather than pure pitch-based development, it belongs to his electronics/band-music period, and is noted as “built on the gradual transformation of a single flute sound through 22 stages of slow progression without discontinuity”.
According to a festival programme note: the title refers to “continuous evolution of sound-events covering the temporal space from sustained sounds to granular ones, with timbre as the predominant parameter”. Time in Continuo is perceived as processual: the track of the flute sound is prolonged, stretched, metamorphosed. The listener becomes aware of the passage of time by change of texture, not by recurring motif or rhythm. It invites deep listening to how sound changes.
Significant in Maderna’s oeuvre It reflects a broader historical shift in the 1950s: composers turning to studio, tape, electronics as new instruments and medias for musical thought. Maderna thus participates in the lineage of the Italian electronic school but takes it further by focusing on continuity, metamorphosis, and timbre, rather than only on technology or novel sounds. No doubt that such piece has influenced later composers in exploring how an instrumental identity can persist through, or vanish under, processing — important for later electroacoustic, granular, spectral music.

Dub Taylor – Lumière For Synthesized & Concrete Sounds (Medley) (1972 / Varèse)

Once again the Belgian label Sub Rosa deserves high praise for reissuing this forgotten piece of history from American composer, producer, engineer and graphic designer Dub Taylor who had studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Lumière evolved over a period of three years from 1969 to 1972.I started by recording random sounds: Jets taking off at LAX, my girlfriend laughing and screaming, my cat Bartok biting a microphone, conversations, etc. I also sampled music, film soundtracks and TV and radio broadcasts. During this period I acquired the first self-contained portable synthesizer, the newly-designed ARP 2600. I began to envision an electronic and Musique Concrete piece combining various natural and processed sound recordings with synthesized sound into a suite of noise. In June of 1972 I did a preliminary version of elements of the piece. By October I was ready to put it all together. I set up all these reel to reel machines with tapes I had pre-recorded and plugged them into a mixing board, feeding stereo to a two-track master 15 IPS Revox A77 tape deck. My idea was to create a sound collage with form but without losing spontaneity and an element randomness. So I rehearsed my fade-ins and fade-outs and the starting and stopping of the various playback decks and when I was ready I went for it, ‘playing’ all these machines like a musical instrument in this mad moment of creation. In effect, Lumière was a ‘live’ performance. The only later additions were the silence gaps inserted near the end of the piece using pieces of blank leader tape.
Dub Taylor

In 1972 he founded Varèse International, which became later Varèse Sarabande in 1977. In the 70s he established the Vargod Studios for electronic music and recorded sound. Taylor has bounced between the music world and the visual arts for most of his life and continues to pursue diverse creative projects.

Val Stephen – Abstractum The Electrogenic Music of Val Stephen (1972 / Dual Planet)

A lost collection of home studio tape manipulations and VCS3 synthesizer experiments from the unsung Australian composer Val Stephen. A practising medical anaesthetist turned electronic music innovator, Stephen began his forays into electronic and tape music in the late 1950s and early 1960s, building his own equipment (ring modulators, noise generators) and working mostly independently of academic studios. Throughout the following decades he created a remarkable personal archive of uncharted electronic compositions and experimental music sketches using a range of resourceful tools, pioneering techniques and a VCS3 from EMS. With only two of his compositions ever published (Folkways – Electronic Music. 1967) this reissue from Dual Planet caused a sensation offering a window into a lightly known but historically important figure in early electronic music—especially in Australia—whose work sits between amateur inventiveness and serious studio experimentation.

The label notes that Stephen’s work is “a hallucinogenic hybrid of sedated synthesis & primordial musique concrète” and regards him as a pioneer in the Australian electronic-music scene.
Stephen’s dual identity (anaesthetist + electronic musician) may give his music a metaphorical dimension of altered consciousness, meditative states, or sound as anaesthetic/threshold experience. His outsider-status (working outside academic studios) fostered a DIY aesthetic, giving the music a raw, inventive quality—exploration for its own sake rather than for institutional recognition.
Historically, Stephen’s Australian context is significant: early electronic music in Australia was less institutionally supported than in Europe/USA, so his work represents an important thread of independent experimentation in a less documented region. Abstractum (and Stephen’s broader output) helps to expand the geography of early electronic music: tape, synthesis, and home-studio techniques and certainly fills in a gap in the history of electronic/experimental music: Stephen is described as the first Australian to have electronic music released commercially on an international label. It is inspiring for how it blends bricolage, innovation, and personal vision. It invites rethinking the binary of “academic studio” vs “underground experiment”.

Henri Pousseur – Seismogramme I-II (1956 / Sub Rosa)

Henri Pousseur was a composer who studied at Liège & Bruxelles music conservatories. He worked alongside Boulez, Stockhausen, Berio on dodecaphonic, serial and Electronic music in Cologne (1954) and Milano (1957) before founding his own studio in Bruxelles (1958). In parallel he taught composition in Darmstadt, Cologne, Bâle, Buffalo, and then Liège before directing the city music conservatory while enjoying a world-respected career in the avant-garde.
In the summer of 1956, at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, he met Luciano Berio, who invited him to come to Milan to work at the Studio di fonologia musicale of Radio Milan and there he created this gem being his first Electronic work. At the Studio di fonologia, Pousseur discovered a special filter designed by Dr Alfredo Lietti, the technical director of the studio. This device enabled selecting, by setting the filter’s threshold, material from a complex sound phenomenon, or the opposite, progressively increasing the attenuation. In other words, various more or less dense “skimmed off” bandwidths can be isolated from the same stockpile of sounds. Studio technician Marino Zuccheri assisted Pousseur in compiling a supply of suitable sounds for his composition.
Once again a reissue from Sub Rosa in their “Early Experimental Electronic Music” series of CDs. MERCI.

The title « Séismogrammes » (literally “seismograms”) evokes recordings of disturbances, tremors, waves — a metaphor for sonic tremors or electronic fluctuations.
The piece was among the earliest European studio works and Pousseur regarded it as a “study” in electronic sound, layering sound-objects and processes; one source says:

“In the first part of his electronic study Séismogrammes (1954) there are ‘living’ sound-mixtures, made of separate layers (each of which contains several sine-tones) … these intensity curves had to be adjusted manually in the Cologne studio.”

The idea of “living mixtures” suggests that Pousseur was interested not just in fixed tones but in dynamic evolution of those tones (change of amplitude, overlap, blending). The metaphor of a seismogram suggests fluctuation, emergence, fall-away, possibly modelled on waves or tremors rather than conventional melody/rhythm, forming a “continuum acoustic space-time” which was likely influenced by Webern who had theorized. that sound could be regarded as a continuum within the total sound-space for which the five determinants are limited by our own sense of audibility. Continuum alluring to the seismic activity or earth movement; the sonic field is “shaken”, layered, fluctuating. This gives the piece a sense of unstable equilibrium, of listening to energies beneath the surface.
Of course « Séismogrammes I-II » is historically important because it marks Pousseur’s entry into electronic music and is among the earliest Belgian/European tape-studio works. It also showcases a philosophical/technical direction: an interest in sound as object, texture over melody, time as process — parameters that become central in later electroacoustic music. To cut a long story short, this work is a landmark early electronic piece that blends technical experimentation with conceptual ambition. It draws on Pousseur’s deep interest in sound as material, time as process, and the relationship between human gesture and machine control. For those interested in the development of electronic and tape music in Europe, it offers an important example of how the studio became a compositional instrument.

Luc Ferrari – Visage V (1968 / Limelight)

Luc Ferrari (1929–2005) wandered through sound like a flâneur through a city — curious, attentive, slightly mischievous.
A student of Messiaen and Schaeffer, he learned the rules of structure and immediately began to dissolve them. At the GRM in Paris, he helped invent musique concrète — and then betrayed it, gently, by letting life itself into the studio.
While others purified sound, Ferrari dirtied it — with laughter, traffic, whispers, wind. His tape recorders became diaries: “Presque rien” (1967–70) turned the morning of a Dalmatian village into a symphony of real life.
He called this anecdotal music — music that tells stories, but without words; where the world performs itself.
Between control and chaos, Ferrari composed as one might breathe: observing, editing, remembering. His works — from “Hétérozygote” to “Far-West News” — are invitations to listen differently, to hear the musicality of existence.
Luc Ferrari: the composer who made silence hum, who found poetry in the refrigerator’s buzz and eternity in a passing sound.

« Visage » is a « mixte work » for 10 instruments (2 flutes, 2 trombones, trumpet, double bass, piano, 3 percussions). Ferrari composed this work in 1957 and 1958 before before his arrival at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales of the R.T.F. (French Radio and Television). It represents an attempt at conquest of a certain number of degrees of an imaginary and already concrete range.
The first degree is the exploration of an interval located in the low register of the instruments.
The second degree is that of the unforeseeable events (accidents) causing a disturbance in the continuity.
The third degree is that of the superimposed rhythms, or the irregular iterations.
In the fourth degree, the dynamic profiles (variations of intensity) are superimposed producing slowly evolving sound screens.
The fifth degree represents a play of musical objects; transpositions of visual objects (various rhombuses, spirals, crosses and angles).
The sixth degree is that of the play with heights, dispersion and bringing together notes with variations of duration.
The seventh degree is a fast dance going slowly to high instruments (progressive disappearance of the low instruments).
The eighth degree completes the work by melodic structures that evolve near the high frequencies.