TS: Raymond Scott vs Oskar Sala

See also records made on Soviet-era ANS synthesiser.

They're both fantastic and you can't compare them (though some of the timbres are definitely similar). I'm still waiting on Basta's promised 2 CD of Scott's Electronium music.

now that I'm listening to Sala again I'm really loving the microtonal control of his melodies, the intervals just really leap out at you & the chords & drones backing them, they're deep. Sala's melodic sense is much more 19th/20th century romantic classical/impressionist than Scott's catchy pop jazz metrics.

xpost

but I think the record's still in print, you can buy it directly from the label: http://www.erdenklang.de/cdinfo1_en.asp?bestnr=70962.

so this is the only Sala thread

TS: "Dinner Music For A Pack of Hungry Cannibals" vs. "Speech of the Dead Christ from the Universe Saying There Is No God"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xrb5w9hsSzA

that's 1961, so right after Stockhausen's 'Cartridge Music' & years before Stockhausen's 'Mixtur' and all the other guys writing extensive program notes about 'live electronic music' and the vital need to begin exploring the potentials for improvisation in the new medium, and this guy's just over here in the corner 30 years into his career being completely taken for granted

Sala is completely and shockingly overlooked

1941 -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQ4wGucalpc

1987 video of him playing a similar model of the MixturTrautonium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zHaQPyG7u4

As the back of the record says "If anyone cares, this record has a dynamic range of 51 dB. Its lowest frequency is 15.4 cycles per second, its highest fundamental 3951 cps, the highest harmonis or overtone 15806 cps. It can blow out speakers, traumatize cats and arouse the landlord."

A few years before Metal Machine Music, that one.

I like it but I would've LOVED it more if I heard it at the ballet.

Only the Gassmann side was written for ballet; his side is good as well but a lot more traditionally romantic. Underneath all the delays & ringmod & microtonal riffing you can still hear all these notes grounded Sala's romantic roots, but otherwise, this is just Conrad Schnitzler territory.

I can see why he didn't quite fit in as radical enough in the emerging Cage/Stockhausen context for live electronics; in 1930 he was having pieces written for him by Hindemith, and his playing style built on the same context that presented the Theremin & Ondes Martenot as a classical/romantic instrument, but already by the 50's, this record, he's obviously already in completely abstract territory. Most of the historical recordings of his playing from the 40's/50's are all of the classical pieces -- this 'Five Improvisations' is the earliest recorded example of his solo abstract style, which I imagine he'd already been doing for decades but even a document of this in 1961 is still well in advance of what contemporaries were managing in real time

been working on a lecture on pre-1965 live performance electronic music instruments, and these youtubes were not online last time I went on a Sala run and they are killing me

100% synthetic birds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XER-YAkOiBs

so who knew that while Moog was doing initial research & developing his concepts for the modular, he was commissioned by this maverick composer Max Brand to build a working copy of the Mixtur Trautonium for him from scratch?

Trautonium does not come up as much as it should, but between Moog starting out building theremins, doing spec work for Raymond Scott & getting a demo from Scott himself of this thing he'd built called a sequencer, and getting copies of the schematics of the Trautonium as well as financial carte blanche to design a working copy... not to lessen Moog's accomplishments in the slightest, it took an incredibly clued in engineer to have a series of world class geniuses for his clients as a young man, and stitch together the best of all those designs... why hasn't this come up in a single documentary I've seen? why are these things footnotes?

http://moogfoundation.org/from-the-archives-moogtonium-discovered/

https://www.whosampled.com/sample/640062/Lizzo-Missy-Elliott-Tempo-Raymond-Scott-Nescafe/