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Nowadays, you can go to any supermarket and pick up, say, three samplers, four synthesizers, and a drum computer, along with your daily groceries. Of course things haven't always been this way: There once was a time when, if you wanted to make electronic music, you had to build your own equipment or spend hours and hours welding small pieces of tape together. Alternatively, you could go to a government-funded research facility where scientists in white lab coats spent their days building the most fantastic machines, which would produce strange bleeps and buzzes if you programmed them correctly.
On 'Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music 1948-1980' you'll find 42 tracks that document this period. If you, like me, don't really know a lot about illustrious forebears such as Stockhausen, Pierre Schaeffer or Luc Ferrari, these three CDs are a godsend. All those major composers and pieces you've seen namedropped before - and quite a few unknown ones (unknown to non-scholars, at least) - make an appearance. You'll find, amongst others, a rendition of Edgar Varese's 'Poem Electronique', an excerpt from Stockhausen's 'Kontakte', Laurie Spiegel's 'Appalachian Grove' featured alongside the opening tune of the movie 'Forbidden Planet', and a nice ambient (no, not the Orb) piece by Brian Eno. Excellent stuff. If nothing else, this boxed set will show you that current artists like Carsten Nicolai or Sonic Boom/E.A.R. aren't operating in an historical vacuum, but are in fact continuing an historical tradition that's well over half a century old (curiously enough, the oldest piece on this collection dates from 1937, not 1948, as you would expect).
If you work your way through the three CDs, you'll discern a distinct progression, from the collage pieces and primitive bleeps of the early years to the more abstract experimentations of the 1970s. To ears that have grown up in the 1990s, the tracks on the last CD sound the most recognizable and familiar, as they contain ideas which are still being explored by artists today. 'Appalachian Grove', for example, could have easily been an Autechre track, except that it's from 1974. Maryanne Amacher's piece 'Living Sound, Patent Pending Music for Sound-Joined Rooms Series', on the other hand, sounds like an E.A.R. space-drone, while Jon Hassel's 'Before and After Charm (La Notte)' wouldn't look out of place on a Chain Reaction release. Of course this does not mean that current artists such as the aforementioned are simply clones of past masters; even though a lot of the ideas are somewhat familiar, most tracks on this boxed set sound rather blunt and coarse compared to the subtlety of present-day recordings on, say, Rastermusik or Mille Plateaux. This is not to say that they're bad, it just means that there has been more than a little development in electronic music since 1980, which shouldn't be surprising. There's some real gems lurking on this collection though, and if you have an interest in this kind of history, these CDs will definitely be worth your while. On the other hand, if you're an academic with a keen understanding of ancient electronica, you'll probably want to skip this, as it's more of a "Reader's Digest" of the history of electronic music than a collection of rare gems. But for those of you who came to abstract electronics from a decidedly non-academic background, there's a lot you can learn here, not to mention some stunning music. If you have some spare cash you want to get rid of, spend it on this. At the very least, you'll be able to impress your friends with your new-found knowledge.
http://www.kindamuzik.net/recensie/diverse-artiesten/ohm-the-early-gurus-of-electronic-music-1948-1980/524/
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