National Recording Registry hears ‘Electronic Music’

electronic music album

Not all head music of the late 1960s came from heads.

In 1967, the avant-garde composers Steve Reich, Richard Maxfield and Pauline Oliveros offered separation visions of “New Sounds in Electronic Music” on an album composed of three otherworldly tracks.

While the album came out on CBS’ budget label Odyssey, its e-music legacy remains rich. And now the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress has added the album to its preservation list.

The latest Recording Registry list (for 2017), released March 21, 2018, has one other selection from the psychedelic era, the hippie holiday classic “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” from folkie Arlo Guthrie. The list also includes the Mississippi Sheiks blues classic “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” which decades later came up through the underground via Cream’s “Wheels of Fire.”

“New Sounds in Electronic Music” was the debut disc in composer/producer David Behrman’s adventurous “Music of Our Time” series for Odyssey. Even though the tracks came at the dawn of the synthesizer age, they were created with conventional tape machines.

Track 1, “Night Music” by Richard Maxfield, uses the supersonic bias signal of a tape recorder and a sawtooth waveform from an oscilloscope to create a 9-minute dreamscape. “Maxfield uses these sources to create a series of complex sounds intended to mimic the nighttime vocalizations of birds and insects,” the Registry notes.

Track 2, “Come Out” by Steve Reich, is built around repetitions of the spoken sentence “Come out to show them.” It ventures from the sparse to the surreal. The wording is “heard both on the left and right of the stereo field and timed so the two repetitions slowly fall in and out of sync,” the Registry says.

Track 3, “I of IV” by Pauline Oliveros, utilizes 12 tone generators, an 8-second tape delay, and feedback and reverb to create a 20-minute electronic epic. It’s “a dense, reverberant recording that was entirely improvised; individual sound will rise to the surface and fade only to repeat later and disappear altogether,” the Registry notes.

Despite the later fame of Reich, especially, the vinyl album saw only a handful of rereleases and the title apparently never was issued to CD.

“New Sounds in Electronic Music” joins Wendy Carlos’ 1968 synthesizer album “Switched-On Bach” and the 1967 Morton Subotnick electronic work “Silver Apples of the Moon” on the preservation list.

Here are the key psychedelic-era works already in the registry, which dates back to 2002: