Archeologies of Electronic Music & Other Science Fictions

Play Vladimir Ussachevsky – Wireless Fantasy, 1960
Intro
This talk will trace a few interwoven paths thru electronic and synthesized music in relation
to industrial/post-industrial aesthetics and social space.
It’s not pretending to be a complete, or even sequential history of this music, and I’m not
claiming any special ethno-musiological or sociological knowledge.
Rather I’m approaching it as a fan of various kinds of music and as an artist who likes to
explore connections between things. In this case essentially between music and
technology and the utopian and distopian impulses that seem to accompany it’s use.
I hope it will be of interest and also provide some context for the project I’m currently
working on here at Izolyatsia.
If I’m lucky some of you might also share your knowledge and viewpoints on these sorts of
music too, as I’m sure many of you will have your own interesting understanding of what I’ll
be discussing.
Pic – Noise Machines
The Art of Noises
I’m going to start with something very iconic and well known for it’s connection between
art, music and machines, Luigi Russolo’s ‘noise machines’ which coincided with his
publishing the Futurist manifesto known as The Art of Noises.
Play Russolo’s Risveglio Di Una Città, (Awakening of a City) 1913
He performed numerous scandalizing concerts with these, usually as accompaniment to
classical orchestral instruments playing odd scores.
Pic – Noise Machines rebuilt
These are not electronic instruments but they do conform to a very basic idea of
synthesized or generated sound, in this case they are not trying to mimic real instruments
as many early synthesizers attempted, but the sounds of machines, sounds from the
factory and the industry of the early 20th c. which the Futurists celebrated and promoted
with a utopian fervor!
Pic – Russolophone 1930
It must have seemed at the start of the 20th c. that technology was hurtling along at a
terrific pace that threatened to either leave people behind or propel them into the future,
the Futurists were clear where they intended to be but elsewhere technological break
throughs not only inspired but literally created new possibilities and approaches to
producing sound and conceiving of music…
The Russian Avant-garde
A perfect early example of this is the Theremin or Termenvox as it was known in the Soviet
Union, another quite iconic and charasmatic machine which many of you will know. It’s one
of the first electronic musical instruments and the first to be mass produced.
Theremin playing his own Instrument

It was developed in 1919 by Lev Sergeyevich Termen a prodigous young physicist and
inventer while perfecting a high frequency oscillator to measure the dielectric constant of
gases with high precision, adding circuitry to generate an audio tone, he noticed the pitch
changed when his hand moved around. This is often seen has the first synthesiser but
although is has an amazing otherworldly sound it was consistently used to play classical
existing compositions often accompanied, like Russolo’s machines, by piano or even a
whole orchestra.
Pic – ANS melodya CD
Another arguably more radical departure into the world of electronic synthesized was
developed from the late 1930s onward through the part-time experiments of another
Russian inventer and engineer, Evgeny Murzin. This became known as the ANS (named
after earlier Russian composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, himself a synesthete and
pioneer of atonal music )
Pic – ANS in basement
The ANS synthesizer is a photoelectronic musical instrument based on the technological
breakthrough of graphical sound recording used in cinematography, which made it
possible to obtain a visible image of a sound wave, as well as to realize the opposite goal
—synthesizing a sound from an artificially drawn sound wave.
Play Edvard Artemiev – 12 looks at the world of sound
The sine waves generated by the ANS were printed onto five glass discs using a process
that Murzin (an optical engineer) developed himself. Each disc had 144 individual tracks
printed onto it, for a total of 720 microtones (discrete pitches), spanning 10 octaves. The
modulated light from these wheels was then projected onto the back of the synthesizer’s
interface.
Pic – ANS in basement c/u
The user interface is perhaps the most unusual aspect, a glass plate covered in a sticky
resin, is drawn or scratched into allowing light to pass through it. In front of the glass plate
sits a vertical bank of twenty photocells that send signals to twenty amplifiers and
bandpass filters, each with its own gain adjust control. The ANS is fully polyphonic and will
generate all 720 pitches simultaneously if required (a vertical scratch would accomplish
this)
Pic – SOLARIS Cover
The track we’re listening to is Edvard Artemiev – 12 looks at the world of sound, fittingly the
best known ANS pieces are his film soundtracks for Cosmos and Tarkovsky’s Solaris /
Stalker
Although radical departures in sound both these where still used primarily alongside or
comparably to classical composition.
Pic – Stockhausen’s score 1
Musique Concrete
The first electronic composition considered by many to be high art in it’s own right is
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Studie I from 1953.
Study #1 play while talking… (quiet 10 minutes)
Created using additive synthesis and confining his audio source to sine wave oscillators,
he devised specific relationships between frequencies, duration, amplitude, and envelope
shapes. Different frequencies with different volume envelopes were recorded onto different
tracks of a four-track tape deck. Through splicing and bouncing tracks, Stockhausen
explored new levels of timbral composition, being able to control the presence of complex
tones.
Pic – Stockhausen’s score 2
Although Stockhausen’s use of sound synthesizers had a direct influence on the German
music scene that became known as Krautrock, including hugely influential bands such as
Can and Kraftwerk, perhaps the even more influential aspect of this form of composition
was that recording itself was regarded a legitimate part of the creative process of
electronic music.
I prefer Etude… play and talk about Musique Concrete
Pic – MC Album cover
This Stockhausen had learn’t this from Musique Concrete and time spent in France with
it’s founder Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer had also been a radio engineer and became
fascinated by recording techniques while working at Radiodiffusion Francaise during the
Second World War.
In 1948 he created a piece from the sounds of locomotives, Etude aux Chemins de Fer
(Study in Locomotives). The piece consisted of a set of recordings made of six steam
locomotives whistling, accelerating, and moving over rail joints.
Play Etude aux Chemins de Fer
Pic – Pierre in his studio
This initial effort represented a number of “firsts”:
• The piece was created entirely with audio technology
• The piece existed entirely in recorded form, requiring no musicians
• The piece was derived entirely from recorded sounds that were not musical.
This use of magnetic tape and the art of using recorded sound to compose and perform
music developed throughout the 50s and would become fundamental to popular music
with the increasing use of the studio as an instrument and the producer as a musician that
is so familiar to us today.
Pic – Classic Abby Road studio
And one example of this that I want to look at now is also useful to register a shift in this
history from technically specialized and avant-garde activity to a much wider spread and
popular phenomenon.
The Loop
Pic – Eno’s Loop
Up till now the story I’ve told has been quite linear, but I think it’s really interesting and
appropriate that from this point things become much more simultaneous, and
multiplicitous, with influences moving back and forth – more like feedback loops (and this is
the stuff i find much more interesting!)
Motown
The example of recording and studio production I’m going to look at to start this feedback
loop is Motown.
Pic – Motown logo
Starting in the late 1950s and taking it’s name from it’s home town, Motor City, Detroit —
the automobile manufacturing capital of the U.S. — this label and studio of course became
famous throughout the 60s for its enormous success in popularising Soul music.
The Motown production process has often been described as factory-like, it’s charasmatic
and autocratic founder Berry Gordy tightly controlled everything from image to sound.
Pic Berry Gordy in studio
Using a trio- of songwriters and a select group of session musicians for almost every
release he set about standardizing a ‘Motown Sound’ rather than one developing individual
artists. But much of the Motown Sound came from the use of overdubbed and duplicated
instrumentation. Motown songs regularly featured two drummers instead of one (either
overdubbed or in unison), as well as three or four guitar lines. All this was to create a
powerful sensational and dance orientated pop music out of previously gritty and rather
plaintive genre of music.
Play track – you tube – no where to run / motor baby audio Martha Reeves
Motown Ford Factory

Northern Soul
Pic keep The Faith
From the late 1960s a very strange thing was happening with some of these records,
they were being played and danced to by working class youth in the north of England at
obscure all-night venues in a movement that became known as Northern Soul.
Pic – NS Crowd
Theres a few things that I really like about this scene… first of all it’s probably the first
example (even preceding disco by a few years) of a music style being defined by its
listeners, or really dancers, and the djs who played to them, rather than the musicians
making the music, or record companies and radio stations promoting it.
Pic – Twisted Wheel
This is beautifully reflected in the name Northern Soul which refers not to where the music
was made, or even for whom, but where it was listened to and danced to, on the other side
of the atlantic, in city’s like Manchester, Leeds and Sheffield (a sister city of Donetsk! 🙂
and the smaller towns around them.
Pic Sheffield 70s 1
I also love the fact that these hard edged, full and passionate sounds that came out of
cities like Detroit and Chicago seemed to completely translate to such a supposedly
different place, and I’m convinced that it was the parallel post-industrial experience that
made this possible…
northern soul dancing
Wigan Casino – dancing from 5:50 (opening of doco great)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zc0iIICF55k&feature=related
I’m also convinced that the clubs and networks of dancers and the culture of all night
parties, complimented by drugs and euphoric dancing rather than booze and cruising were
what laid the foundations for the huge impact of House music and shortly after Techno, on
the North of England a decade later, coming again from Detroit and neighboring Chicago…
Play you tube – Northern Soul dancing
Industrial Music
However before this happened another very different foundation for its reception was
being laid in many of the same cities…
Pic Sheffield 70s 2
Play Cab V. Exhaust (going under)
By this time, beginning in the early 70s in Northern English Industrial cities like Sheffield ,
and a little later Manchester, by then boosted by the DIY ethos of punk, people where
turning away from the grandiose and virtuoso uses of big expensive and complicated
synthesizers by the likes of Pink Floyd and Rick Wakeman
Pic – Rick Wakemen
to produce a harsher, wilfully less-human and more distopic sound, influenced by
everything from JG Ballards Sci-Fi to William Burroughs cut-up technique and of course
the Musique Concrete we’ve already spoken about.
The earliest band’s like Cabaret Voltaire of Sheffield, and the various groups formed out of
COUM Transmissions mixed performance arts desire to disturb with musique concretes
proposition to reproduce the real sounds from the world around them.
Pic – Cabaret Voltaire cassette
Play Cab V. Calling Moscow
They distorted traditional instruments like drums and guitars as well as taking advantage of
increasingly smaller and cheaper technology – cassette tape recording, domestic
keyboards and very basic drum machines.
Picture of Chris Carter’s from COUM trans EMS-VCS3
They self-released on their cassettes labels and on Industrial Records which spawned the
name for a whole genre.
Pic – Industrial records (patch like)
Synthpop
By the early 80s, Post-Punk and with the success of Kraftwerk and reappraisal of
Krautrock in general, we can hear an increasingly rhythmic and less-distopian approach to
the increasingly user-friendly technology emerging in bands with names like New Order
from Manchester, and The Future (later the Human League), again from Sheffield.
Pic – The Future cover
Play Dance Like A Star / just as they changed there name… / reps the attitude
Factory Records pic 1
The history of Manchester’s Factory Records, home to Joy Division then New Order, A
Certain Ratio, and Section 25 and later The Happy Mondays and the Ibiza styled club the
Hacienda, is a micro-history of this shift from Punk DIY to 24 HR Party People.
Factory Records pic 2
Play New Order Blue Monday

The success of other labels like Mute Records with Depeche Mode Pic Constr. Time Again
and Yazoo, as well as top of the pops hits for Gary Numan and The Human League,
moved the machine sound more mainstream with what became known as synthpop, every
band had to have at least one synth, a Yamaha DX7, a Simmons or a Fairlight.
Pic – 1983 Yamaha DX7 pic
Strangely enough, just as the Motown Sound had found an unlikely home in the North of
England now this English and other Euro synth sound had eager listeners on the airwaves
of Detroit through the eccentric radio show known as The Midnight Funk Association
where the DJ The Electrifying Mojo would famously mix-up Kraftwerk, Parliament, New
Wave and R&B.
Play Shari Vari; A Number of Names, 1981
The Scene (Shar Vari) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OScrghVh15s
Pic’s Mojo
In nearby Chicago a similar mix, fueled this time by the ecclectic taste of DJ’s like Ron
Hardy at warehouse clubs like the Music Box, helped to keep dancers interested and ever
more manic after the demise of disco.
Pic – Ron Hardy
By the the mid-80s of course both of these city’s had fledging electronic music scenes
geared specifically, and more than any before, towards dancing. House music and Techno
respectively took the paired back editing of the break beat from disco to new extremes,
often containing only this and augmenting it with the hard repetitious bass and drum
sounds from the Roland 303 and 808.
Play Acid Tracks / Dancing Ghosts
Pic’s – Roland 303 and 808 – “Acid Tracks” 12” released in 1987 by Phuture. Credited as
the first track to feature the acid house “squelch” sound created with the Roland TB-303
synthesizer.
Detroits techno especially embraced the machinic and distopian aesthetic that seemed to
suit the cities post-industrial reality, but both cities had plenty of disaffected youth and
disused space to allow for a more utopian or at least euphoric communal experience to
grow around the music.
Pic – Packard Motor plant etc.
Once again, partly I think for the reasons described earlier, this took a hold first in the
North of England and by the late 80s all of the UK and much of Europe was in the throws
of Rave culture.
Pic – Smiley
Play Voodoo ray
Pic’s – UK Rave scene
Again the appeal was collective and euphoric, 88’s Summer of Love saw an explosion of
illegal parties both outdoors and in abandoned warehouses and saw equally massive
crackdown by police and lawmakers.
Pic – Newspaper article
There is of course a lot that has happened with electronic dance music and dance music
culture since this moment, but we don’t have time for all that and I think this is a good
place to leave it as I believe it represents a point of no turning back.
Pic – party scene
The only further shift I would mention in passing is of course that of the digital revolution
which to put it briefly shifts access to musical creativity several steps further in the
direction of the mass audience whether as itunes or youtube dj, instantaneous remixer or
PC composer.
Play Bleeps From Outer Space
Pic – iphone app.