The Alien Territory Archives: A Collection of Radical, Experimental, & Irrelevant Music from 1970s San Diego, various artists (Nyahh Records)
Back in the 1970s, if it was cutting-edge new and experimental music you were after, then the Center For Musical Experiment at The University of California San Diego (UCSD) was one of the places to be. It was to develop into an Establishment institution with a multi-million dollar performance hall, but it began life as musicians – most famously, Harry Partch – working in quonset huts, eking out grant money or living on air. Nyahh Records have collected together a 4 CD box-set of music by composers associated with it. The collection accompanies a book by Bill Perrine, ‘Alien Territory: Radical, Experimental and Irrelevant Music in 1970s San Diego’, that came out back in 2023. For anyone unfamiliar with it, the term ‘irrelevant music’ was coined by Kenneth Gaburo, one of the composers featured here, to describe music free of compromise and constraint, untainted by commercial considerations.
The first CD – ‘Drones and Tape’ – begins with one of two tracks featured by Robert Turman. Prior to creating them, he’d been working with Boyd Rice on NON, a two-man outfit which produced heavy-duty punk-influenced noise music with drum machines, loops and home-made instruments. He left, as he said he felt the band was ‘becoming a bit too one-dimensional’. ‘Relay’ and ‘Insecta’ date from 1977 and are more nuanced and reflective than his work with Rice. Ernie Morgan’s ‘Remains’ – arresting on account of its use of space – is one of a number of pieces he’d squirrelled away in wooden boxes to be discovered after his death in 2016. He’d told his wife that only ‘The Scarlet Aardvark’ would understand their contents. It’s easy, when working outside the overhyped world of the cultural mainstream, to be phased by a perceived lack of audience interest. And, although you want artists to be critical and self-edit their output, it makes you wonder just how much good stuff gets sidelined in that process. In the book, Perrine tells the story of Ken Friedman who, having ‘established the permanent “Fluxus West headquarters” in San Diego in 1966, went on to destroy the vast majority of his work. As he said: ‘I listened to the tapes and reviewed the scores. Soon after, I decided that I was a terrible composer. I destroyed the entire collection of scores and tapes.’ So much gets lost, destroyed or forgotten: sometimes it may be for the best, sometimes not. As Richard Brautigan said, in his novel, In Watermelon Sugar, published in 1968, ‘the Forgotten Works just go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on. You get the picture. It’s a big place, much bigger than we are.’
As I said, the full story can be found in the book, but you’ll have great difficulty finding it, as it comes without an index. Don’t get me wrong, the reason I’m so annoyed is because the book is so good. I’d strongly recommend getting it if you find the music here interesting, but if you use it for reference, it’ll quickly get well thumbed!
For me, the highlight of the first disc are probably the pieces by David Dunn – in particular, ‘Arroyo’. It began with his attempt to record the sound of a sandstorm which turned out to be so fierce, it trashed the microphone. Later, in his studio, Dunn ’embedded resonances and noise bands in the sandstorm recording by adding some vocal sounds and electronic noises’. He then – typical of his concern for ambience and ‘spirit of place’ – returned to the original location, played the recording through speakers and recorded the result. It doesn’t end there: the whole enchanting story is told in the liner notes. As Dunn has said elsewhere of his work, ‘my interest was in regarding the complex web of environmental sound-making as evidence of complex-minded systems – a way of experiencing what Gregory Bateson has called “the integrated fabric of mind that envelopes us”’. (Gregory Bateson was a thinker who – to quote Wikipedia – ‘viewed that all three systems of the individual, society and ecosystem were all together a part of one supreme cybernetic system that controls everything instead of just interacting systems. This supreme cybernetic system is beyond the self of the individual and could be equated to what many people refer to as God, though Bateson referred to it as Mind’).
Dunn had ended up in San Diego as he’d deliberately chosen to go to university there, in order to make contact with Harry Partch. He worked as his assistant in the early 1970s (he performed with Partch on the the latter’s film, The Dreamer that Remains) and, although Partch’s music was never a direct influence on him, the older man’s readiness to think about music in original ways inspired him to do the same.
Listening to Partch himself, on the second disc, introducing his ‘Two Studies On Ancient Greek Scales’, I was struck by how affably he came over. And he had a risqué wit. ‘How they made it was a moot point’, he wonders aloud, talking of the story of Leda and the Swan. His obviously quite young audience laugh. At the end of the track, we’re treated to his introduction to ‘Castor and Pollux’. Unfortunately, these pieces aren’t included here. Anyone who knows them knows that the members of that young audience, who clearly liked ‘Two Studies’ are about to have their minds blown away. We, on the other hand, get a few of the petals that fell on Petaluma instead. It’s one of Partch’s best pieces – and a great showcase for his famous ‘Cloud Chamber Bowls’ – but I, for one was left pining for the twins. Enjoy Petaluma, but if you don’t know Castor and Pollux, go check them out.
The choppy sea of accordion sound that is ‘Phrases Please, Or My Name is Country and Western Oatmeal, Boys and Girls’ features Warren Burt, Pauline Oliveros and Reinhard Berg. Burt had dreamt that the three of them were playing accordions and they went on to recreate what he’d dreamt. Hilariously, the piece garnered the same critical response in real life as it had in Burt’s dream.
‘Citizen’s Band’ was the brainchild of composer and percussionist William Parsons. It was, as Bill Perrine says in the book (page 180!), ‘a social construct as much as a musical one … open to essentially anyone, regardless of skill or confidence.’ Parsons set out his philosophy in a short book, Music For Citizen’s Band, Vol One’. Essentially a DIY improvisation kit, it came with a 7” record. You’d think, what with the internet, it’d be possible to still get hold of it, even if only as a pdf. However, I’ve been looking and, so far, I’ve found no sign of it, which is a shame. The track included here was great, I thought, and left me wanting to hear more, as did the track by Kiva, an improvisation outfit that has been likened to the UK’s AMM, ‘Excerpt from Pure Intellect, Serpent Power, Inner Frames’.
I liked the feel of ‘Polyphonies II’ by Dary John Mizelle, the first track on the third disc, Synthesizers. It reminded me of the music that went with made-for-TV sci-fi shows of the time. The track that really grabbed my attention here, though, was Japanese composer Joji Yuasa’s ‘My Blue Sky in Southern California’. One can create electronic music simply by getting a synth to do what it can do. However, ‘My Blue Sky’ shows real command and control of the possibilities of electronic sound synthesis. The trick is probably to approach all the parameters of the music creatively. The first version of the piece was created in Japan, the year before Yuasa arrived in San Diego. The California version includes vocal sounds, provided by UCSD’s Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble. The combination of voices and electronics can be enthralling, as Stockhausen had demonstrated in ‘Gesang der Jünglinge’ and Berio, in ‘Visage’. Yuasa’s piece not only enthrals, but demonstrates a humorous lightness of touch, which I like.
Ernie Morgan’s ‘Buchla Bounce’ name-checks Don Buchla who, together with Robert Moog, invented the voltage-controlled synthesizer and who’d popularised ‘West Coast synthesis’ – a sound distinct from Moog’s better known ‘East Coast synthesis’. Another find here was the work of Diamanda Galás. ‘Scalatron Music’ was the piece she used as the opening number to her ‘Wild Women with Steak-Knives’ performances. Galás had grown up in San Diego. Aged fourteen, she was performing Greek and Arabic music with her father’s band and had performed, as soloist, in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the San Diego Symphony. Having studied biochemistry, she found her way to UCSD as a postgrad. ‘Scalatron Music’ certainly has a wild feel: part cabaret, part fairground, with note-clusters and chaos thrown in. The scalatron was an microtonal organ invented by Herman Pedtke. Fewer than twenty were made, so it’s quite special to get to hear it played. Partch was a fan. He said of it, “it’s just what I needed, 40 years too late”.
The final disc – devoted to vocal music – begins with Alexina Louie’s ‘Molly’ (1972), a vocal/electronic piece based on a section of Molly’s Monologue from Ulysses. I liked the electronics and the choice of text, but the words, I thought, were delivered in exactly the voice poets try to avoid at poetry readings, which put me off slightly. Louie went on from UCSD to become a leading composer of contemporary classical music in her native Canada.
The acronym in the title of Peter Gordon’s ‘Greetings From the SLA’ would have been known to everyone at the time when it was made. It’s a spoken word piece based on a statement made Patty Hearst during her time with the Symbionese Liberation Army. A member of the mega-rich Hearst family, Hearst was abducted by the SLA in 1974. As a result of a possible combination of brainwashing and Stockholm Syndrome, she went on to join them. The voices include that of Gordon’s partner at the time, experimental novelist Kathy Acker. Kenneth Gaburo’s ‘Ringings’ (1976) is a recording made at a happening involving both music and a film by Gaburo. It’s one of the most haunting pieces in the collection. His ‘Noyse’ (1975), too, is a wonderful, if bizarre, musical artefact. Its use of a Gregorian Chant-like melody would’ve no doubt got up the nose of the local conservative Catholics the same way the mere presence of lesbian and feminist Pauline Oliveros as head of the Center For Musical Experiment did, had they been listening.
From what I’ve read, I’d say Oliveros must’ve been a pretty good head of department. She held the post from 1976 to 1979. She was, in a good way, as Bill Perrine puts it, ‘both omnipresent and hard to pin down’ – a pretty good modus operandi if you want to make things happen while allowing others to release their creative potential, which is, of course, what it’s all about. Tracks like Joseph Julian’s ‘Windows and Clouds’ took me back to being a music student in the 1970s myself. There was a feeling in the air – at least there was where I was, in Manchester – that the music we were making reflected something exciting going on in society. Things were going to be different. It didn’t turn out that way: as time went on, it became obvious that the gatekeepers had lost patience with visions and were only interested in business plans. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989: there was no longer any need for the West to portray itself a champion of artistic freedom. Nevertheless, the spirit that’s alive here in these half-century old recordings still lives on. We may not have changed the world yet, but we haven’t gone away.
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Dominic Rivron
LINK
The Alien Territory Archives:
https://nyahhrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-alien-territory-archives-a-collection-of-radical-experimental-irrelevant-music-from-1970s-san-diego
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