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mode 237-Subotnick book_11 10/26/11 12:00 AM Page 2 1. Until Spring: Revisited (1976/2009) 37:19 t’s important to remember, especially as it Well, certainly not where Morton for live electro n i c s , glass harp and live video starts to take some prodding to do so, that Subotnick was when he started on the body Morton Subotnick, live electronics Ielectronic music has not been around for of work that would most properly slot into his Miguel Frasconi, live electronics & glass harp very long. Different versions of the creation oeuvre of “electronic music.” Those were story loop back to different points in time, years when the very notion of such a thing SUE-C, live video (DVD only) some of them quite far from the future. To wit, still jammed most sensible signals, or at least that most anachronistic eminence Mark Twain scrambled them out of sorts. So it was that a 4 Butterflies (1973) 34:38 as quoted in the New York Times upon his headline for an article in Today’s Living in for 4-channel tape & two films by Mario Castillo* introduction to a new musical apparatus 1962 could suggest, seemingly not in the least N ew 4-channel & stereo mix by the composer called the Telharmonium, in 1906: “The trou- bit facetiously, that “Tomorrow’s Bach Might 2. Butterfly No. 1 7:46 ble about these beautiful, novel things is that Be a Tape Recorder.” Or that, a few years later, 3. Interlude 1:24 they interfere so with one’s arrangements. a review in the New York Times of Subotnick’s Every time I see or hear a new wonder like own seminal piece Silver Apples of the Moon 4. Butterfly No. 2 9:32 this I have to postpone my death right off.” could find a critic flustered enough to finish 5. Butterfly No. 3* 7:21 The Telharmonium, developed around his appraisal, so matter-of-factly as to be 6. Interlude 1:38 the turn of the 20th century to transmit music inscrutable, “The engineering is excellent. The 7. Butterfly No. 4* 7:07 through the telephone, is one of many con- sounds are clear.” Or else that another writer N ew high-definition tra n s fer from the original master tapes. traptions from a history more vast and sepia- in another newspaper, this one in the Chicago F i rst CD and surround re l e a s e . toned than might be expected, and Twain was Daily Tribune from around the same time, obviously a fan (“I couldn’t possibly leave the could address the quizzical existence of the world until I have heard this again and again,” new electronic medium with a story headlined ON DVD ONLY: he continued). Other examples of ye olde thus: “Newest Sound of Music Is Pretty Awful.” A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur: Revisited (1978/2011) 10:08 ingenuity abound, but more important than All of that predates the work collected here for live electronics and live video cataloguing exceptions to the rule is the idea in Mode’s third volume of Subotnick’s early Morton Subotnick, live electronics that electronic music remains very much new, electronic music, but the context serves just SUE-C, live video young, not yet fully realized or even necessari- the same. Part of the joy of surveying that con- ly through with being born. Indeed, as more text now, so many years down the blurry line markers and footnotes take their place in the of time, is in heeding the language that it was past, the timeline begins more and more to chronicled in — most of it either over- or blur… to the point where it’s only natural to understated. Around one pole are all the imag- wonder: where are we now? inative, fantastical prophecies and hyperventi- mode 237-Subotnick book_11 10/26/11 12:00 AM Page 4 lating proclamations; by the other, simple more than sanctioned art-music tradition on There’s a lot of dissonance still between antique grand piano. In fact, most of what you statements of fact starved of even the faintest his mind. That, as much as anything exclusive- all these different factions, so that a composer have done to and around your music ever strain of enthusiasm. And they didn’t always ly musical, is what has helped his presence with academic credentials might think techno since has been on a computer, including the line up the way that logic might dictate. To continue to loom. to be brainless and an aficionado of noise YouTube clips you watched while biding time that effect, the introduction to an early user’s might find the fruits of musical training to be between musical moves, the video games you manual for the Buchla Modular Electronic It would be hard to overstate Subotnick’s overly fussy and constrained. That dissonance played in part for the soundtracks, the photo Music System, which Subotnick famously influence in a wide and wild world of music is diminishing, though, and no projection distortions you idly started to design by tweak- dreamt up and helped develop by way of that, of course, ranges beyond realms in would make sense to forecast anything but ing the controls of PhotoShop, the experimen- offering creative input to Don Buchla, begins: which artists call themselves composers. That eventual erasure as thoughts and ideas contin- tal video collages you learned to make when “The first thing you will probably notice about includes techno, new wave, post-punk, laptop ue to evolve. static images grew tiresome… The list goes on your equipment is that each unit assembled in glitch electronica, noise, and countless timely It’s in that context that Subotnick’s influ- and on, and it reads in places like an almost the cabinet is of the same basic size, 7 inches variants of what we might just call pop. Part of ence is still most intriguingly being sifted literal translation of some of Subotnick’s most 1 high and 4 ⁄4 inches wide or a multiple there- Subotnick’s influence in such realms is in fact through, not even yet entirely consciously. seemingly fantastical imaginings from the of.” As can be confirmed by anyone who has expressly musical, sourced to the DNA of his The impact of his work figures into not just the ’60s. When he conceived his idea of the early ever stared down a Buchla synthesizer, with early electronic music. You can hear it in the sounds that followed him but also the strains Buchla synthesizer as a sort of “electronic its blinking lights and tangled nests of colored drifting “kosmiche” soundscapes of ’70s acts of thought that have only just now started to music easel” for the masses, he didn’t think patch cords, none of that described in the like Tangerine Dream, in the mechanistic ’80s settle in as a result. Think of the ways that he would be around to actually witness it as manual is even remotely close to what makes ideals of Kraftwerk and the earliest practition- changing conceptions of music and music- prophecy. Yet here we all are. a first impression. ers of techno in Detroit, in the rave and ambi- making have affected our relationships to not Including the young and boundlessly But then, you have to marvel at the practi- ent music of the ’90s, in the laptop-intensive only what we hear but also so much else: inspired musicians who shared a stage with cality! No one overly inclined toward rhetori- “clicks + cuts” movement of the ’00s. His use objects, technologies, the very tools and things Subotnick in a club in Chicago in early 2011, cal flights of fancy would be likely to actually of sequences and his promiscuous sense of not just of art but of everyday life. when he, at the age of 78, headlined a festival engineer such a thing as a voltage-controlled rhythm, dating back to when he started play- Say you’re a typical 20-year-old with musi- called Neon Marshmallow populated other- modular synthesizer. Likewise, spied the other ing with pulses in the New York nightclub the cal aspirations right now. That means you were wise by acts 40 or 50 years his junior. Or the way, few close readers of circuit boards and Electric Circus in the ’60s, suggested a formal- born in 1991. You had a computer, or at least ones who a few months before came up to schematics have it in them to transubstantiate ist grounding for all the electronic dance access to one, either from birth or pretty soon ogle his Buchla at Unsound Festival New York, such science into art. music that came to follow. And his sense of thereafter. You got an e-mail address at six and where Subotnick served as a lynchpin for a Somewhere in the middle of all of that texture and grain, of dynamics that can startle learned how to listen to anything you wanted program that sought to cinch together dis- stands Morton Subotnick, whose lasting and soothe, has been subsumed by everyone to hear on file-share sites at 10. When you parate but interconnected musical avant- impact owes in part to the role he wrote for from the biggest producers of pop to experi- started recording, it was on a computer, even gardes. Or the ones who gathered to see and himself as a hyper-curious young artist with mental denizens of the deepest underground. if it was something traditional like guitar or an hear him at the similar festival Club Trans- mode 237-Subotnick book_11 10/26/11 12:00 AM Page 6 mediale in Berlin, where techno is thriving something lost.