Monday
• O C T. XVIII. • Vladimir Ussachevsky — “Piece for tape recorder”
From the 1957 album A Poem in Cycles and Bells & Other Music for Tape Recorder.
Vladimir Ussachevsky was one of the true pioneers in electronic music, especially in the field of tape music, which he pretty much invented with Otto Luening. Born in 1911 in Manchuria (just south of the Siberian border) to a pianist mother and a father who was a Captain in the Russian army and an honorary Mongolian prince, at age 19, Ussachevsky and some of his family immigrated to the U.S. when Japanese invasion looked imminent, later working for the OSS and State Department in WWII. For over 30 years, he taught at Columbia University, where he co-founded the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center with Luening.
His soundtracks to the Orson Wells directed film version of Jean-Paul Sartre's play No Exit, and Lloyd Williams' film Line of Apogee are eerie and fantastic, and are well worth tracking down. Speaking of soundtracks, this particular piece was posthumously used to great effect in one of the final scenes of the 2001 film Session 9, one of the few "recent" horror films that I truly love.
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Ah, more good stuff. I've never heard of Vladimir Ussachevsky, and it was good to be filled in on some proto-electronic music.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, have you ever heard Ataraxia's The Unexplained: Electronic Musical Impressions of the Occult? It's not by the Italian band Ataraxia, but rather an album from the mid '70s. It's synth-laden stuff that's supposed to be based upon paranormal phenomenon.
-Neonstatic (AKA, Astro Zombie)
Shit, I forgot about Mort Garson! His stuff woulda been perfect for this; I might have to sneak some in. Great stuff done all on a Moog, kinda like a dark version of Wendy Carlos. I don't have the album he did as Ataraxia, but I do have Lucifer Black Mass, which is the same guy under a different name a couple years prior. Thanks for the reminder!
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