Kenneth Gaburo was an important person in American modern and avant-garde music, but not at all as known as for example Harry Partch or Conlon Nancarrow. Gaburo was a teacher, pioneer of electronic music, jazz pianist, writer, ecologist, publisher and proponent of compositional linguistics. This CD deals with his role as a pioneer of electronics, or should I say tape music. He didn’t compose very much pure tape music, because most of the electroacoustics was integrated parts in bigger compositions, like multimedia works etcetera, but during a thirty year period he accumulated ten solo tape pieces. They are all presented on this irresistible CD from Pogus, who hereby accomplishes a cultural good deed of great proportions, making available these highly original and exciting tape works.

Five of the works here were produced in the mid-1960s at the University of Illinois, so it’s historical stuff by now, from a very interesting period in the evolution of tape music. During those vibrant years many genres were flowering, for example the early minimalism, like in Terry Riley’s pieces “Olson III”, “Untitled Organ”, “Bird of Paradise”, “I Can’t Stop – No!" etcetera, and you had the high end experimentations in San Francisco, at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, where Ramon Sender shaped his “Desert Ambulance” and Pauline Oliveros started her early tape music experiments, documented on wonderful CDs these days – one from Pogus! – and the maestro and teacher Robert Erickson who laid down the score to his famous “Drum Study” and a few years later wrote the incomparably beautiful “Oceans” for trumpet and percussion, himself handling the delicate eastern percussion on the recording from 1972.
Yes, modern culture was in a whirlwind those days, not only in the so-called popular culture (Dylan! I grew up with Dylan! He introduced poetry to rock ‘n roll, surrealism to folk music! What can I say? He changed my whole attitude towards life and culture!) but also in poetry (The San Francisco Renaissance; Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti! – and I hopped a plane from Sweden to San Francisco, ventured down into City Lights Bookstore, bought Kaddish and Planet News - and early secret Dylan bootlegs in a record store downtown; “Seems Like a Freeze Out”) and art music – and Gaburo arrives via art music, modern avant-garde art music, and wild thoughts about life, about existence, about our journey under the stars, among the stars, in mystery. He is a person to love, yes!

Of the other works on the CD, one was made at home in La Jolla, California 1974-75, and the remaining ones a little later at the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Only two of the pieces do not involve vocal material in any form, which of course is typical of this composer who, as he said, aimed at blurring the distinction between language and music.

Kenneth Gaburo took his tape music very seriously, which is demonstrated by the fact that he got involved in several methods of tapping resources from his subconscious while composing, like staring at the machinery for hours on end, and then, totally exhausted, bearing down on the equipment, and prerecorded tapes that he rearranged and manipulated. His friends say that Gaburo had so many intuitive and partly subconscious ways of composing tape music, that he really couldn’t convey the methods in a coherent or understandable, technical way to others. He just did what he did, feeling his way ahead, with a “right-on-intuition”.

“Fat Millie’s Lament” (1965) is the first piece on the CD, brewing like a pygmy dance in Central Africa (Yes – I have the Ocora CD"!), with recurrent tape loops of sharp, tiny percussions, as if from glass beads or frosty fragments of hostile thoughts piercing your cheeks. Soon enough a heavy brass cuts those lines of thoughts off, and you’re on Broadway or some American Main Street – only to fall back again into the pygmy jungle land, fading into the mists of a fertile greenshift.

“The Wasting of Lucrecetzia” (1964) is a maddening collage of sounds, some at very high speed, some more normal… no! No! Nothing is normal in this piece. It’s so insane that it can only be loved and treasured! This is real loco tape art! The piece fades out into a sharp and madly thinning treble.

Next piece – “For Harry” (1966) – really does sound like Harry Partch stuff, but maybe a fraction more seasick than Partch’s music usually sounds. It is a seasick homage to Partch, no doubt. You sort of see a line of bottles curving back and fort and in and out, and everything sways away and here and there – and here are even artificial farts spreading through the sound system. (The seasick sounds came from an instrument that Gaburo built; a type of monochord). Partch is not the only one alive in this piece, though. I here remnants of Morton Subotnick (“Silver Apples of the Moon”) and John Chowning (“Turenas” and “Sabelithe”), even though the Chowning pieces were ready many years after “For Harry”… mhh… Well, Chowning was working on for example “Sabelithe” in 1966, a first version, so that saves it, I suppose. Anyways, this is a truly great and adventurous, highly pleasurable tape piece, to listen to again and again!

“Lemon Drops” (1965) lay me wasted, believe you me. Out of these Chowning or Subotnick highlife plonks and boiiings crystallizes a jazzy mellow melody, totally artificial, and totally true. It’s a pity that Gaburo didn’t spend more time with tape music production!

“Dante’s Joynte” (1966) sounds very different from what we’ve heard so far, seemingly more multi-layered and thoroughly structured. Gaburo has long slow brushes of events taking place in the background, while letting short-wave-type blurts ransack the foreground, and at times you hear some dance orchestra somewhere deep inside a hall somewhere, as if in a dream, but the electronics – and the birds, the birds! (or are they cats, or Disney cartoon figures?) – come back and clean up the mess, yeah, let the electronics clean it all up!
This piece was part of a multimedia show way back, where a projection showed the hurried and unstoppable growth of cancer cells to the music.

“Re-Run” (1983) sounds amazingly similar to a piece by Leo Nilsson called “Early Ear”, composed for an LP that was recorded for John Cage’s 70th birthday in 1982. Are there any links? Leo Nilsson’s piece had to do with picking – no, hunting! – mushrooms. “Re-Run” is a frantic popping of… mycelium? It sounds like innumerable little red rubber balls falling out of a hole in the wall and spreading out over the floor, out onto the steps, out into the street, down to the harbor, and right into the sea, bobbing up and down with the waves, and when far out into the sea transforming into old squaw birds (Clangula hyemalis) who sound just like this when they amass. This is one of the most hilarious tape pieces I’ve heard; sounds to live with in the luny bin! You name it, we like it! Gaburo picked up an old Buchla synthesizer for this piece. Magnificent! Jolly darn good, to the last drop, just like you know what!

“Mouthpiece II” (1992) is a very personal – the record company maintains also painful – piece, where Gaburo talks all through, relating an observation he made at a restaurant, when a dysfunctional family came in to eat, without saying anything to each other. Vocal utterances, processed, mixed, delayed, are mixed into the background, like a texture, like wallpaper. Gaburo is miked very close, and it all sounds very urgent. It’s a desperate piece; I agree with that characterization in the CD booklet.

(Reviewers comment: As I write this an analog handwritten enveloped letter from a woman in Rome, Italy – whom I only met once but will meet again come Christmas… or Chanukah – which is sitting on top of the external modem, leaning against the computer – keeps falling down onto the keyboard.)

“Hiss” (1992) is a timbral piece, seemingly made from auditive residues, fed through machinery. Very compelling to an audio connoisseur like myself, a sonic soundwave gulper like this old boy. Yeah, once again; you name it – we like it!

“Few” is a collaboration between Gaburo and French sound poet and madman Henri Chopin. The French sound poet visited Iowa and Gaburo in 1985, and Gaburo jolted machinery while Chopin –as usual – stuck the mike deep down his throat and proceeded to breath and gulp and growl. Great stuff!

“Kyrie: ORBIS FACT / OR: a very odd do” (1974) ends the CD. Strange piece! One channel has Gaburo singing a plainchant Kyrie, while the other channel has a close-miked Gaburo reading the nursery rhyme “This Old Man”.

As I said before; I really regret that Gaburo didn’t spend more time with these kinds of tape pieces. His imagination and visionary capabilities were apparently inexhaustible. This CD from Pogus is one of the most interesting and rewarding CDs I’ve heard in a good while. If I didn’t already have it I’d buy it right away!