David Tudor - Anima Pepsi
Hot on the heels of their second LP dedicated to the Postal Pieces of James Tenney, and appearing alongside their release of Lea Bertucci’s monumental The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity, Blume Editions delivers Anima Pepsi, the first ever vinyl pressing dedicated to David Tudor’s legendary work in 1970 at the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion in Osaka, Japan. Belonging to Blume’s larger initiative, constructing networks of context and understanding across contemporary and historical efforts in the field of experimental sound, the two long-form works that comprise the LP, Anima Pepsi and Pepsibird, are pioneering efforts of site-specific, specialized sound, created by Tudor within a unique artist-designed and programmed space, created by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) for Expo ’70, utilizing a vast collection of recordings collected and/or made by Tudor, radically rethinking the possibilities of musique concrète and electronic music at large. Among the most important and groundbreaking compositions in Tudor’s catalog of recorded works, Blume’s beautifully produced, highly limited red, 140gr audiophile vinyl edition of 300 copies is accompanied by an Obi / insert featuring newly commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey, as well as a 20-page LP-size booklet with the essay After All: A (Multiple) Digest of the Pepsi Pieces by Tudor scholar You Nakai.
Few artists within the canons of 20th century avant-garde and experimental music were as important or influential as the pianist and composer David Tudor. Yet, despite his place in history, his legacy largely remains under the shadow of the artists that he worked with, most notably John Cage. While enduringly ambitious, and perhaps because of that, his output as a composer, representing the central axis of his activities for the last three decades of his life, is relatively slim, housed across a handful of releases (Microphone (1978), Rainforest IV (1981), Pulsers / Untitled (1984), and Neural Synthesis Nos. 6-9 (1995)) issued by small labels like Cramps, Edition Block, and Lovely Music prior to his death in 1996, with a small handful appearing since: each revealing a distinct facet of a truly radical mind.
Born in 1926, Tudor is widely regarded as one of the most talented and versatile pianists of the 20th century. Initially trained on organ before switching instruments, he emerged as a leading figure within New York’s musical vanguard not long after his arrival in the city, following his groundbreaking 1950 performance of Stefan Wolpe’s Battle Piece (1943–1947) and the virtuosic American premiere of Pierre Boulez’s Second Sonata (1948). The following year he joined the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, upon its founding, as its accompanist, a role in which he would remain until his death in 1996, while cultivating one of his most important and lasting creative relationships with Cunningham’s partner, John Cage, who would subsequently state that the entirety of his output composed between 1951 and the end of the 1960s was written with Tudor in mind. The pianist’s restless ambition and unmatched skill behind the keyboard positioned him as an adept vehicle for the ideas of composers on both sides of the Atlantic, leading to him becoming a key bridge between the two contexts. Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Sylvano Bussotti, Mauricio Kagel, and Karlheinz Stockhausen all wrote works for him during the 1950s and ’60s.
It was Tudor’s towering ambition and drive, and perhaps the mutual sense of collaboration activated between himself and Cage, allowing for his own vision to assert itself within emerging works, that led to his eventual abandonment of the piano in favor of his own efforts as a composer, largely embarked upon utilizing his own self-designed and built electronics, often working in collaboration with engineers from Bell Laboratories, leading to his joining Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.), a platform to promote collaborations between artists, engineers, and scientists, formally launched by the engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer, alongside Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Whitman, upon its founding in 1967. A central aggregator of his activities over many years to come, Tudor realized numerous works under E.A.T., as well as taking part in its projects and initiatives, among the most noteworthy and ambitious of which was the Pepsi-Cola Pavilion, an interdisciplinary architectural construction for Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan, for which Tudor composed four pieces (Pepsibird, Anima Pepsi, Pepscillator, and Microphone) between March and April of 1970, the first two of which comprise this LP, pressed on vinyl for the very first time.
The Pepsi-Cola Pavilion was the culmination of Pepsi-Cola’s marketing team’s desire to involve artists in the process of creating the company’s presence at the expo, a world’s fair themed around “Progress and Harmony for Mankind”, which resulted in E.A.T. and three of its core artists, Frosty Myers, Robert Whitman, and David Tudor, alongside the architect John Pearce, being tasked with creating the design and function of the building. The result was a 120-foot diameter steel and polyvinyl dome, shrouded in mist and fog created by spray nozzles, and a square of intense blue-white light, created by xenon lamps, during the evenings. Each of the elements auxiliary to the building’s structure was regarded as an interactive artwork in its own right, stemming from collaborations between artists and engineers. For his contribution, Tudor worked closely with Gordon Mumma and Fred Waldhauer in the development of a unique sound system, capable of processing and variable distribution through 37 speakers, controlled by both automated means and the performer, as well as with Lowell Cross on a sound-activated laser deflection system within the pavilion’s mirrored performance hall.
Pepsibird and Anima Pepsi, advanced forms of musique concrète, were realized for and within this entirely singular environment. Both pieces utilize small libraries of tape recordings, live mixed and processed through the Pepsi pavilion’s sound console, before being distributed through the system’s speakers, divided into 8 channels of stationary and rotating patterns, designated by Tudor’s instructions: small circle, great circle, large rhomboid, single overhead, spiral, small triangles, and small ovals. Pepsibird is thematically focused upon a physical interiority, with its ten source tapes being recordings of brain wave activity of both humans and animals: cat’s eye, nerve firing, bats, brainwaves (slow / regular), EKG, alpha wave AM-FM, modified nightjar (slow), modified nightjar (regular), and demodulated alpha waves. Despite the work’s spatialization being mixed down to stereo, this recording of Pepsibird, made in situ in 1970, retains the striking sense of the space and ambience that Tudor achieved through its performance, leaving an impression of being there. Foreshadowing the enduring relationship to the sounds of the natural world that defines later works like 1973’s Rainforest IV, and many of his efforts for the remainder of his career, for more than eighteen minutes the composer merges subtle textures and pulses, at times resembling birdsong, within a blanket of vast, resonant ambience of subaquatic density, crystallizing Tudor’s remarkable power as a composer into its shimmering forms.
Anima Pepsi is conceptually centered on the exterior, specifically field recordings that Tudor made of animal and insect sounds: mosquitoes in a jar, a fly on flypaper, a wasp chewing, a beetle walking, as well as a mix of human and animal sounds that he referred to as the “funny tape”. Further distinction is rooted in audibly different approaches to the interface between source material and technology. If Pepsibird deploys interior sounds in ways that allude to the natural world, Anima Pepsi pushes the sounds of nature and humanity toward the otherworldly through the clear presence of electronic sounds and processing, revealing a stronger association with the artist’s hand, as it moulds detailed, pointillistic patterns of abstract sonority into the work’s gauzy blankets of ambience and space.
Representing foundational cornerstones of intermedia practice, and emboldened by optimism and societal hope activated through collaboration, Tudor’s Pepsibird and Anima Pepsi anticipate numerous territories of electroacoustic practice that emerged through advances in computer and digital technology over subsequent years, while still remaining remarkably fresh and ahead of their time. Like all of Tudor’s work, long resting in the shadows of his peers and collaborators, they are long overdue for a reappraisal that allows Tudor to be fully seen for the radical innovator, influencing vast swaths of experimental practice in his wake, that he truly was. With luck, the call heralded by Blume’s release of Anima Pepsi will mark the beginning of such an initiative. Issued in a highly limited red, 140gr audiophile vinyl edition of 300 copies, and accompanied by an Obi / insert featuring newly commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey, as well as a 20-page LP-size booklet with the essay After All: A (Multiple) Digest of the Pepsi Pieces by Tudor scholar You Nakai, this beautifully produced LP joins the conversations and connections forged by Blume’s catalog between the past and the present day, landing exactly where it should.
David Tudor, Anima Pepsi (Anima Pepsi, Pepsibird). LP, BLUME 028, edition of 300 copies, red vinyl, with a 20-page LP-size booklet.
Issued by Blume, with liner notes by Bradford Bailey and an essay by You Nakai.