Lucien Goethals, Louis De Meester

condition (record/cover): VG (side two has two hearable scratches that tick, the first for just 15 seconds and the other longer but almost unnoticeable) / NM 

One of the key documents of early Belgian electronic music, and among the most elusive of the three Alpha Brussels LPs devoted to the output of IPEM - the Instituut voor Psychoakoestiek en Elektronische Muziek founded in Ghent in 1962. Lucien Goethals (1931-2006) and Louis De Meester were co-founders of the institute, and the two composers represented here embody the dual impulse at IPEM's core: the exploration of electronic sound as an extension of post-serial compositional logic, and the investigation of tape music as an independent medium with its own structural laws.

Goethals arrived at IPEM by an unusual route: born in Ghent but formed in Buenos Aires at the Dima Conservatory between 1933 and 1946, he returned to Belgium to complete his studies at the Royal Conservatory in Ghent, where his interests turned decisively toward serialism, dodecaphony, and electronic composition - studies furthered by work with Gottfried Michael Koenig at the Gaudeamus courses in Bilthoven and at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht. His Difonium, the centerpiece of this LP, is a work for live bass clarinet - performed here with precision and extraordinary authority by Harry Sparnaay - and pre-recorded tape: a sustained dialogue between acoustic presence and processed electronic shadow, the instrument and its double never resolving into unity. De Meester's Studie V and Mimodrama are pure tape works of a different character - tighter, more gestural, closer in spirit to the French musique concrète tradition.

A high-water mark of the Flemish avant-garde. Rare in any form, and increasingly recognized as such. Alpha, SP 6028, 1975.