William Hoskins

Criminally under-rated set of Early American Moog Modular Synthesizer Music - the sole release by composer William Hoskins, the "Director of Electronic Music and Composer-in-Residence at Jacksonville University in Florida." Issued in 1979 by the Harriman, NY-based Spectrum - a "Division of UNI-PRO Recordings, Inc." the LP consists of a pair of discrete pieces, with each taking up a side of its own. "Galactic Fantasy" lives up to the premise of its title, its far-reaching narratives are concerned with the same windswept alien-landscapes as so many of Nik "Pascal" Raicevic's classic Private-Press sides. Recorded at the Jacksonville College of Fine Arts' Electronic Music Studio - at some point between when he set it up in January 1969 & the LP's issue - it's a rather unorthodox mix of purely aleatoric Synth Bleep & reoccurring motivic patterns that lands halfway between Douglas Leedy & Angel Rada. "Eastern Reflections: A Suite for Imaginary Orchestra" concerns itself with "travel through time. It postulates an imaginary orchestra of the future, a cosmopolitan merger of Japanese, Balinese, Chinese, and Indian styles of writing and playing." - all sounds again ℅ the Moog Modular. Much like Chris Swansen's reconstruction of a complete Jazz ensemble utilizing the instrument's Oscillators, Filters & Modifiers, Hoskins has fashioned a series of non-extant instruments to model. The results aren't that far away from semi-contemporaenous work such as Slava Ranko's "Arctic Hysteria" in their pan-cultural appropriations, re-cast & realized in Electronic Sound.