László Dubrovay

condition (record/cover): VG+ (some surface noise) / VG+ (bent corner and edges wear)

Born in Budapest in 1943, László Dubrovay studied composition at the Béla Bartók Conservatory and the Budapest Academy of Music before a DAAD scholarship brought him to West Germany in 1972. There he studied composition with Karlheinz Stockhausen and electronic music with Hans-Ulrich Rumpert, and in 1975 was commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk to realize an electronic work in the WDR studios in Cologne. He worked further in electronic studios in Stockholm, Freiburg, Bourges, and Berlin before returning to Hungary to teach at the Budapest Academy - carrying the grammar of the European avant-garde back behind the Iron Curtain, where it found an institutional home on the state-owned Hungaroton label.

This LP, issued in 1979, collects the live electronic works Dubrovay developed through the mid-to-late 1970s: performances in which the score and its electronic realization coexist in real time, the performers and the apparatus in direct dialogue. The music is dense, microtonal, and procedurally rigorous - Stockhausen's influence present in the structural thinking while the sound itself remains distinctly Dubrovay's own: oscillating textures, noise elements, acoustic and electronic sources in close proximity, the boundary between them deliberately unstable.

One of the essential documents of Hungarian electronic music, and one of the stranger objects in the Hungaroton catalog - a recording that demonstrates, once again, how much was happening behind the curtain that the West was not paying attention to. Certified by the Creel Pone canon; sought after by collectors for decades. Original pressing.