André Zumback, Joseph Haydn

condition (record/cover): NM / VG- (tear on front neatly repaired with tape)

Insert included. No multiple. A private press LP of peculiar attraction. 

Among the most singular objects in the history of Swiss electroacoustic music - and as an artifact, almost impossible to categorize. André Zumback's Micromégas VI, issued privately on Éditions Suisse in an edition that came packaged with a 31cm square aluminum mobile sculpture, belongs to a tradition in which the record as physical object is inseparable from the meaning of the music it carries. The title references Voltaire's tale of the cosmic traveler confronting the smallness and incongruousness of human existence - a philosophical frame that inflects the work's treatment of scale, proportion, and the relationship between the electronic sound and the Haydn material with which it shares the pressing.

Zumback had appeared on the important 1971 Swiss compilation Musiques Électro Acoustiques Et Instruments, and his approach to electronic composition - his Chronophonie, collected here - belongs to the more materialist strand of Swiss electroacoustic practice: sound as physical phenomenon, the studio as a space for the investigation of acoustic time and substance rather than abstract serial procedure. The pairing with Haydn is not ironic but genuinely dialectical - an encounter between two temporal worlds conducted with the seriousness that the Voltairean frame demands. Private pressing, 30-230. With mobile sculpture.