Tod Dockstader

In the early 1960's Tod Dockstader was a young maverick composer of electronic 'organised sound', and James Reichert a film composer and music supervisor. They met in New York in 1963, and launched one of the most extraordinary collaborations in modern music, a unique attempt to integrate electronic sounds and the classical orchestra. Unlike Varese's Deserts, and Stockhausen's Kontakte, it does not merely have the orchestra play along with a tape, or even process orchestral sounds live. What makes this project unique is that the orchestra was transformed by electronic processes at a fundamental level, and organically fused with the purely electronic sounds. The completed work is a bizarre blend of Dockstader's fundamentally intuitive approach to sound, and Reichert's more conservatoire-based feeling for melody and orchestration. It often sounds like an unlikely collaboration between Stravinsky and Frank Zappa in avant-garde mode, or Stockhausen and his alter-egos, Stock, Hausen and Walkman.

 It's not simply an important historical document, but an intriguing and entirely convincing listen; a truly extraordinary combination of electronic and orchestral textures, in which the orchestra seems to have been drenched in Technicolor, and dragged through a cartoon sound studio.