Jim Fassett

An early electronic manipulation/ musique concrete masterpiece, the reissue of an old 1960 Columbia album, Symphony of the Birds. Working with CBS radio technician Mortimer Goldberg, Fassett painstakingly pieced together fragments from recordings of bird calls originally made in the field by Jerry and Norma Stilwell. On this recording you will hear an orchestra of singing birds." That's how Jim Fassett introduces this extraordinary disc. The one-time musical director of CBS Radio composed his birdsong symphony in the late fifties, using only sounds recorded from birds. Thoughtfully he also provides an introductory track, with Fassett donning both his ornithologist and musicologist hats, providing performance notes on the three-movement composition that takes up the first half of the album. This first half is all tape-manipulated chirruping, cawing and whistling, pitch-bent and spliced together in a most unexpectedly musical fashion. When this first surfaced on LP it must have been quite a mindblower. The B-side yields yet more auditory wonderments, making like a proto Chris Watson and taking a documentary approach to the subject matter. The only manipulation here is in the slowing down of the birdcalls, enabling the listener to revel in "the marvellous complexities of musical motifs hidden, up till now, in the calls of a number of familiar birds of the field and woodland." Discoveries like this are what reissues are all about. A superb piece of early electroacostics from the wonderful EM imprint, and highly recommended!