Mario Davidovsky, Barbara Kolb

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ 

Mario Davidovsky's Synchronisms - the series of works for solo instrument or instruments with pre-recorded electronic sound that he began in 1963 and extended across five decades - represents one of the most sustained and rigorously realised bodies of electroacoustic music in the American tradition. The title refers to the precise synchronisation of live and recorded material: the tape part is fixed, the performer must align their playing with it in real time, and the relationship between the two is neither subordination nor independence but a genuinely intersubjective encounter, each part shaped to accommodate and extend the other. Synchronisms No. 6, for piano and tape, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 - a recognition that helped legitimise electroacoustic music within institutions that had long regarded it with suspicion. Barbara Kolb, the American composer paired here, was one of the first American women to win the Prix de Rome (1969), and her chamber works of this period engage with a post-serial language inflected by jazz rhythm and a particular sensitivity to textural transparency.

Issued on Turnabout, in what amounts to one of the more substantive LP documents of 1970s American experimental music.