Various

Featuring: Pauline Oliveros, Harry Partch, Diamanda Galás, Robert Turman, Kenneth Gaburo, Joji Yuasa, David Dunn

This wild and wonderful 4 cd set came about from a meeting between Nyahh Records boss Willie Stewart and Bill Perrine, author of Alien Territory: Radical, Experimental and Irrelevant Music From 1970's San Diego. The two were chatting over email when Bill happened to mention that he had access to  the archive at the University of California, San Diego. Which contained a large collection of unreleased work by many of the artists and musicians mentioned in his book. They decided to collaborate on a compilation album, which soon turned into a 4 disc set. The 4 discs are separated into 4 categories: Drones and Tapes, Ensembles, Synthesizers and Vocals.

In the early 1970s San Diego was a sleepy Southern California Navy town on the Mexican border and a seemingly unlikely gathering point for some of the most innovative, unclassifiable American artists of their era. Yet the presence of Harry Partch - hobo composer, iconoclast and inventor of instruments such as the Harmonic Canon and Quadrangularis Reversum - and a newly established and highly experimental music department at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) ushered in a revolution that was as much social as it was musical. Drawing from the occult, self-realization and radical political movements of 70s Southern California, these artists sought to dismantle the established control systems of American life, looking to the future even as they sometimes referenced a distant, idyllically imagined past. In their pursuit of “Irrelevant Music” - Kenneth Gaburo’s term for an untainted music free of constraint and compromise - these disparate artists constitute a shadow history of American experimental music far removed from the European and East Coast models of the time. Sonic Meditations, compositional linguistics, microtonality, invented instruments, cutting edge electronics, underwater synthesizers, Tibetan throat singing, environmental sound and pure noise were their tools. My 2023 book, Alien Territory: Radical, Experimental and Irrelevant Music in 1970s San Diego, presents the story. In this collection are the sounds. 

It’s a lot of ground to cover and in an attempt to ever so slightly smooth out the listener experience and impose a little structure on to a decade of far-reaching experimentation each disc from this set is devoted to a particular musical style, strategy or genre. These are useful but admittedly porous distinctions that the artists themselves may or may not recognize. With the exception of “Noyse” by Kenneth Gaburo, which was released on a Musicworks compilation in 1999, as well as a couple Warren Burt tracks available for purchase directly from the artist, all tracks in this set are previously unreleased. Thanks to all the artists who contributed their work, as well as Philip Blackburn, Gavin Bryars, Lia Gaburo, Pea Hix, Ione, Al Margolis, John McCaughey, Grace Bell Parsons, Pat Strange, Jon Szanto and the other fine people I’ve forgotten to thank because I left this section to the last minute. An extra round of applause to Warren Burt for his archival efforts on behalf of Ernie Morgan; likewise to David Dunn for his work on the Kenneth Gaburo pieces.