Folke Rabe, Bo Anders Persson

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Insert included.

This is one of the great records. Two productions from the Electronic Studio of Swedish Radio, Stockholm, issued by Wergo in 1970 - and one of the earliest and most concentrated documents of what drone and sustained-tone music could become when pursued with genuine rigor and genuine imagination. Folke Rabe's Was?? (1967) and Bo Anders Persson's Proteinimperialism (1967) occupy one side each, and together they constitute a kind of manifesto: two composers, two entirely different approaches to stasis and time, arriving at works that remain, more than half a century on, among the most powerful in their respective modes.

Rabe - who began as a jazz orchestra trombonist before moving into chamber music, tape, and theater - called his practice "micromusic": the systematic composition of individual harmonic overtones, each manipulated separately, producing a shimmering mobile of sound in which illusionary internal beats emerge from the intersection of wave frequencies. The effect accumulates, over the work's twenty-six minutes, into a full harmonic spectrum - each partial gaining in presence, the whole generating the sensation of a vast, slowly breathing organism. La Monte Young and Tony Conrad are the obvious reference points, but Rabe's mathematical precision and harmonic architecture give the work its own completely distinct profile. Persson's side, by contrast, loops the spoken word into a polyrhythmic process that thickens and transforms over twenty-four minutes - politically titled after the food imperialism of Western grain corporations - closer in spirit to Alvin Lucier's resonance experiments, the source material gradually dissolving into layered, primitive rhythm and abstract sound-image. Three copies available. Wergo, WER 60047, 1970.