To Kill a Sunrise and La Ruche
**2020 stock** Turkish-born musician and composer Ilhan Mimaroglu worked extensively with electronic (tape) music. The two programmatic pieces paired here are "To Kill a Sunrise," a dirge subtitled "Requiem for Those Shot in the Back" with words borrowed from a poem by Guatemalan guerilla poet Marco Antonio Flores, composed in Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center (New-York, N.Y., 1974). And "La Ruche" composed at Groupe de Recherches Musicales (Paris, France, 1968) an experiment of reminis…
The RCA Mark II
C Spencer Yeh presents an album of electro-acoustic music made on the legendary but defunct RCA Mark II modular synth - nicknamed ‘Victor’ - at Columbia Uni. An ingenious concept, captivatingly executed. “The RCA Mark II is a follow-up to Yeh’s recent vocal work and is focused solely on the non-musical operation of the famed RCA Mark II synthesizer. Built and installed in 1959 at Columbia University, it was the first programmable synthesizer and became the bedrock upon which the Columbia-Princet…
Parmak Çocuk, Çizmeli Kedi
While there’s no explicit date listed anywhere within, I’m guessing the pair of 45rpm 7”s in question - released only in Turkey - date to the mid-60s, with each featuring Solmaz Sporel reading a different fairly tale over a completely amazing Musique Concrète tape-backing by Ilhan Mimaroglu, produced at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center in New York. Personally, these particular outings are some of the most gratifyingly zonked things I’ve ever heard, having much to do with the langua…