The Traveller in the Evening
The Traveller in the Evening
Spectral Promises: Electronic Music 1970-1990
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Spectral Promises: Electronic Music 1970-1990

Moving from Stockhausen to Nurse With Wound, in an episode soundtracked by Iancu Dumirtrescu, Bowie and Throbbing Gristle, here's a critical account of key decades in the birth of electronic music.
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Planned as a long Q&A session between Andy and long-time Traveller podcast co-host, Conor Kostick, that discussion raised so many questions and went on for so long that it seemed best to postpone airing the issues on the podcast. For this episode we excerpted Andy’s intro to the discussion, touching on his own experience listening to and making electronic music.

Nagra SN tape recorder, manufactured by the Swiss company Kudelski, 1973.

Starting with Wendy Carlos and Popcorn, (yes, it’s Hot Butter by Popcorn, not Popcorn by Hot Butter… Andy got that wrong throughout) passing through Kraftwerk, David Bowie, Throbbing Gristle and Nurse With Wound, Andy argues that the technology is generally used lazily and to little effect, compared to the enormity of, eg., the work of Iancu Dumitrescu.

Various releases by the Romanian Spectral composers, Iancu Dumitrescu and Ana-Maria Avram.

The gist of Andy’s argument is that all the things he found interesting in the distorted timbres and extremities of electronic rock and industrial music are used with overwhelming effect in the music of the Romanian Spectral composer, Iancu Dumitrescu, whose music runs throughout the show, along with samples from David Bowie, Throbbing Gristle, the Tim Hodgkinson / Ken Hyder collaboration, KSpace, and Andy Wilson’s own recorded archives.

Throbbing Gristle: DoA / Dead on Arrival, which starts with the track IBM, channelling the data on a computer program cassette.

Along the way, Andy discusses the combined and uneven development of electronic music, with huge increases in the expressive power of the tools available to musicians still lagrely unexplored by most musicians. Yes, Andy is complaining about the music young people make today. Conor thought so, and he might be right.

The Korg MS20 analogue synthesiser

Andy also tells stories about visiting abandoned quarries on a military base to record foxes with Chris Watson of Cabaret Voltaire, Cod that burp (off the Galapagos Islands, not Japan) at hissing cockroaches, Chris Carter’s Gristleizer, Bourbonese Qualk’s Simon Crab buying Throbbing Gristle’s Korg MS20, comparisons between buying tickets for Oasis and dumping grain in the Pacific, seagull reverb, the Nagra tape recorder, BBC Radiophonics, ‘Dada, Futurism, Industrial Music’, Wendy Carlos, hand-cranked ring modulators, The Aphex Twin and the Supercollider user group, Steve Stapleton bunking off at Faust’s Wumme and Kurt Graupner’s Faust Machines, computerised shamanic improv, John Lennon’s tape experiments, SoundRaider, time division multiplexing, nature recording with David Attenborough, the pleasures of dentistry under general anaesthetics, and more besides.

David Bowie: John, I'm Only Dancing

Criminally, I didn’t get around to talking about how the sound of King Iwah and the UpsettersGive Me Power, produced by Lee Perry in 1972, set the scene for everything that followed. I can only apologise and drop this video here.


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The Traveller in the Evening
The Traveller in the Evening
Reflections on William Blake, Surrealism, ecology, radical theology and politics.