aural.

while going through my cd collection the other day, i stumbled across this triple-disc release by music concrete/electronic musician tod dockstader that i bought based on reading an interview with him in “the wire” magazine a couple of years ago. so, i began to listen to it from beginning to end, and i fell in love with it all over again. dockstader is in his 70′s now, with a career that stretches back to 1960 as a composer. the interesting thing about this guy was that he cut his teeth on electronic music from the opposite end of the spectrum from other composers of his time. while most avant-garde musicians during the 50′s and 60′s made the transition from traditional musics, dockstader worked as an audio editor and engineer right out of college, making sound effects for cartoons like mr. magoo. he became excited by the works of pierre schaeffer and edgar varese, which promted him to produce a massive quantity of music between 1960 and 1965, but when the studio he workked in shut down, no one would take him seriously enough to support his composing.

then in the 90′s dockstader began to compose again, not with sine wave oscillators and tape manipulation, but with a computer his daughter bought for him to email. he began work on this magnum opus, aerial, a 260 minute composition created solely out of short-wave radio signals. he says on the box cover, “airwaves allow for a silence that is not dead, representing a presence even without a signal”. the three discs in this collection are filled with airy drones and pulses, clicks and shimmys, all by manipulating recorded sounds from what exists between radio stations. and it’s absolutely beautiful.

you can hear a clip from each disc here.