Ever since my good friend Folke Rabe – Swedish composer, radio producer and cultural diffuser – introduced me to the world and music of Pauline Oliveros, I’ve been fascinated by the diversity and intensity of her activities, as a musician, composer and administrator, and not least thinker and philosopher.

I conducted an interview with Folke Rabe some years ago, and in it we came across Pauline Oliveros a number of times. I had for example asked Folke how he connected to Dancers’ Workshop and San Francisco Tape Music Center, and he explained that he had been in Bilthoven in Holland to perform one of his own pieces at a festival in the beginning of the 1960s, and at the same festival a piece called “Sound Patterns” by Pauline Oliveros was presented. Folke was introduced to her, and they got together for some hollands (Dutch gin) at a restaurant in Bilthoven, which is where a long lasting, warm friendship started.
Folke then went on to explain that he finally in 1965 went to the States and worked at San Francisco Tape Music Center, where he met a host of personalities, like Morton Subotnick, Stuart Dempster, Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros. He spent many a night at Terry Riley’s place, and also participated in performances of “In C”. Folke also explains that he later managed to arrange guest performances of many of those artists in Sweden, and among them Pauline Oliveros.
The most entertaining story about Pauline Oliveros from those days – 1965 – took place when Oliveros had borrowed a house with a lovely view and lime trees in the garden from a priest in Berkeley Hills across the Bay.
Folke Rabe, his Swedish colleague Jan Bark and Pauline Oliveros got some Japanese sake together for a parting party, since Folke Rabe was to leave on a Greyhound headed east the following morning.
The sake bottles were placed in water baths on the stove. Unfortunately the last bottle was forgotten there by the jolly threesome, and in the morning a horrendous holler from Pauline Oliveros rose out of the kitchen downstairs, where she had descended to fix breakfast. The sake bottle had cracked, and the sake had gasified and consequently stuck to the walls like sticky glue… Folke Rabe explained with a chuckle how hard it was to get the sake off the walls, and that he couldn’t assist Pauline Oliveros and Jan Bark much, since his bus was due to leave… A complicating factor was that the borrowed house of the priest was up for sale, and was going to be shown to potential customers soon…

So much for old anecdotes…

This is the second CD from prolific label Pogus with frontier electronics by Pauline Oliveros, the other CD being the wonderful “Alien Bog / Beautiful Soop” CD (Pogus P 21012-2) issued in 1997, with pieces from 1966 & 1967. In addition to these important releases there is another Oliveros CD that was issued simultaneously with the Pogus 1997 release, on Paradigm Discs PD 04, with equally important frontier electronics from 1965 & 1966. These three CDs with early electronic music by Pauline Oliveros constitute a haven for anybody the least interested in the poetic origins of beginner sounds out of the amassment of creativity at the San Francisco Tape Music Center and consequent organizations. These CDs are marvelous auditory nourishments, delicious fruits filled with refreshing juice!

Pauline Oliveros comments on this issue (the capitalization here and there are hers): “In The Summer of 1966 I worked in the Classical Electronic Music Studio at the University of Toronto for six weeks. The System I used to create No Mo and Something Else consisted of Lafayette tone generators, noise source and tape delay. In the Fall of 1966 I was the newly appointed Director of the Mills Tape Music Center, formerly the San Francisco Tape Music Center and now the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College. Bog Road was created at the Mills Tape Music Center in Summer of 1967 with Buchla Series 100 Box. The studio overlooked a pond where frogs singing a chorus inspired a series of Bog pieces.”

An aspect of these pieces that strike you immediately is the sheer joy of sound in them. There is a freshness of perception here, which is hard to find sometimes these days, when we’re so used to all kinds of electronic devices and acoustics. These works from 1966 and 1967 are saturated with that knack on desire for discovery, which was inherent in much of the pioneering art of electronics and electroacoustics. Furthermore, there is duration here to consider, i.e. duration enough to really have you soar and float, jerk and twist, ascend and descend – and you can take big chunks out of this crunchy auditory meal and chew till your jaws get locked in the cramp of fatigue. (“Bog Road” is in excess of 33 minutes; “No Mo” almost 18 minutes)
These sonic revelations out of Oliveros’ curiousness are so generous, so fulfilling, if you will. Oliveros serves a steady meal here, with three fat dishes of sound. Ah, that spirit of ingenuity, of “gerade-aus”-pioneering; I love it!

“No Mo” (1966) is the starter. Stereo separation – like in many early electronic works – is complete. Wheezing, hissing machine audio or radio static sounds take turns in the right and left realms, then mix furiously. I recall my iron-works summer jobs, walking down giant halls where running steel rushed down in gravitational bows of heavy white liquid to become black sheet steel, which was cut up in sizeable pieces while sprays of welding sparks fountained all around… and that is one possible venue of association here – but you can just rest inside the sounds too; in these extended gushes of white and gray – even black! – sounds, in a counterpoint of administered noise! If you listen to these kinds of works for the first time here it might be a tough venture, but most people who listen in at all to music like this have previous experiences of electronic music, maybe having enjoyed for example Gottfried Michael Koenig (“Klangfiguren”, “Terminus I”, “Terminus II”, “Funktion Rot”, “Funktion Grau” and so on), Konrad Boehmer (“Aspekt”, “Apocalipsis cum figuris”), Henri Pousseur (“Scambi”, Paraboles-mix”), Guy Reibel (“Granulations – Sillages”, “Signal sur bruit”) and so forth. Maybe some of us have even been aware of these sonic extensions since the beginning of the WDR studio (Westdeutsche Rundfunk) in the early years of the 1950s. Then this Oliveros hellhound exorcism is pure enjoyment for tympanic membranes and the more visionary expanses of our spirits!

Second track is “Something Else” (1966). As it commences it seems to exhort more pitch than pure noise, and a droning, almost bewildering, bulging tone stretches out in a space fashion of sorts, while short event repeats between long pauses. A murmur is apparent behind this all, and soon percussive tones thud by – for a while. The long electronic drone chord continues, but fluctuates in density and volume. It’s like a recording from inside a human being, monitoring some of the bodily signs of life, with a murmuring heart, blood rushing, electric impulses flashing by through the nervous system and so forth, the listener at rest and attention inside an anatomy!
You don’t have to have all that experience I talked about above to hear this bit; it’s quite easily enjoyed, but no less intriguing and exciting!
“Something Else” is like a state you’re in, but a state of something else, like somebody’s body!
Man, they don’t make them like this anymore…

The 33-minute “Bog Road” concludes this wholesome sonic Oliveros adventure from days long gone, and with flying colors too! With the right channel getting the upper-hand to begin with, with humming and flaking sounds, like thermos flasks leaking, the left arises with lonely birdlike calls in a repetitious pattern – or could it be the (somewhat) processed sound of those frogs in that pond? High pitch figures paint light strokes inside the tonal web, and the counterpoint of events is transparent, beautiful, softly dreamy… progressing ever so slightly through the durations, in an introversion of a nature curled up around itself at nightfall, around the pond; the trees still, listening with outstretched branches to a sky full of stars…
Electrostatic noise interferes momentarily seven minutes into the piece, like the Northern Lights flapping its curtains in a shower of crackling electrons across the borealis of the planet.

The wobbling interstellar electromagnetic forces increase in audible volume, while a repetitious “melody” of seemingly human origin rolls and spirals in the right channel, balancing all these space associations with the feet of Homo Sapiens in the soil of the Earth.

Oliveros manages here to connect between the frog pond and celestial bodies in the far reaches of interstellar space, displaying a relation which is natural but not often fully perceptible in works of art – but here the oneness of the All is apparent, in the feelings and gut associations that Pauline Oliveros’ sound art conveys – and you don’t have to hurry, but may sit back and let this happen, for many are the lives…