Pogus Productions and its procurator Al Margolis keep on providing some of the most interesting stuff for sound aficionados, be it completely new sound art, or, as in this case, historical electronic music.

I’ve said it before, but it can be voiced again: The early attempts at electronic music have a peculiar freshness about them, which only very, very rarely illuminates new music. Perhaps it has to do with the rawness of the tools, the initial basic research, and, which might be very important, the limitations of the machinery. The composers/technicians had to make do with a sparse toolkit, finding many different ways of twisting and turning the same basic sounding characteristics.
This ability to work the ascetics of the period has been retained by some senior composers, and in rare cases been revived by some of the younger ones, who have had to seep through layer upon layer of sophisticated software to reach the bare nakedness of raw sound, or at least inherited a vivid sense of that special quality of the more rough, unaltered sparks out of early electronic craftsmanship; the spirit of it!

This CD is bursting with examples of very enjoyable early sound art from Brazil and the pioneer Jorge Antunes. It’s like visiting the studios of Gottfried Michael Koenig of Henri Pousseur again – but way down in South America.

Jorge Antunes (b.1942) from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil started out studying violin, composition and also conducting at the University of Rio de Janeiro. He also simultaneously studied physics. He went on to study composition with Alberto Ginastera and Luis de Pablo. 1970 – 71 he attended studies with Gottfried Michael Koenig in Utrecht and then he spent two years at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris.
He had already in 1962 begun his research into electronic music.
To date he is the Director of the Electronic Music Laboratory of Brazil as well as the conductor of Orquestra da Universidade de Brasilia.

Pequena Peça para Mi bequadro e Harmônicos (Short Piece for E Natural & Harmonics) is the earliest example of Antunes's venture into the art of electronic music, achieved as early as 1961 (October – November) in the 19-year-old adolescent’s home, i.e. his parents’ house in the Santo Cristo district of Rio de Janeiro.
The machinery was indeed ascetic, amounting to a Grundig reel-to-reel, a National reel-to-reel and a saw tooth wave generator that he had constructed himself.
It is very interesting to note how this interest was set off. Apparently the Municipal Theatre of Rio de Janeiro, under the guidance of Eleazar de Carvalho, conducted a so-called Youth Series held on Sunday mornings, and the tenth part of this series, on September 24th 1961, dealt with electronic music. It was in fact the very first electronic music concert in Brazil. It contained Stockhausen’s Kontakte, presented by David Tudor, as well as Henri Pousseur’s Scambi, Koenig’s Essay and piano pieces by Earle Brown and Sylvano Bussotti. The course was set!

A further amplification of Antunes’s interest was his knowledge of the electronics of the day, since he had completed a course in electronics and was making extra money repairing radio sets etcetera. His familiarity with the oscilloscope made it possible for him to build hos saw tooth wave generator.

In Pequena Peça para Mi bequadro e Harmônicos Antunes alternated and superimposed E notes of the piano and periodic pulses of the piano. The booklet text explains that Antunes recorded the whole piece without the technique of cutting and splicing tape, which he wasn’t yet familiar with, only using the stop, record and pause buttons! He gathered sounds from other recordings on two channels to enable simultaneous playbacks.

All this information would be useless unless the result turned out interesting, but no worries; this is a very gratifying piece of pioneer electronics, with many surprising ingredients, evoking associations to much later wailing guitars, screeching and rumbling industrial sites and speeding elementary particles. Long stretches of sound are elastically extended as a backdrop for short, pulsating and percussive events. The traces of the piano may be deciphered if you’re aware of their presence, but otherwise hardly. It’s an exciting first etude from Jorge Antunes, still standing its ground in all its electronic freshness.

The second piece – Valsa Sideral – exposes a peculiar Rune Lindblad audio in a slowed-down techno guise! The Rune Lindblad affinity may be explained by the period’s electronic devices, common to most electroacousticians back then, but the techno aura is harder to explain. It’s simply a whim of Antunes; a Pinocchio march across the circuits of home-made devices, beeping like austere shortwave emergencies and static between the stations, adding up to an almost serene Donald Duck intoxication…

The booklet explains that this is the first purely electronic piece of music produced in Brazil, meaning that only electronically produced sounds were used. Antunes made it in 1962 in his home studio in Rua Orestes, Rio de Janeiro. He utilizes a loop with three different sounds of different pitches. Across the waltz rhythm the composer-musician improvised freely on his saw tooth generator, manipulating frequency variations of the generator with a potentiometer. He then superimposed two other recordings on the first one.

The funny thing is that Antunes in all honesty thought that he was first when he started to tamper with recording heads of the tape recorders to achieve feedback and loops, but only a few years later, in 1955, he realized that this technique had been in use since 1950 in France (boucle) and Germany as well as America (loop). Of course, this means that he really was an inventor, knowing nothing about the other goings-on, the same way Rune Lindblad in Sweden was in the early 1950s, unaware of the experiments at Radio-France in Paris and WDR in Cologne. Naturally, as we have seen time after time, certain inventions and ideas come up simultaneously and independently in different places when the conditions are ripe for them.

Música para Varreduras de Freqüências (Music for Frequency Sweepings) is the third CD track, and a short one at that; less than two and a half minute. The composer crafted the piece in 1963.
One of the remarks in the booklet is very important. It states that Antunes kept the unavoidable little glitches of the sound producers and made musical use of them. This is the true mark of an artist, taking what works against him into his artistry, having it work for him!

The booklet also tells a story about Antunes’s circumstances that I cannot keep from the reader, so I will relate it here. It appears that Antunes had very little space in the apartment of his parents, in a small room where the upright piano was kept. The story goes on about how his father was a collector of – among other objects – wall clocks, and these clocks on the walls would make quite an alarming noise, making serious recording work all but impossible. The solution lay with Jorge Antunes’s amiable mother. She allowed Jorge to stop all the clocks as his father left the house, enabling the artistic work of the son. However, the noises from a couple of near-by factories frequently polluted Jorge’s recordings.
By the way, before Jorge’s father returned home after work, the rest of the family got all the clocks working again!

For Música para Varreduras de Freqüências Jorge Antunes used some sounds from an early sound effects LP, run through his own electronic contraptions. The result is not bad! To hear it this long afterwards on a CD from Pogus is a great treat, especially with all this historical documentation concerning the environment in which these works emerged! Great fun!
The composer mostly used a rising glissando from the LP, labeled, on the LP, as the sound of a flying saucer! Indeed, some of the passages would make do in one of those early attempts at science fiction movies!

Fluxo Luminoso para Sons Brancos I (Luminous Flow for White Sounds I) stems from 1964. At this time Antunes had added an industrial sine and square wave generator to his makeshift studio.
It is apparent that the compositional work had evolved into a more professional state, leaving some of the haphazard improvisation behind for a more logical, consequent and planned work, involving minute cutting and splicing, a preconceived idea of the great form, and an artistic aim.
The work now included a graphic score, admitted to large 92 cm x 45 cm sheets of paper. Un upper part involved track 1; a lower one track 2. Antunes had familiarized himself with the early Stockhausen, as for example the scores of Die Elektronische Studien. Some of the characteristics of Antunes’s score are influenced by Stockhausen’s methods.
A new ingredient in this work is Antunes’s own voice, somewhere there inside the electronics!

The music is complex, yet clearly evolving in layers of sounds rising out of former sounds, growing into new sounds, while some characteristic figures remain, repetitious, relentless. Waves of sound swell, then diminish, as murky halls open into which the light of day seeps through metal dust in photon rhomboids.

Contrapunctus contra Contrapunctus was conceived yet a year later, in 1965, but in the same home studio… though no mention is made in the booklet whether Antunes’s father’s clocks still had to be silenced…
Antunes had been studying the correspondence between color and sound, and in 1965 he finished his study, resulting in a dissertation that he tried to incorporate into his artistic activities, sound vise and else.
Apart from working in the visual arts in addition to his electronic sound work, Antunes also began composing for acoustic, traditional ensembles in 1965. However, these were often mixed works, i.e. with traditional instruments introduced into an electronic environment or vice versa, depending on how you wish to see it. Not many had done this that early, except, of course, Stockhausen. It became very fashionable much later, in the 1980s and 1990s, with… mixed results!

The booklet – in describing Contrapunctus contra Contrapunctus – talks in terms of meticulous cutting and splicing and micro-assemblies. This means that Antunes by 1965 had taken on an even greater compositional determination, wishing to control every last bit of sounding information, deciding the over-all impression as well as the minute details.
The booklet describes how Antunes uses ostinati of cells of electronic sounds, superimposed on melodic wave generator improvisations. It is also stated how Antunes traditional musical education is apparent in, for example, the division of the piece into three sections.

The sound is bubbling, droning, methane spheres rising out of a marsh deep inside an enchanted forest, or inside an altered mind of sorts, much like in the early electronic works by Swedish pioneer Ralph Lundsten, in pieces like Rock Carvings, Winter Music and Gunnar of Lidarände. Again I wonder if this is due to general tendencies of the arts at the time, or if it has to do solely with the equipment used, or, if indeed these composers were aware of each other and influenced one another.
The echoing effect that permeates this work like the morning mist of the enchanted forest renders it a dreamlike aspect, like a vision rising in someone’s drowsy mind, resting under a tree, the unconscious leaking madly into the world…

Três Estudos Cromofônicos (Three Chromophonic Studies) were composed 1966.
Antunes kept up his studies, independently of his musical activities, and in 1966 he completed his degree in Physics, starting his Master’s at the Brazilian Center for Research in Physics.
The three studies comprising Três Estudos Cromofônicos deals with complementary colors in three different pieces: Estudo para Círculos Verdes e Vermelhos (Study for Green and Red Circles), Estudo para Espirais Azuis e Laranjas (Study for Blue and Orange Spirals) and Estudo para Pontos Amarelos e Violetas (Study for Yellow and Violet Points).
As the work was premiered at the Music School of the University of Brazil, it was met with raised eyebrows and headshakes, but in the audience was a man named Luiz Heitor Corrêa de Azevedo, a musicologist who formerly had been in charge of the Music Service of UNESCO in Paris. He was impressed by Antunes’s work, and arranged to have it represent Brazil at UNESCO’s International Rostrum of Composers in Paris in 1966.

In Estudo para Círculos Verdes e Vermelhos Jorge Antunes lets the colors green and red correspond to the notes C and G. Without dwelling further on this, let’s just note that Antunes applies his theory of color and sound in these three works.
In Estudo para Círculos Verdes e Vermelhos different octaves of C and G are put into action.
Bubbles in water are said to be the symbolic element of this piece, and indeed they do appear shortly after the beginning. Otherwise the means are rudimentary as usual, considering the meager equipment used in Antunes’s studio. In addition to the wave generators a bronze ashtray is utilized, producing a bell-like sound.
The bell quality renders the work an unusually beautiful, ringing timbre, which soon enough, though, is buried in a swarm of metallic bees roaring past and around and up front, attacking your senses with their sharp stingers… The mad bubbling sends you into some perverted 1930s’ film laboratory, where unimaginable extracts are deduced out of the boiler…

Estudo para Espirais Azuis e Laranjas lets the colors blue and orange correspond to D and A. Antunes again followed his own rules from his studies of his chromophony theory, which indicates that the relation between the frequency of the notes which form an interval of a perfect fifth I s the same as that which exists between complementary colors.
Antunes used a sound from a sound effects LP, where he this time picked out a booing sort of sound to work the spiral effect he wanted. To make variations Antunes slowed-down or sped-up the recorder!
This really strikes you as an experiment into noise, not unlike much of what Rune Lindblad did in the 1960s, and with further elegance in the 1970s. Pointillist beads of dots or points are dispersed through a wailing alarm call of factory whistles or unstable piles of sheet steel slowly grinding to a catastrophic descent while all the workers flee like ants in all directions at the very bottom of the factory pit…

Estudo para Pontos Amarelos e Violetas is very short. The booklet talks about short sounds enriched by kinetic stereophony and a dot-sound dialogue. The notes dealt with, corresponding to yellow and violet according to Antunes, are B flat and F.
The work was still achieved by the utilization of crude and inappropriate resources, like regular tape instead of the splicing tape that was to come. Simultaneously, though, as stated before, Antunes made some musical use of even the disturbances caused by the lack of good tools.
It would be tough to make a piece like this nowadays, avoiding all the sophistication of the tools now readily available to everyone in the home computer, so let’s enjoy this creative harshness a little extra!

Canto Selvagem (Savage Song) has lent its title to the CD as such. We’re going ahead chronologically through time and have reached the 1967 of Sgt Pepper and the Basement Tapes. Not much of those are apparent in Antunes’s works, though…
However, the piece was not made at home, but at the Antunes Studio of Chromo-Musical Research in the Villa-Lobos Institute, where Antunes had moved his venture. Already installed there was a Revox reel-to-reel, which added some possibilities to Antunes’s meager workshop.
Antunes had to attend to his formal duties at the Institute too, which meant teaching, and he founded a course in concrete, electronic and magnetophonic music. It was a success.
Canto Selvagem is a mixture of electronic and concrete music, aimed at shaping a kind of atmosphere of primitivism; thus the title.

The music is hardly definable into categories, I’d say. It’s a wild surge of happy-go-lucky sounds, albeit semi-composed and interlaced, primitively layered and with a deep hum to go along with it… Humorous, speech-like insertions seem to imitate some overly optimistic girl chatting with her friends in a school corridor, but some tribal drumming is let in to the space-ship sounds of 1940s’ American low-budget movies… Nice!

Movimento Browniano emerged in 1968, the year of the European Revolution, the year of Rudi Dutschke and Daniel Cohn-Bendit, and the sowing of the seeds of the Baader-Meinhof group.
Jorge Antunes was still working at the Villa-Lobos Institute, where Movimento Browniano was conceived. The title refers to the disordered agitation of small particles in suspension in a liquid, to quote the booklet. It was studied and documented by the Scottish botanist Robert Brown in 1827, the year of Beethoven’s passage into his Bardo walk and a consequent new life which we no nothing about. Antunes tried to cerate this foreseeable, rhythmic chaos in this work, by the production of complex polyrhythmic, which are peculiar to the Afro-Brazilian, samba school!
The beginning of the piece is humorously march-like, right out of a comic strip, but it soon gets more complex, with rhythm upon rhythm and an increase in volume. It’s an exciting piece of sound art which will spin repeatedly over at Sonoloco, I can tell you – and loud!

Canto de Pedreiro (Mason’s Song) is next in line on this CD with many short works of early Brazilian electronic works. It also dates from 1968. This work was a commission from Professor Dulce Leal de Souza, as an illustration for her lecture Music and Poetry.
Antunes used the Theremin machine he had built himself for some of the sounds in the piece. The Revox he’d gotten by chance provided some echo effects. The text was shredded, cut-up and reused, and even reversed, in the good old manner of the text-sound composition premiered in Sweden in the 1960s.

Cinta Cita stems from 1969. It is – after all those years – the first work that Antunes accomplished in a full-fledged professional studio; Torcuato Di Tella Institute of Buenos Aires. Much in line with the rather dry science of electronics and visual arts of the times – though he was a very dramatic artist soul in the so-called reality – he commenced to work with the ideas of points, lines and surfaces, and I see in my collection of unpublished music by the masters that Rune Lindblad recorded stuff in the early 1970s which he indeed even called Punkter, Linjer, Ytor, which is Swedish and translates into Dots, Lines, Surfaces! Lindblad copied these recordings for me right before his untimely death.
Antunes develops the different characteristics of his sounds in sometimes unexpected ways. It is evident that he now has access to more sophistication, but the freshness of his approach remains unadulterated, making this work a very rewarding piece to over-hear. White noise, sudden metallics and swarms of tiny glissandi livens things up quite a bit, and the pure quality of sound; the brilliance of sound, is way superior to anything Antunes did before. This is poetry of sound if anything is!

Auto-Retrato sobre Paisaje Porteño takes us into something quite different and highly fascinating; a long piece from 1969/70, almost 15 minutes. This reminds me more of French gurus like Luc Ferrari and his many-facetted but low-key sound worlds of surprising details. This work by Jorge Antunes opens a dreamscape to me that lacks nothing of serene enchantedness and lurking dangers behind bell-like flowers and moss-covered tree stumps embellished with dewdrops that reflect a whole world of mischievous warmongers in the grown-up bodies of little boys.
This world is pried open by the sounds of an old, wrecked 78 recording of a tango by Francisco Canaro, which Antunes located in a junk shop on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Believe me, it gets funky, it gets seriously fascinating. From a scratch in the record he produces a basic rhythm for the world of little ones that he opens, like a dynamo deep down in the earth below the elves and fairies and evil dark shadows that glide past in the far reaches of the soundscape.
Without really being noticed much, vocal characteristics slowly grow out of this atmosphere; lingual layers of fragmented speech. Dear Protector of Sounds; I love this piece!

The last work on the CD is Historia de un Pueblo por Nacer / Carta a Vassili Vasilikos y a todos los Pesimistas. Both the title and the duration are the longest on the CD!
The piece was composed in 1970 in Torcuato Di Tella Institute of Buenos Aires. It is inspired by the film Z by Vassili Vasilikos, and comes in three sections. Antunes declares that this piece is a pessimistic one, dealing with the cyclical process of military coups and intermittent democratic regimes, taking turns at power over and over again in a Latin American country.
Antunes has tried in this work to build a piece, which starts low-keyed and calm, gradually evolving into something loud and violent. The International is inserted in the last section to show the course towards Utopia…

Indeed the beginning is inconspicuous, low, lurking on the outskirts of existence, ducking down below the horizon, but circling it, transmitting a fear of something untold, a bad message to be delivered to the unsuspecting mother; a child’s death at the mercy of Captain Astiz, perhaps… and the intensity grows as the cold winds sweep in closer, carrying the sound in it’s snow-blasting appearance across the plains of consciousness… and the electronic circuitry warms up and glows ominously, as the sound cuts like a surgeon’s scalpel into the bones of your head.
The second section of the piece starts in the same low-key manner, but nonetheless in a bubbling tour-de-force of hasty electronics falling over each other in trembling piles of audio from inside the core of matter.
The sharp metal bird chirps get louder and more blaring, until dying down into silence, which gives, room to an intense humming of generators and other highly charged high-voltage machinery, until getting pleasantly unbearable!
The calm and low beginning also kicks off the audio in the third section. This last section is formidable in its auditive surprises.

In addition to my enthusiasm for the soundings of this CD I might also state that the booklet is completely crammed with interesting information. There are a few must CDs. This is very near the top in that exclusive pile!