This video interview, via BBC World News America, features electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick talking about his work.
Subotnick was filmed at the American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center in Washington DC, where he performed From Silver Apples of the Moon to A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur: VII with the Berlin Visual Artist Lillevan.
via I Dream Of Wires
His music was beautiful fifty years ago, and it’s beautiful now.
Amazing how his stuff still sounds ahead of its time, and how it’s just now starting to get an audience.
Morton Subotnick now using silver apple to play~
well played, sir 🙂
Mort – one of the true geniuses of the electronic music art form. Mr. Subtonic is a true visionary who has sought to plant his flag WAY outside the bounds of the commercial mainstream, letting his imagination go wherever it would lead him in the less-charted sonic realms that were becoming so accessible to musicians and composers with access to things that moved electrons around. Now 40 and 50 years later it is tragic that there is so little in the way of true sonic exploration going on as hordes of EDM disc jockey loop-player and preset drum machine button-pushing disco boys ape the same boring old 4/4, 120 BPM, syncopated back-beat templates that disco boys were already making old news back in the 1970s. The only substantial difference between disco then and disco now is that now the disco boys rely more on synthesizers than their grandparents did and know far less about them. And what little non-disco electronic music there is out there, is so obscure and difficult to find as to be virtually non-existent. Even the term “electronic music” has come to basically mean “disco with synthesizers” usually made with instruments that have never had their factory presets altered and with commercially purchased loops just repeating the same old crap that was born boring.
Fortunately there are still a few old war-horses exploring something beyond disco. But they are a dying breed.
i guess this is a an American thing..never understood this whole Subotnik enthusiasm.
There were hundreds of composers in Europe at that time doing similar things, if not a lot more experimental and interesting but no-one is asking them to do bbc appearances..
Subotnick now that would be a cool name for a synth and no doubt cool in sound.