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The League of Automatic Music Composers: “Martian Folk Music” (1980)
From the album The League of Automatic Music Composers 1978-1983
Take the anarchic, self-organizing ethos of free improvisation, add the raw, low-bit waveforms of early computer sound chips, and tie it all together with cybernetic concepts of interactivity and information exchange, and you get the League of Automatic Music Composers. A product of the uniquely Northern Californian fusion of counterculture and high technology (brilliantly chronicled in Erik Davis’ book Techgnosis), the League pioneered the use of computers in live performance and created music of rare and distinctive beauty.
The League at work: Tim Perkis, Jim Horton, and John Bischoff
The KIM-1, released in 1976 and packing 1152 bytes of RAM, was one of the first mass-market microcomputers (so-called to distinguish them from the massive mainframes that were the most common form of computer at the time). Jim Horton, an electronic musician who had been active for years in the Bay Area scene, quickly bought a KIM-1 and started exploring the unit’s potential as a musical instrument. Horton had earlier specialized in building massive, self-generating analog synthesizer patches which he would let run for hours on end— a remarkable parallel with the simultaneous efforts undertaken in Europe by Roland Kayn. (A late solo work by Horton was previously featured on this blog.)
It was Horton who conceived the notion of a “silicon orchestra” of human-controlled interconnected computers which reacted to each other’s output in deliberately complicated configurations. He was soon joined by John Bischoff, Rich Gold, and David Behrman, and this quartet performed for the first time as the League of Automatic Music Composers in November 1978.
In 1980 Gold and Behrman left the group and Tim Perkis became a member. “Martian Folk Music” is performed by this later lineup of Perkis, Bischoff, and Horton. This track is typical of the League’s trademark sound: pure digital waves spasmodically careening across the sound-field, interacting according to the laws some occult dynamics that lies just beyond the listener’s comprehension.
A flyer made by Rich Gold showing one of the League’s configurations
Played 162 time(s).
August 02, 2010, 1:00pm
