So yeah I am talking about Suicide.  If you don’t know ’em, check ’em out…  it is amazing+terrifying that this record came out in 1977…  truly truly AOTT.  And plainly awesome too.  I really love this band, and they inspired me greatly in the early 2000s, when I was performing with a punk band in Brooklyn using an analog drum-machine rig based around some old Roland beatboxes, voltage controlled filters, and a CV-generating homemade theremin to control the whole thing.

LISTEN: The_Flesh_Gallows

This felt fairly fresh to me in the year 2001; so that fact that Suicide was doing this same thing 25 years early was mindblowing.  I had to wonder; how the hell did these guys make all the stuff?  Even in the year 2000, DIY’ing synth equipment was fairly unusual for rock musicians; but in 1975?  That was like black magic!  Well I think I found the grimoire.

NEways… kinda a long setup to what will be…  the first OUT OF PRINT BOOK REPORT we’ve had in a while.  And oh boy will there be more coming.  I was recently at a really fascinating estate-sale somewhere in Marin County, California, where I met an elderly engineer who sold me a library of ancient audio-tech books and wished me luck on my travels… the pick of the litter was the above-depicted “Experimenting With Electronic Music,” by Robert Brown and Mark Olsen.  Published in 1974, it is TAB books catalog number 666.  No joke.  This just keeps getting better.

The book starts with some fairly uninteresting discussion of various commercially-available synthesizers circa ’74, but soon gets into a wealth of both schematics and ideas regarding DIY’d audio electronic circuits.  Here’s the TOC:

There’s a ton of great stuff in here, and while I honestly have no idea whether or not the particular transistors spec’d in these circuits are still available, I would imagine that there are subs available…  even if you never build anything from the book, I think anyone with an interest in early electronic music will find it fascinating.  Here’s a few projects that I plan to do at some point:

“Experimenting with Electronic music” is available from a few sellers on Abe Books.  It ain’t cheap, but I’ve been digging for these sorta books for 20 years now and this is the first copy I ever came across.

And speaking of the RE15…  after watching the prices slowly rise on eBay for the past year, I finally picked up one of these..  expect some audio clips/shoot-out here soon.  I always ignored these in the past, i figured, I have an RE20, what’s the point…  but I finally had to know.  I recently worked with a contractor/tech from a major live-sound company who had 1/2 the stage mic’d with these things, swears by ’em…  anyway, I am super-curious.  They are apparently very hi-fi with very accurate off-axis response.  More to come…

While on the subject of dynamic mics…  above, the Turner Model 10 circa 1972.  Those of you who’ve been following PS for a while will know that I am a big fan of obscure Turner models, especially the flagship models like the 510…  I recently bought my second 510 for Gold Coast Recorders and I have to sadly report that it is not as awesome as the example I have had for years… Anyway, the Model 10 seems to have been a replacement for the 500/510 series…  there is a super-rare Model 11 (likely the ‘selected’ hi-fi version of the Model 10) on eBay right now for really cheap…  might be a good purchase for anyone looking for more interesting dynmics mics…

Above, the AKG D190 and D124!  Finally some info on the D124…  these turn up in my old 70s AKG catalogs (most of which you can download here on PS dot com), and I actually use this as the console talkback mic at GCR, but I had not realized that it was the replacement for the D-24.  The D-124 is an amazing little piece of engineering, very nice smooth sound and incredibly small in size.  D-190s are much more common, I tend to see these on CRList quite often.

Above: Shure SM5 circa 1969.  I love the similar SM7, use it regularly, it seems to have become somewhat of a standard-bearer vocal mic these days…  artists actually ask for it in the studio the same way some will ask for an 87 or 47 or 58….  The SM5 is much less common, no longer made, and consequently extremely expensive.  Are any of y’all using SM5s for music or vocal recording these days?  Thoughts?

Above: Sony ‘Superscope’ branded C-77, C-37, and C-55 circa 1969.  A C-37 or C-37 Fet is very high on my wish-list…  Never used any of these models.. anyone?

Above: the Electrovoice RE55 is introduced (1969).  Interesting to see that the RE55 was the successor to the 655.  I have a pair of 655 at GCR, very very old pair circa 1950, and wow they sound great.  Fairly high self-noise for a dynamic, but for drum overheads it’s never a problem.  Anyone using the RE55?  Seem pretty uncommon…

Above: The AKG 412 circa 1972.  Seems to be the final evolution of the C12 prior to introduction of the still-standard 414.  Anyone using a 412?  Is it significantly different than a circa 70s 414?

Download a five-page article from Radio News 1931, on ‘The Electrical Future Of Music.’

DOWNLOAD: Radio_News_3107_Electronic_Music

It’s interesting to see her how the focus is primarily on the creation of instruments on which one could perform western tempered music (as opposed to music concrete or noise-music).  Although those more avant garde approaches to electronic music would come soon, this earlier approach – the electronic (as opposed to bellows) organ, the violin-simulating theremin – seems to be what has won out.  Eighty years later, most of us are not usually listening to atonal clusters of carefully organized noise – we’re still mostly listened to very diatonic, 4/4 folk-songs (essentially) performed and presented via wholly electronic means.

Above: the photo-electric organ

Above: the Theremin, still popular today in a variety of musical genres.

Above: an electronic organ built by Westinghouse, 1931.

Above: an electronic Carillion as built by RCA.  The principle employed here is also still very popular today.

Early attempt at acoustic isolation of an instrument for electronic pickup

Imagine if this dude had been your college music professor.  Read a 4-page essay by Mongolian-born composer Vladamir Ussachevsky as printed in the 1/17/74 issue of DOWNBEAT magazine.  Ussachevsky was one of the founders of the legendary Columbia-Princeton electronic music studio, and one of the folks who bridged the tape-manipulation and synthesizer eras of early electronic music.  It’s almost impossible for us to grasp the conceptual leaps that these early pioneers had to make in order to arrive the formulation of audio-manipulation-as-music; for many of us working as musicians in the past few decades, it’s hard to even separate music and audio, so intertwined is audio technology with music, so thoroughly has the studio become-an-instrument.

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