out of print book report – Preservation Sound https://www.preservationsound.com information and ideas about audio history Tue, 16 Apr 2013 15:02:41 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 Suicide Manual https://www.preservationsound.com/suicide-manual/ https://www.preservationsound.com/suicide-manual/#comments Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:19:14 +0000 http://www.preservationsound.com/?p=6376 TAB_666_ExperimentingIn NYC in the mid-seventies, an electronic-based band arose amongst all the guitar punks, a band that was known as much for their confrontational post-beatnik vocals as for the strange and intense sounds that emanated from their famously homemade electronic sound equipment.  A band who has become, in the decades since, one of the few acts that is truly ‘required reading’ in the lexicon of avant-garde rock n pop.  Or, as James Murphy so brilliantly puts it in his apocryphal tale of musical uber-taste, “I was there, in 1974, the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City… I was working on the organ sounds…with much patience” (skip to 2:50… or, actually, don’t… this song kinda rules).

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.

ARP_2500The 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:

TAB_666_ContentsThere’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:

PhotoElectric_Modulator Tremolo_Schem BandSelect_Audio_filter“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.

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