Sound Piece 1 & 2

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Sound Piece #1 - 8:28
Sound Piece #2 - 31:15

19 September 1980 - OU Synthesizer Studio - Norman, Oklahoma
Pupaum - Modular Synthesizer
Digitally Remastered - Chicago - 24 November 2009

These were my very first two recording in a synthesizer studio. No keyboard playing was employed. These pieces were created wholly from tweaking knobs to manipulate the oscillators and envelopes.

I think there are some very interesting parallels, sound wise, between this work and "Early Electronics" created over 6 years earlier and under very different circumstances.

How this work came to be...

I had been making good progress developing my skills as a video artist, but I was using audio from LPs and felt strongly that I wanted to create my own electronic music to score my video art.

The University of Oklahoma School Of Music had a synthesizer studio, however the electronic music classes were only available to advanced music majors.

Joe Hobbs, the Dean of The School of Art, was an extremely important mentor in my art career at OU. I had come to his attention as an extremely focused, disciplined and self-motivated art student and was one day summoned to his office, where he took me under his wing and arranged for me to have 24-hour access to the art school so I could work at anytime of the day or night.

When I learned of my ineligibility to take an electronic music class I went to Joe Hobbs with my dilemma and he arranged with the Dean of The School of Music to make an exception in my case and I was allowed to enroll in The Fundamentals Of Electronic Music, my final semester at OU.

This was a critical and pivotal point in my art career and I relished in this new environment.