Michael Czajkowski - People The Sky

Music created on the Buchla modular electronic music system. This score was realized in the electronic music studio of the Composer's Workshop at the New York University School of the Arts' Intermedia Program. Although the name Michael Czajkowski is virtually unknown outside of certain academic music circles, his “People The Sky” album was an advance reconnaissance into the burgeoning synthesizer scene of the late sixties. Ignorance of his work is understandable, as his entire back catalogue is but a pair of tiny blips in the universe of recorded electronic music. But the sounds and emotions he conjured were daring and exquisitely handled non-linear excursions rendered in a newly-discovered language that had only recently been invented. One cannot attempt to recount the story of Czajkowski without that of avant-garde composer Morton Subotnick and one of the earliest electronic keyboards, the Buchla synthesizer, that linked them together without at least a cursory overview of the events that led to these pioneers and that unique musical apparatus crossing paths during their artistic pursuits of the late sixties.

It was more than a century of various innovations in compositions, instruments and electronic-based experiments that led to and directly inspired the RCA Mark II Synthesizer. Completed by Harry Olsen and Herbert Belar in 1955, this landmark achievement would set in motion all synthesizer developments to come with the earliest of these electronic keyboards located within the confines of state-operated, European and Japanese radio stations or studios attached to a handful of American universities. Operated by a small circle of technicians, studio engineers and professors, these machines were too expensive, too few and far too unwieldy to be used on a regular, freelance basis and it was not until the advent of transistor technology that a dramatic increase in the production of far more compact synthesizer units began. And although Robert Moog had already been constructing his own synthesizer modules, like their precursors they were usually fitted directly into studio consoles. But by 1961, the synthesizer first became recognised as both a standalone component as well as an independent instrument in its own right when a collaboration between electronic music equipment designer Don Buchla with composers Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender yielded the first major compact synthesizer module whose aim was to facilitate a far wider potential for recording as well as live performance. Buchla named the prototype ‘The San Francisco Tape Music Center’ in reference to Subotnick’s music studio. Subotnick quickly and poetically re-dubbed it the ‘Buchla’ and it was on this first finished prototype, the Buchla 100 that Subotnick began work at the aforementioned San Francisco Tape Music Center -- a studio workshop located at the San Francisco Conservatory which Subotnick and Sender established to meet the needs of a small group of composers and artists from nearby Mills College that included Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley and Anthony Martin.

At least as important as the sounds and the reduction of time spent on labour intensive overdubbing and manual tape editing, the creation of the Buchla stressed the interaction of the musician through its accessible front panel layout and musical controls. Its final modern flourishes featured a series of touch-sensitive metal plates placed at intervals in the place of a traditional keyboard while an interior analogue sequencer provided the further innovation of pre-programmed sound patterns that could be manipulated into endless varieties of rhythms.

Edited from http://www.headheritage.co.u...el-czajkowski-people-the-sky

NOTE: VINYL LP RECORDING, INCLUDES CLICKS AND POPS