Laurie Spiegel - The Expanding Universe '2012

Tracks list

Tracklist:

CD 1:
01. Patchwork (9:46)
02. Old Wave (6:53)
03. Pentachrome (7:18)
04. A Folk Study (2:03)
05. Drums (7:09)
06. Appalachian Grove I (5:22)
07. Appalachian Grove II (7:56)
08. Appalachian Grove III (3:14)
09. The Expanding Universe (28:28)

CD 2:
01. East River Dawn (14:16)
02. The Unquestioned Answer (6:30)
03. The Orient Express (10:02)
04. Clockworks (5:22)
05. Dirge Part I (2:20)
06. Dirge Part II (2:31)
07. Music For Dance Part I (8:37)
08. Music For Dance Part II (6:20)
09. Keplers Harmony Of The Worlds (10:40)
10. Wandering In Our Times (11:44)

Earlier than most, Laurie Spiegel recognized that computers could offer the
complete freedom to define any kind of world you wanted and work within it. Her
compositions from the 70s and 80s were coded instead of written, revealing new
horizons for improvisation and experimentation while remaining accessible. In
those decades, Philip Glass and Steve Reich were her contemporaries in the
close-knit experimental scene of downtown New York. But Spiegel continues to set
herself apart from the high-profile minimalist movement, preferring the term
slow change music. Her innovations to American and electronic music have by now
gone down in history, but her rise to recognition has been as slow and subtle as
her compositions.

Because it transcended known genres, her first album, The Expanding Universe,
was picked up by the folk label Philo Records. (Spiegel recently said it had the
impact of a mere drop of rain falling into the ocean.) It wasnt until 2012, when
the label Unseen Worlds reissued The Expanding Universe, that many were able to
hear these pieces for the first time. (The label has now pressed the album
again, and has also given Spiegels second album, Unseen Worlds, a first vinyl
pressing.) Recorded nearly a decade apart, these works reflect the changing role
of the computer from a cumbersome machine kept behind institutional doors to its
place in the home as a personal tool. The personality of the compositions
shapeshifted as well, from primarily buoyant and melodic tendencies in The
Expanding Universe to unsettling soundscape-driven scores in Unseen Worlds.

The Expanding Universes cover art suggests a vivid sunset, setting the mood for
what lies within. Sporting lush tones flying up and down scales, the opening
track, Patchwork, embraces the listener with optimistic energy. The timbre is
surprisingly warm for a completely digital album. The ability to shift the
timbre was fairly limited on the technology available, but the textures still
ended up being intimate, humanizing the synthetic nature of digital tools. It
suggested that a personal relationship to both computers and the cosmos were
within our reach. The Expanding Universe is a 30-minute meditation of modulated
droning that captures the albums ethos: to make music that Spiegel could feel
close to… which should have existed somewhere, but which [she] hadnt been
able to find.

In contrast, Keplers Harmony Of The Worlds was programmed with astronomical
calculations, made by Johannes Kepler in 1619, to anxiously screeching ends,
like a chorus of earthquake emergency alarms sounding at once. Carl Sagan caught
wind of Spiegels sonic experiments and, recognizing their mathematical beauty,
asked that it be etched into two gold-plated records and sent into space with
the 1977 Voyager mission. Meant to be found by intelligent extraterrestrials,
these records are still hurtling through space, many billions of kilometers away
from Earth.

Such experiments were only possible with the unique access to a new computing
protocol named GROOVE. Spiegel saw an opportunity to streamline the composition
process while retaining the potential to improvise. But once the GROOVE system
became obsolete, Spiegel decided to make her own music software. She wrote one
of the first widely-accessible music composition programs, Music Mouse, which
could be downloaded on then-popular platforms such as Mac and Atari. If you grew
up learning to use a mouse before you learned to read, you might take this
innovation for granted. Accessible software cut away many gatekeepers of the
music world and set the stage for the development of programs such as Ableton.
Music Mouse was one of the programs Spiegel used on Unseen Worlds.

If The Expanding Universe is a gleaming astral body, then its follow-up, Unseen
Worlds, is the dark matter of Spiegels universe. It seems like a response to the
limited timbre of its predecessor, offering a spindly architecture of atmosphere
and texture that leaves one in nail-biting suspense. The Doppler effects on
Three Sonic Spaces suggest three-dimensional space and a sense of falling. Sound
Zones and Riding The Storm are straight-up frightening, as if the impending
disaster hinted at in earlier tracks is reaching fever-pitch. The title of
Strand Of Life (Viroid) points to its short and simple form: viroids are the
smallest discovered infectious pathogens, the menacing elegance of a single,
circular strand of RNA.

Despite titular and sonic references to heavenly bodies and microorganisms,
these albums also embrace the sublime moments found in everyday experience.
Picture the feeling of having stayed up all night on the Lower East Side…
then looking out through the hazy dawn air at the river, read Spiegels liner
notes to East River Dawn, and its easy to feel the melodic tones accumulate and
drip like morning dew on a window pane. The last line reads: The day feels full
of potential.

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