Charlemagne PALESTINE
“In-mid-air”

The first electronically generated sounds that Charlemagne Palestine ever heard came from the machines he encountered in ordinary daily urban life. Machines like the refrigerator electric motor, or electrical generators; but it was especialy the sounds of motion (race cars, motorcycles, war planes, rocket ships) that first excited his sonic imagination as a young teenager. Then he heard the elctronic music of Tod Dockstader, Pierre Henry and Pierre Schaeffer, the famous ’Podme Electronique’ of Varese, Xenakis and ’Gesang der Junglinge’ of Stockhausen. He immediately reacted buying a cheap reel to reel tape recorder, cutting and pasting recording tape and making collage sound experiments. Then, one day, Charlemagne Palestine experienced at an electronic music studio what electronically produced sounds waves looked and sunded like through an oscilloscope and he began studying Helmholtz’s on the sensation of tone. He started dreaming of an expressive continuous evermoving, everchanging sound form; an enormous sonorous, 3-dimensional sculptural canvas in mid-air using electronically produced sounds. The first experiments were done with simple sine tone generators emitting the purest sound waves without any overtones. With access to more complex systems the sound was constructed using the sine/sawtooth/square wave oscillators in a fluid everchanging mix of adding or filtering overtones and white niose to create sonorities constantly changing timbres and weight. Five early electronic compositions including ’Sine Tone Study’ (1967); ’Open Closing’ (1968), created through speed alterations of ’Holy 1+2’; ’Seven Organism Study’ (1968); ’Negative Sound Study’ (1969) and ’Timbral for Pran Nath’ (1970). Late night electronic sonorities created on the Buchlas 100 & 200 systems available at the New York University Intermedia Centre. All compositions previously unreleased. 3-folded digipak cover with original photos and liner notes written by the composer.