Unseen Worlds

After composing 1980’s *The Expanding Universe* on software proprietary to Bell Laboratories, New Yorker Laurie Spiegel designed her own computer-music system, Music Mouse. (It was eventually commercialized for Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari.) The long-out-of-print *Unseen Worlds*, from 1991, is proof of her instrument’s expressive capabilities: Metallic drones shape-shift like thunderheads, while plucked and hammered string-like sounds suggest futuristic harpsichords. The album is darker and more ominous than her debut, less minimalist and more atmospheric; “The Hollows,” in particular, points the way for decades of dark ambient to come. But these compositions are as searching as any of her other work, with an emphasis on unfamiliar timbres and unexplored terrain; the brief “Strand of Life (‘Viroid’),” meanwhile, rises like a single blade of grass from an alien landscape, beautiful in its familiarity and simplicity.

Laurie Spiegel’s second full-length album, Unseen Worlds, arrived just over ten years after her debut album. Having realized the pieces found on The Expanding Universe (1980) on an instrument no longer available to her, the GROOVE System at Bell Laboratories, Spiegel moved on to composing and developing for the Alles Machine, alphaSyntauri, McLeyvier and various other instruments before creating an instrument entirely her own. Spiegel created “Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument” on a Macintosh 512k so that she could have an instrument that was not general purpose but a small, specialized, and well defined musical instrument for and by her that she did not have to compromise on or risk losing access to it. While it was a very personal instrument for Spiegel, demand among friends and colleagues nevertheless grew until “Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument” became a commercial product for the Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari personal computers with a devoted popular following that continues to this day, despite the obsoletion of those platforms. At the time of her Unseen Worlds album’s original release in 1991, the issuing record label turned out to be going out of business, dissolved and disappeared, sending the album immediately into obscurity. Outside of a private CD edition issued by Spiegel on her own Aesthetic Engineering label in 1994, this new edition represents the first proper commercial release of Unseen Worlds. “Unseen Worlds is not so much based on melody and rhythm as it is on textures, pulses, and sonic environments. Sometimes dark, sometimes light, its drama pulls in the adventurous listener who wants to take a musical journey. Using computer software she wrote in order to implement a unique musical vision, Unseen Worlds blends the artistic and the technical, the cerebral and the sensual, and revives the virtually abandoned tradition of electronic music. Unseen Worlds is the work of a sonic explorer whose music can both challenge and caress. Those looking for other worlds of sound can put on headphones and find them here.” - Craig Anderton

Reissued at last by the label that borrows its name, the second album from the computer music innovator is less predictable, with dark moods rising to a captivating surface.

The story behind this big, beautiful album is as extraordinary as the music itself. A year before releasing her debut, The Expanding Univers...