Accordion & Voice

CD/LP available directly from Imprec.com A central figure in post-war electronic art music, Oliveros was one of the original members of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (along with Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Terry Riley, and Anthony Martin), which was the resource on the U.S. West coast for electronic music during the 1960s. The Center later moved to Mills College, where she was its first director, and is now called the Center for Contemporary Music. Oliveros often improvises with the Expanded Instrument System, an electronic signal processing system she designed, in her performances and recordings. “Accordion & Voice was the first of my recordings as a soloist. I was living in an A-frame house in a meadow just below Mount Tremper at Zen Mountain Center. I had a wonderful view of the graceful saddle mountain top. When away on a performance trip I would imagine the mountain as I played Rattlesnake Mountain. I followed the feelings and sensations of my many experiences of the mountain - the changing colors of the season, the breezes and winds blowing through the grasses and trees. Horse Sings From Cloud taught me to listen to the depth of a tone and to have patience. Rather than initiating musical impulses of motion, melody and harmony I wanted to hear the subtlety of a tone taking space and time to develop. The tones linger and resonate in the body, mind, instrument and performance space. My thanks to Important Records for bringing these pieces to be heard again.” ~ Pauline Oliveros, 2007

Critic John Rockwell's review of a New York performance of Horse Sings From Cloud offers a concise and insightful summary of Pauline Oliveros' aesthetic: "The music…is built up of the simplest of ingredients. In a sense, it is the experience of the piece and its essential sounds that interest her more than the compositional deployment of those sounds….It might not seem to be 'music' at all, but some vaguely therapeutic ritual. Oliveros means it to be just that; for her the implied politics of a concert are at least as important as the tangible aural result."