Experimental Electronic Music (1984-1989): Excerpts from 5 Songs

I recorded these original experimental music compositions in the 1980s and recently recovered them from twenty-year-old cassette tapes. The first excerpt is from a work that was recorded at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. The other songs were recorded at Carleton University in Ottawa.

#ExperimentalMusic #electronica #longzijun

The video clips are processed (using AfterEffects) screen captures (using CamStudio) of music visualizations (using the iTunes and Dr. Glitter visualizers).

'Blade' features drums, synthesizer (Yahama DX-7), alto saxophone, voices, a bicycle pump, coins, pieces of wood, glasses of water and probably a few things I have forgotten about. This was recorded at Fanshawe College with my classmates in the Music Industry Arts program. We had some free time and I had an idea kicking around in my head, so we just went into one of the studios (the small one) and recorded it one afternoon. (I left the MIA programme shortly after the recording to work, saved up some money and then went on to study at university).

Young Sycamore' has live vocal and percussion parts that weren't recorded. It was only performed once. The lyrics were adapted from a poem by Wlliam Carlos Williams. The piece was written/played using the software 'PC Composer' and a midi controller. It was recorded at the Computer Music room at Carleton University.

'Untitled' features an EMS Synthi 100, a synthesizer from the early 70s. The device takes up half of small room and is interesting to use because you have to physically connect all the different sound items like sine waves, noise and filters. According to Wikipedia, only about 30 of these synthesizers were produced and their original selling price was 25,000 USD (the equivalent of over $100,000 USD today). If I had known it was so rare and expensive, maybe I would have appreciated it more back then.

I found using it frustrating at first because it was very difficult get the exact sound you were aiming for. And once you got the sound, it was almost impossible to replicate it (even if you wrote down every setting). I got in the habit of just having one of the tape machines recording at all times.

The actual composition is by one of my classmates, Heather Baird. I made the sounds and she decided how to assemble them. The piece was recorded in Carleton U's audio lab (Michael Bussière was in charge of the computer room and audio recording lab at that time). The arpeggios and background sustained notes are from a Korg Poly61 synthesizer.

For 'Sting Quartet No. 2', all the notes were typed into a computer (using the PC Composer programme) and then played back through a midi controller before being recorded on a reel-to-reel tape deck. Some of the sections were composed traditionally (e.g., following the normal customs of melody and harmony) and some parts were written using a repeating 12-tone system. The composition was written for a string quartet, but when doing the computer version I added some 'impossible' parts.

'Mammals I Have Known and Loved' features the EMS Synthi 100, a tam tam (a kind of gong, but this time played with a violin bow), alto saxophone, empty pop bottles, voices, loops made of sound effects and laughter. The voices mainly came from outtakes of interviews I had been recording while doing some work at the campus radio station.

[GabrielBarbaro]

Cool, interesting work! Good melodies and the visualizations are awesome too!

[TheMadisonHang]

Its like your creating your own With the Music... and the Video... I like it alot!

[zijun]

at the moment, only two of the five songs are uploaded: Blade and Mammals I Have Known and Loved. If you go to the video description for this video, you can find links to the YouTube videos to those two songs. In the descriptions for those videos, you can find the download links.

[v]

Yeah man this is genuinely really good... really top standard stuff...

[zijun]

@Ocielocique Thanks for commenting. The recordings only exist on 22-year-old cassette tapes, so no edits or re-mixes can be made. After re-listening to the songs two decades after recording them, I think all five tracks in the video have serious problems, especially with structure, but there are some interesting sounds, timbres and effects here and there.

[jexeq]

wow man... congratulatetions to you... i became in trance with it.... bravo!

[azrock]

after listening to noise music, this is glory for my ears

[zijun]

the movement is all from the iTunes visualizer (view -show visualizer)., I just added effectsand filters (theoretically you could do all the movement in AfterEffects, but that would take me about 10 years to do). The iTunes visualizer (developed by magnetosphere?) creates an interesting organic look that is different from most other visualizers (but there are only a handful of presets).

[filmexperimentales]

very good video and music totally enjoyable!!

[zijun]

Hi, the images are simply the song playing in i-tunes with the visualizer turned on. If you use i-tunes, you can try it. Just select 'view' and 'show visualizer'

[zijun]

@korgds10
Oh, the visuals are just screen captures of the music visualizer in iTunes (If you use iTunes, you can find it by selecting 'view' - 'show visualizer'). I processed the images a little using AfterEffects.

[zijun]

the video is mainly just a screen capture of the songs being played in iTunes with the music visualizer turned on (View - Show Visualizer), I changed the colours a bit with AfterEffects for some of the sections.

[zijun]

@gosep Oh thanks. They weren't really ahead of their time, though. I was just experimenting with music styles we were covering in class (early electronic music, minimalism, serialism, musique concrète, gamelan, etc.) and progressive/electronic pop of the 70s/80s (Pink Floyd, Jean-Michal Jarre). I can prepare the mp3s later (around Easter)--I'll send you a the links when they are uploaded.

[zijun]

I removed most of the the tape-hiss and brightened up the sound with Magix Audio Cleaning Lab. The original cassettes were very high quality and had been used to record direct from the reel-to-reel master recording. Unfortunately, I only had a cheap cassette deck to play back the recordings.

[zijun]

@ImThePangolin oh . .the first one is the iTunes visualizer, but I messed around with the image a bit in AfterEffects, so the swimming things are more 3D in appearance.

[zijun]

@ultrage4 I'm afraid that's all there is. These days there's a video, photographic or audio record of almost everything. In the 80, however, we didn't document things so well.

[zijun]

@vgmaster9 At the time (at university in the 1980s), we were expected to be going for a 20th century experimental music sound, but I was more influenced by pop/electronica like Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre and even Jan Hammer (Miami Vice background music).

[Guitarmaster]

There were like five stages of music, ranging from normal to disattached from social dogma, and this genre was in like stage 4 or 3, can't remember which

[zijun]

@TheMadisonHang oh thanks . . . your channel is interesting no uploads, but lots of breaking and some ambient music - interesting combination -maybe next time I will try to compose something that can be danced to :)

[zijun]

If you are looking for 'nice', do check out some of my other songs on this channel. Experimental music rarely sounds nice; my usual music is much more normal/mainstream.