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Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961-1970
This 12-CD set documents Oliveros’ earliest years working in the realm of electronics and tape, when those mediums were quite new and the field seemed wide open. It begins with a piece done in her home studio, and continues with work created at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, the University of Toronto, Mills College, and the UC San Diego Electronic Music Studio. The pings and swoops, bursts of static and sudden lurches from one speaker to another both put this music in the same lineage as Xenakis and others working in various academic situations at the time (because nobody else could afford the wildly expensive, room-filling equipment) but also prefigure noisicians like Merzbow and even the digital glitches of Oval. But Oliveros had a lightheartedness that some — okay, lots — of her peers lacked, and that shows up in track titles like “The Day I Disconnected the Erase Head and Forgot to Reconnect It” and “A Little Noise in the System.”