Laurie Speigel - 3 Tracks From "The Expanding Universe" & The New Yorker

Unseen Worlds · Laurie Spiegel - Clockworks

Unseen Worlds · Laurie Spiegel - A Folk Study

Unseen Worlds · Laurie Spiegel - Patchwork

You can find the release here: http://www.unseenworlds.net/UW09/

via The New Yorker where you'll find the full article.

"The surprise Year of Spiegel continues as her landmark and long out-of-print 1980 LP 'The Expanding Universe' is being reissued for the first time on compact disc by the Unseen Worlds label. While the original LP ran at just over forty-five minutes (and had to cheat the long title track of some dynamic range in order to fit all the grooves on side two), the newly expanded “Expanding Universe” sprawls, in its physical form, over two compact discs, with a running time of two and a half hours. What is old on this reissue sounds punchier and punkier than do the ripped-from-vinyl MP3s that exist online. And what’s new on “The Expanding Universe” is as diverse-sounding and alive as any electronic music issued this year, even though all of these pieces were conceived on a computer-analog hybrid system stashed in a Bell Labs hallway from 1973 to 1979.

This device would be Max Mathews’s “Generating Realtime Operations On Voltage-controlled Equipment” apparatus, otherwise known as GROOVE. It was a hybrid digital-analog mechanism that was big enough to require multiple rooms. (Despite its being too unwieldy to take out for live performances, Spiegel once described it as “the ultimate synthesizer.”) A technical breakdown of the GROOVE setup can become pretty complex, but, in brief, the system was controlled from a room that held a console, a monitor, a three-octave keyboard, and a joystick operated by the user, all of which was separated by a glass window from a temperature-controlled room with a large DDP-224 computer, which was in turn linked up to a digital magnetic tape drive down the hall.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/09/an-electronic-music-classic-reborn.html#ixzz28Xgbzz9w"

This one in via Karl.