Composers Inside Electronics perform David Tudor's Rainforest IV

David Tudor introducing Rainforest IV

Composers Inside Electronics perform David Tudor's Rainforest IV

by Composers Inside Electronics

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Rod Stasick I've loved this work since I first got, over 40 years ago, the 1981 LP of the Berlin version. It's good to hear another binaural recording because I have my own lengthy binaural version that I recorded as I walked thru the space over 20 years ago.

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Compact Disc (CD) + Digital Album
Six panel wallet with one CD. Binaural audio best heard with headphones.

Includes unlimited streaming of Composers Inside Electronics perform David Tudor's Rainforest IV via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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	1.	Rainforest IV (UCSD, 1977, binaural) 01:08:56 video	info	buy track
	2.	Rainforest IV (Excerpt) 05:26 video	info	buy track

about

*Binaural recording: Please use headphones*

2023 will be a special anniversary in certain circles. It will have been 50 years since pianist-turned-composer, David Tudor, passed on the concept of his renowned Rainforest work to participants at a summer new music festival in New Hampshire. There, in a barn in bucolic Chocorua, a group of eager young musicians, composers, circuit benders, and maverick solderers learned Rainforest. Rather than signifying an end — letting go of his five-year touring performances of creating music by amplifying tiny tabletop objects for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to dance to — Tudor ended up germinating his own family of collaborators that grew into Composers Inside Electronics (CIE).

Rainforest must be one of the few totally sui generis works of art ever created — truly one of a kind: a collection of whimsical everyday and crafted objects, suspended in space, set into audible vibration by small electro-magnetic transducers. Each object responds to the input signals in uniquely non-linear, unpredictable ways — a roomful of transmuted sculptural loudspeakers. They are activated by the players behind electronics-laden tables, and made to seem like an ecosystem of chattering and squawking critters talking an alien language between themselves. Together they represent a ‘performed installation’ that invites human visitors to explore the space using their ears. This is a magical forest of sight and sound, using deceptively ingenious technology.

On one evening in 1977 at the former military bowling alley turned Center for Music Experiment at UC-San Diego – where Rainforest IV (the fourth incarnation of the concept) had been set up at the invitation of composer Pauline Oliveros – two intrepid young musicians, David Dunn and Warren Burt passed through the space wearing binaural microphones attached to their heads. The result is this mind-warping recording released here for the first time; not a definitive documentation of the work but as close an experience as you might get with headphones.

John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, and other CIE collaborators have maintained the Tudor flames of inspiration as well as pursuing their own extraordinary sound work over the decades. A series of four self-playing Rainforest V variations were recently installed in art museums in Salzburg, Istanbul, New York, and Lyon. None of this would have happened without almost half a century of scavenging trips to scrapyards and surplus stores, inspired by circuit diagrams found in Popular Mechanics of 1966 and David Tudor’s love of resonance in objects and spaces.

credits

released April 29, 2022

Composers Inside Electronics:
Paul DeMarinis
John Driscoll
Phil Edelstein
David Poyurow
Prent Rogers
David Tudor
Bill Viola

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Composers Inside Electronics Denver, Colorado

CIE began in 1973 as a group of electronic pioneers dedicated to developing and performing David Tudor's Rainforest. 50 years later they are still going strong.

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