Norbert Engelbart: Computer Music
International Corporation

Mitch Greer and Rachel Smith generally operate under The Lickets name, but they also on occasion release material under other aliases, a move emblematic of the duo's playful and mischievous sensibilities. Though background stories are typically fashioned for such cases, the tip-off is the label on which the release appears: International Corporation, which the two have used as an outlet for their many projects, Lickets-related and otherwise.

In this case, the conceit is that one Norbert Engelbart, happily ensconced since the late ‘70s at an ashram in the Hawaiian mountains, has used a self-built Vectrex Sinclair in the service of music composition; random generators for melody generation were designed and activated, and granular modifications of flute sounds were deployed to enable the Vectrex to approximate the natural timbres of a wooden flute. Computer Music is the supposed document of some of Engelbart's earliest explorations using the device.

Ostensibly an electro-acoustic exercise, the hour-long release comprises four long settings produced by Greer and Smith Flute, the two respectively credited with MAX/MSP and flute. Each of the four is different in character: the opening “Two” is an undeniably pretty generative affair that sees two softly glimmering melodic lines, one high in pitch and the other low, unspool in a call-and-response manner for eighteen serene minutes. Presented with nothing but the musical material, the blindfolded listener would very possibly identify it as an Eno ambient production on the order of something like Neroli or Thursday Afternoon.

If “Two” registers as an Eno homage of sorts, “Flute In Cabin” might be said to do the same, though in this case the material plays like a woodwinds-based riff on the phasing techniques Steve Reich explored in It's Gonna Rain and Come Out. Flute sounds gradually morph in character throughout its fourteen minutes, in certain sequences resembling a warbling swarm and in others the whirr of a creaking calliope. An extended exercise in tonal minimalism and audio effects, the recording's longest piece, “Color Field,” presents static pitches reverberating for twenty-two minutes, their patterns rubato-like in the way they accelerate and slacken. At album's end, “Four” revisits the soothing quietude of the opener but this time with the pitter-patter of granular noise added into its glistening frame.

March 2018