Laurie Spiegel: The Expanding Universe
Unseen Worlds

Laurie Spiegel: Unseen Worlds
Unseen Worlds

The word essential is sometimes thrown about cavalierly, but it definitely applies in the case of these reissues, for electronic music historians certainly if not for music scholars in general. It wouldn't be overstating it to say that any listener interested in knowing how electronic music got to where it is today would be missing a critical part of the puzzle were Laurie Spiegel's releases not included.

This isn't the first time The Expanding Universe, her 1980 debut album, has been reissued. Unseen Worlds' first go-round occurred in 2012, and the label has now issued it again in a newly expanded form (in double-CD and three-LP formats), with the four original tracks augmented by an additional fifteen from the same period and nearly all previously unreleased. Reissued concurrently with it is her second album, 1991's Unseen Worlds, notable among other things for having been created using Spiegel's own Music Mouse computer program. Together the pair constitute three-and-a-half hours of music, as comprehensive an account of her early work as could be imagined.

A brief history's in order for anyone new to the Chicago-born pioneer. Versed in lute, mandolin, guitar, and banjo playing (she studied baroque and Renaissance lute at Julliard) in addition to computers and programs, Spiegel's consistently brought a cerebral mindset and intuitive sensibility to her music-making. She wrote interactive compositional software at Bell Labs during the ‘70s, later founded NYU's Computer Music Studio, and these days operates independently, supporting herself by her software and distributing music privately.

Spiegel created the tracks on her debut between 1974 and 1977 using the GROOVE system developed by Max Mathews and F. R. Moore at Bell Laboratories. It's mesmerizing material, not only for the entrancement the bright synth-like timbres induce but also for its liveliness, spontaneity, and playfulness. The joy of creation and exploration permeates the pieces, and Spiegel's formal training is evidenced by her use of counterpoint and harmony. A connecting line can easily be made between a piece such as “Patchwork” and the early minimalism of Riley, Glass, and Reich, Spiegel at one moment even seeming to reference Glass directly in the piece (a parallel also can be drawn between the ascending patterns in “East River Dawn” and the vocal riffing in Einstein On the Beach). But the staggering diversity of the two-and-a-half-hour set presents her as a figure who might have been influenced by others (John Fahey and Bach, for example) but who also transcended them. (That Bach influence, by the way, emerges audibly during the classical-styled “Dirge I.”)

Throughout the collection, gentle meditations sit alongside buoyant reveries, each absorbing setting reflecting its creator's affinity for in-the-moment creation. Anything but distancing, these tonal pieces exude a warmth, melodicism, and even at times a pastoral, folk-like serenity that invites the listener into their self-contained worlds. Two-minute vignettes provide fleeting stimulation; at twelve and fourteen minutes respectively, two of the longest pieces, “Wandering in Our Times” and “East River Dawn,” are dwarfed by the sprawling, meditative-drone mind-melt of the twenty-eight-minute title track (was ever a composition more aptly titled?). Highlights abound, from “Drums,” which plays like some minimal techno-meets-Steve Reich's Drumming exercise, to the dancing rhythms and radiant timbres of “Appalachian Grove I” that could pass for template-setters to Kraftwerk's Computer World. The sound design stays largely consistent throughout, with the exception of “Kepler's Harmony of the Worlds,” which sees Spiegel working siren wails into the arrangement. Suffice it to say, the release presents an encompassing portrait of the artist and repeatedly amazes for anticipating so much future developments. That The Expanding Universe sounds as fresh and contemporary as it does emphasizes just how much of a visionary Spiegel was at the time of its creation.

Her music, at least insofar as it's represented on Unseen Worlds, underwent a significant change in the time between her first and second albums. The sound design on the latter is more expansive and sophisticated and its connections to minimalism downplayed if not absent altogether. Part of the reason for that change is attributable to technology: with the Bell Laboratories' GROOVE System no longer available to her, Spiegel had no choice but to move on to other platforms before devising her own C language program, “Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument,” which became a commercial product for the Macintosh, Amiga, and Atari personal computers. At the time of Unseen Worlds' original release in 1991, the issuing label was capsizing, so Spiegel ended up issuing it as a private CD on her own Aesthetic Engineering label in 1994; as a result, the present reissue (available in CD and double-LP formats) is the album's first proper commercial release.

The first nine of the recording's twelve pieces were recorded between 1988 and 1990 using Music Mouse (on an Apple Macintosh), and each was recorded directly to DAT as it was played in real time. Whereas “Two Archetypes: Hall of Mirrors - I” could easily be mistaken for a lost track from Phaedra-era Tangerine Dream, the spooky “The Hollows” suggests she should have been on any producer's shortlist as a soundtrack candidate for horror and sci-fi film projects. Of all the album's pieces, it's the short “From a Harmonic Algorithm” that most recalls the debut. In creating the piece, she “envisioned a tiny computer sitting all alone, playing its little silicon heart out, making the most beautiful and expressive music it could create, unable to know if anyone could even hear it.” Beautiful it certainly is, and it's also an early example of generative music, given that its three minutes constitute an excerpt from a piece that theoretically was designed to continue “composing itself” for as long as the program's in operation. “From a Harmonic Algorithm” also again reveals the impact of Bach, with her drawing for inspiration in this case from an analysis in a 1947 book by Allen McHose of harmonic change in Bach chorales.

January 2019