After mr. Pain Jerk referred his works in Special Interests #4, I decided to go for it. This has been the routine of each issue, that every guy who recommends something, I'll check out as many as possible which I don't know in advance. And yes, it's not called "essentials" just whatever reason, but when I played couple of times DICK RAAIJMAKERS "the complete tape music" 3xCD set, it proves to be really fucking good.
All discs are full length, varied from c. 67 minutes to c. 74 minutes, it doesn't go exactly chronological but little bit. starting from 1959 till 1995. Being among the very earliest electro-acoustic / sound theater (etc) type of research, done in Philips audio reserch studio, it has certain adventurous wibe. And when remembering that the usual stereophonic LP/CD was hardly yet reaching position of being obvious standard, some of the compositions are not just mono and stereo, but also for example 4 channel. Being regular CD, they have remixed/edited all the tracks to be suitable for regular stereo CD listening. It is wild box. Sometimes painfully minimalistic electronic noise. Sometimes classical instruments. Sometimes turntable & tape experiments. Microphoned ping-pong tables, robotic string instruments. Some with symphonic quality, some with pure direct process of electronic decay.
I got 2nd edition of box. Music is told to be 100% same as first, but now in the c. 120 pages paper back book what comes in the box, is removed original dutch language liner notes and all you have is english.
I have yet to read the whole booklet. Most of it seems too theoretical to my tastes, even if the images of machines/"blue prints" of compositional theories etc are interesting. I have yet to check out if the complete tape music excludes a lot of other stuff he may have done.
One would think that these guys rarely work as total hermits. Who may have been the other Dutch masters & pioneers worth checking out? One can say for sure that guys like mr. Kureniemi and other Finnish early experiments are shadows compared to these...
