Source Records 1-6, 1968-1971

In the late '60s, a fair amount of avant-garde and electronic music was being recorded in the United States, even on major labels; in addition to the old standbys like CRI, which had represented some measure of experimental music in addition to the straight, modernist orchestral stuff that had been its main bread and butter. However, there was a stratum of experimental music beyond that which even CRI wouldn't touch, owing to its heightened political rhetoric, seeming artlessness or perceived sense of experimentation for the sake of experimentation. Enter Source Magazine; a spiral-bound periodical featuring music scores, photographs, and articles on experimental music and, from Vol. 2/2, 10" LPs. Despite their somewhat smaller size, the 10" LPs could hold a lot of music and -- in addition to adding a lot of value to the periodical itself -- delivered works drawn from that substrate of experimental musicianship, introducing to records composers like Robert Ashley, Alvin Lucier, Lowell Cross, Alvin Curran, and Allan Bryant to records for the first time. Of course, some of these names would go onto labels like Lovely Music, Nonesuch, and other, longer lived concerns -- Source Magazine folded in 1973 -- and David Behrman, whose Wave Train (1966) was featured on the first Source disc, was already a producer at Columbia Records, where the Source LPs were pressed. However, the main compilers at Source were composers Larry Austin -- the only artist represented twice on Source -- and Stanley Lunetta, and both have cooperated with this Pogus Productions retrospective of the label.
Right off the bat, there's Robert Ashley's 1964 masterwork The Wolfman, as recorded at the First Festival of Live-Electronic Music at U.C. Davis in 1967 and for many years the main version of the piece known on recordings. This piece is the great-granddaddy of what is now known as "power electronics" and has lost little of its ugliness or intensity. Although Ashley's piece predates British industrial music by more than a decade, chances are the laptop band on your block sounds more like this than Throbbing Gristle; rhythm tracks and devices tend to date electronic music, and the utter lack of use of such elements helps keep Source Records 1-6 fresh and current sounding. Also, the variety of endeavor makes this an excellent survey of the avant-garde in this period, ranging from the amplified, eight-mandolin string boxes used by Bryant in his Pitch Out -- which sounds uncannily like a Sonic Youth jam -- or Lowell Cross' Musica Instrumentalis, a very triangle wave-y audio track capable of producing an image on a specially modified color TV set, the stone age equivalent of a visualization skin. One can go on and on about these things; the bizarre babbling in Arrigo Lora-Totino's English Phonemes, Alvin Lucier's claustrophobic I am sitting in a room, and the zipping sound of burning Handi-wrap in Mark Riener's Phlegethon. One place where perhaps Pogus should have gone a bit more is in the liner notes, which are short and in some cases do not clue us in as to what happened to people like Riener or Arthur Woodbury. Also, the three discs, modeled after the original Source Records label art, are close to indentical looking and figuring out which number disc one is listening to is a little difficult.
Nevertheless, among Source's 2000 subscribers were a number of libraries, and over the years their copies of the Source LPs have been heavily raided by treasure hunters. Now you can leave those library copies of Source in the stacks, as here is all the music in one place. While this is no replacement for an actual issue of Source, it is certainly wonderful to finally have all of this material back again. ~ Uncle Dave Lewis, All Music Guide