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S01E03 “Cooks In The Kitchen” (Experimental Electronic Music in Downtown New York 1970-1977)
183 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, we move beyond Jazz to discuss some of the other experimental music and art that was being pioneered in early 1970s New York, specifically in the Downtown artists’ lofts and experimental performance venues around the area south of Houston Street known as SoHo. One particular venue known as The Kitchen had special importance for the City’s exponents of new electronic music and the presentation of ground-breaking mixed media art.
We also discuss the creation of two of the greatest American experimental albums of all time, Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians” and Laurie Spiegel’s “The Expanding Universe”.
Books
Steve Reich – “Conversations”
Philip Glass – “Words Without Music”
Kris Needs – “Dream Baby Dream (Suicide: A New York Story)"
https://pitchfork.com/features/article/9886-blood-and-echoes-the-story-of-come-out-steve-reichs-civil-rights-era-masterpiece/
https://pitchfork.com/features/article/9002-laurie-spiegel/
Songs
La Monte Young – “Composition 1960 No. 7”
Philip Glass - Music In Twelve Parts, Part 8 (1974)
Steve Reich – “It’s Gonna Rain” (1965), “Come Out” (1967), Music for 18 Musicians, Part VIII” (1978)
Laurie Spiegel – “Patchwork” & “East River Dawn” (1976)
Suicide – Rocket U.S.A. (1977)
EMCK
Recommended
Transcript
The Rise of Experimental Music and Art in 1970s New York
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to Episode 3 of Real Gone. In this episode, we're going to move beyond jazz into discussing some of the other experimental music and art that was being pioneered in early 1970s New York, specifically in the downtown artists' lofts and experimental performance venues around the area south of Houston Street, known as Soho. One particular venue we'll discuss, known as The Kitchen, had special importance for the city's exponents of new electronic music and the presentation of groundbreaking mixed media art.
00:00:30
Speaker
Oh.
La Monte Young and the Fluxus Art Movement
00:00:46
Speaker
Lamont Young was born in 1935 and raised in the rural Mormon village of Bern, Idaho. When he moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s, his preoccupation was playing alto saxophone with radical jazz musicians like Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman. Even at this stage, Young had a fascination with the technique of cysteine in music to emphasize its modal drone aspects, something he would decide to prioritize ahead of melodic progression.
00:01:17
Speaker
Young describes this fascination with drone as running back to his early experiences in the wide open spaces of the Idaho plains, the sound of crickets in the wind and outdoor canyons, and the electronic hum of electrical transformers and telephone poles. Young studied at Berkeley in California in the late 1950s, but moved from the west coast to New York in 1960.
00:01:38
Speaker
He became a member of the Fluxus Art Movement, centered around Lithuanian-American artist George Machunas, who we'll discuss in more detail in our next episode in the context of the artist's housing cooperatives he created in Soho with his Flux House cooperatives.
00:01:53
Speaker
The Fluxus art movement included confrontational visual artists, writers, filmmakers and performance artists, Yoko Ono being one of its key figures. Young would also score the soundtrack for a number of Andy Warhol's static films. Labelled as an anti-art movement, the Fluxus artists sought to purge the world of dead art and, in their words, to promote living art, to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettons and professionals.
00:02:18
Speaker
Audience members would be actively involved in their performance, no longer distant and removed. A divisive personality, Jung eventually broke from Fluxus, ironically citing an absence of conventional technical ability, and the lack of seriousness with which they attributed to their craft as some of his reasons for doing so. His work with the dream syndicate would be of a more visceral and intense nature.
00:02:42
Speaker
The Theatre of Eternal Music was led by Lamont Young on saxophone and vocals, and his wife Marian Zezila, an artist who worked on light and sound installations. The other primary members were violinist Tony Conrad and a pre-velvet underground John Keel on viola. Experimental composers Terry Riley and John Hassell were part-time participants.
00:03:02
Speaker
The group's self-described dream music, influenced by Eastern Raga scales and classical Indian music, most notably the hypnotic drone of Hindustani artist Ali Akbar Khan, explored sustained drone and pure harmonic intervals, employing obliterating amplification in lengthy all-night performances. They mined spiritualism from repetition.
The Influence of The Theatre of Eternal Music and The Dream House
00:03:24
Speaker
Many of the group's performances and marathon-length hash-infused rehearsals took place in Young and Cecila's loft at 275 Church Street in Tribeca, the triangle below Canal Street.
00:03:36
Speaker
The Theatre of Eternal Music's sustained drone and extreme amplification influenced John Keel's subsequent contribution to the Velvet Underground in its use of both discordance and feedback. The collective disbanded in acrimony over arguments about compositional credit, with Young claiming sole authorship of the music created by the group despite its aesthetic of extreme minimalism and melodic stasis. However, Young and Cecilia continued their drone experimentation.
00:04:03
Speaker
Their immersive dream house, light and sound installations, where music was produced continuously by sine wave generators, sometimes with human accompaniment, ran from September 1966 to 1970 uninterrupted, and has continued intermittently to the present day. The drone maintained 24 hours a day, open to the public in the daytime.
00:04:23
Speaker
Attendees at the original installations, often fueled by LSD, hashish and opium, spent up to seven hours a night in Young's loft, an experience that would just not have been possible in traditional gallery space. The physical effect of the drones and magenta light installation applied at Dreamhouse is to create what writer Harry Sore describes in his book Monolithic Undertow as a zone of beatific, discombobulation, a stern, eternal oracle buzz.
Philip Glass: A Journey through Minimalism and New York's Influence
00:04:50
Speaker
Despite releasing very little official recordings, the influence of Lamont Young and Marion Zezilla is notable in the development of Brian Eno's ambient music, the pulverizing drone medal of Dylan Carson's Earth and Sun, all of whom cite Young as an influence, Eno calling Young the daddy of us all. This is a Lamont Young piece from 1960 called Composition No. 7, consisting of one piano note sustained throughout the piece.
00:05:35
Speaker
Formal music experimentation found other champions in playwright Robert Wilson and New York resident Philip Glass, who collaborated on the ambitious modern opera Einstein on the Beach in the early 1970s.
00:05:48
Speaker
Wilson's own play, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, attended by Glass, had run from 7pm to 7am at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 1973. This long-form approach was attractive to Glass, who by that point had begun composing idiosyncratic pieces of his own that stretched to well over four hours. Glass and Wilson were headhunted by French Minister of Culture Michel Guy to stage the production of Einstein at the Avignon Festival in 1976.
00:06:20
Speaker
While head of the festival d'automme in Paris, Michel Guy had attended a musical rehearsal of the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1973. At the downtown, New York laughed at one of its members, saxophonist and painter, Dickie Landry.
00:06:33
Speaker
Like Glass and many other avant-garde artists, Landry had gained recognition playing in the downtown art galleries of Soho during the 1960s, including the prominent Leo Castelli Gallery at 420 West Broadway. Castelli had famously sold Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans and hosted the first exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein's comic book paintings in 1962.
00:06:56
Speaker
Glass was a migrant from Baltimore who lived in a converted loft on Fulton Street in 1959 when he first moved to the city to study at the prestigious Juilliard School of Music. He had moved to Paris in 1964 for an intensive musical education with the expert female classical professor Nadia Boulanger. He adopted Yoga, Vegetarianism and Buddhism at a relatively young age and travelled to India to expand his spiritual understanding of the world.
00:07:23
Speaker
When he returned to New York in 1967, after working with Ravi Shankar in Paris, he reconnected with his old Juilliard classmate Steve Reich. He was ready to break new ground and create a new form of modern American music. Experimenting in heavily rhythmic and hypnotic music, Glass worked in the four-hour Opus, music in 12 parts, between 1971 and 1974.
00:07:46
Speaker
and perform concerts in his loft at 10 Elizabeth Street off Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village near the city's Flower District.
00:07:54
Speaker
This was not too far from the jazz loft of Eugene Smith, which, as we mentioned in earlier episodes, was secretly frequented by the hyperactive jazz artists of the city, who, like Glass, a classically trained musician, were attempting to break free from the conventional perception and presentation of their music. There was a requirement to go further than anyone had ever been, and New York was the alien landscape that allowed these artists to demark their creative territory.
00:08:20
Speaker
Glass had spent some time with his ensemble performing incomplete versions of his work at Jonas Mika's Cinematheque in Soho. He also availed of the burgeoning art gallery and musical theatre scene in Soho during the late sixties, where he played in his own ambitious but sincere words, high-concept music that was aligned with high-concept theatre, art, dance and painting. It seemed to us that, for the first time, a music world that was equivalent to the world of painting, theatre and art began to emerge.
00:08:47
Speaker
If that sounds too pretentious, it's worth pointing out that Glass spent years during his early New York musicianship, operating a moving van business, working as a plumber and more time even after his creative successes as a New York taxi driver to make ends meet. In his moving business named Chelsea Light Moving, he used a truck borrowed from his friend Richard Serra, the revered American grand scale steel sculptor.
00:09:11
Speaker
whose works were on show in 2023 in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and various celebrated arts venues across the world. Influenced by Joseph Papp's public theatre, Glass would salvage discarded theatre seats and rugs he found abandoned in downtown streets to adapt his loft at Elizabeth Street into a performance space.
00:09:30
Speaker
Reading Glass's memoir Words Without Music, one as impressed by the level of professional dedication, but also the sense of adventure Glass brings to his many spiritual quests and lauded musical endeavours. Glass was well into his forties before any level of commercial success presented itself, but there was always a relentless dedication to and love for music that shines through.
00:09:51
Speaker
and an unceasing willingness to work in service to his creativity. After decades of musical education and time spent in and away from the city, he described music in 12 parts, his crystallization as an artist of unique importance as music that came right out of the guts of New York City. Glass Speaks have been influenced by the high-volume presentation of bands like Jefferson Airplane and Frank Zappa, who he watched perform at the Fillmore East in New York in the late 60s.
00:10:17
Speaker
He also credits the raw power of bebop music, the life force in the music of John Coltrane, Bud Powell and Lenny Tristano, even though stylistically jazz did not seem outwardly to be an important influence on his early music. Philip Glass wasn't exactly Lou Reed in terms of musical personality, but it's difficult to think of his music being created anywhere else in New York City. There is absolute beauty in his early music, but never comfort or resolution, and this is not easy listening.
00:10:46
Speaker
There are always too many moving pieces and a kind of anxious hyperactivity, as if there's some focused effort that the prolonged performance of the music will somehow resolve the artist's insecurities or keep the impossibility of perfect realisation at a distance. There is a trance-like quality in his music that presupposes techno.
00:11:05
Speaker
as if Glass was trying to compose music that would manifest itself culturally as a form 30 years ahead of its time, with any immediate comparator to indicate if he was moving in the right direction, either artistically or commercially.
00:11:21
Speaker
The sound system utilized by Glass for the first performance of music in 12 parts at Town Hall in New York was built by Kurt Mancasi, who had designed audio systems for Lamont Young and would be a regular player in the Philip Glass ensemble for decades to come. This approach was novel and significant in that it sought to apply the technology of rock music to modern classical music to immerse audience members in a more visceral concert experience than had previously been on offer.
00:11:48
Speaker
Glass's music was not experimentalism for the sake of it, and there was a sincere effort being made to have this music reach a wider audience.
00:12:19
Speaker
Is that good?
The Minimalist Movement's Impact: Steve Reich and Beyond
00:12:26
Speaker
The success of Einstein on the Beach at the Avignon Festival led to the Metropolitan Opera in New York booking Glass and Wilson to stage a production of the opera in November 1976. The production was a critical success, but not uncommon for the opera world, these concerts and the previous tour of Europe had made significant losses and plunged Glass and Wilson into $100,000 of debt.
00:12:49
Speaker
Nonetheless, Einstein had made their reputation and both would go on to lasting critical and commercial successes and immense cultural importance. Glass is celebrated as one of America's greatest composers, composing symphonies, operas, concertos
00:13:04
Speaker
and a broad range of film side tracks, including the Truman Show, Kajana Skatsy and Errol Morris' documentaries, which include The Thin Blue Line. Robert Wilson is recognised as one of the most innovative pioneers of experimental theatre, collaborating with Tom Waits on the plays The Black Rider, Alice and Wojciech, and a multitude of other revered artists.
00:13:28
Speaker
Steve Reich was a groundbreaking minimalist composer living in New York. His work had heavily influenced his friend Philip Glass and others. He created outstanding emotive pieces in the mid-60s utilizing sampling, vocal manipulation and repetition that would dovetail with the aesthetics of disco remix culture in the mid-70s and innovations by sonic explorers like Walter Gibbons and Arthur Russell.
00:13:53
Speaker
Observing the tape loops of slightly differing lengths containing the same idea went slowly out of phase and very gradually back into phase when they were repeated incessantly, right conceived of phase shifting in the mid 60s. An incredible example of this approach being applied in It's Gonna Rain from 1965. This track features a Pentecostal preacher delivering a passionate sermon about Noah's Ark in San Francisco's Union Square.
00:14:20
Speaker
Two recorded loops of the preacher's voice start off in unison before one of the loops creeps slowly ahead. The shift in the rhythms creates an interlocking effect that right then manipulates, accelerating and decelerating, isolating patterns and phrases in the vocals, hidden within the original phase.
00:14:39
Speaker
The effect is uncomfortable but hypnotic, creating the impression that under any seemingly random sequence of words, lies hidden polyrhythms and infinite music. American steel sculptor Richard Sira, a friend of Steve Reich's, also gave the opening speech at a 2005 ceremony where Reich was being awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal for his contribution to American arts and culture. When describing Reich's use of spoken word in the piece It's Gonna Rain, Sira spoke of how the result is music, not language.
00:15:09
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Language is being pushed to the breaking point where the meaning of words has been obliterated so as to allow its potential for music to emerge.
00:15:32
Speaker
It's all rain! It's all rain!
00:15:45
Speaker
In 1966, Reich's Peace Come Out was based on another vocal sample, this time inspired by the case of the Harlem Six, six young African American men who in 1964 were arrested in Harlem's 32nd District after a riot and accused of murder. One of the men, 18-year-old Daniel Hamm, whose case was later overturned,
00:16:07
Speaker
was interviewed at the nearby Friendship Baptist Church a few days after the initial incident that led to his arrest. A short section of the interview forms the basis of Reich's peace.
00:16:30
Speaker
On 20th April 1964, Hamm had intervened when local police had casted a group of children, who, seeing a capsized fruit cart outside a local store, began throwing grapefruits around for fun. As a result, Hamm and his friend Wallace Baker were beaten by police through the night.
00:16:48
Speaker
but had been refused medical attention as their wounds were not visibly bleeding. At the beginning of the piece Ham describes being beaten and trying to prove that he had been brutalised. As the piece progresses, the phases of the extract shift and move against each other into an unsettling pattern that reflects the tone of the subject matter.
00:17:18
Speaker
On April 30, 1964, 10 days after his beating by police, the stabbing of Margate Sugar at her used clothing store in Harlem brought the police back to Ham's door. He was arrested with five other men and charged with murder, despite a lack of evidence to justifiably convict them.
00:17:37
Speaker
Civil rights activist Truman Nelson, as well as several other famous artists including writer James Baldwin, actor Ozzy Davis, poets Amiri Baraka and Alan Ginsberg, philosopher Bertrand Russell, together with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, campaigned on behalf of the Harlem Six. Nelson recorded interviews with the boys as well as their mothers and put them together into a book entitled The Torture of Mothers in order to raise awareness about their case.
00:18:06
Speaker
While attempting to organize a benefit concert in 1966 to pay for their legal fees, Nelson was made aware of Steve Reich's piece, It's Gonna Rain. He approached Reich with a request to edit tape extracts of his interviews with the imprisoned Harlem Six into a musical piece for the benefit concert to be held at Town Hall in New York that April.
00:18:25
Speaker
The concert was successful in raising funds to launch appeals against the convictions in 1968, but retrials and hung juries led to this process dragging on until 1973. The Harlem Six pleaded reduced charges of manslaughter in exchange for suspended sentences.
00:18:42
Speaker
Daniel Hamm was released from prison the following year, having been detained for nine years since Margit Sugar's murder. Reich first performed his piece Come Out in the Park Place Gallery in Soho one month after the Town Hall concert. It's released in 1967 on a compilation of experimental music by CBS Odyssey and the related glowing reviews from Time Magazine and New York Magazine properly announced Reich's arrival as a composer of importance.
00:19:10
Speaker
Reich would revisit documentary material throughout his career, notably in the 1988 piece Different Trains, which features vocal samples of Holocaust survivors describing their personal journeys on the trains to Auschwitz on 2011's WTC 911, which incorporates voice recordings relating to the September 11th attacks in the World Trade Centre.
00:19:32
Speaker
Reich's compositional scope had developed into efforts in writing for larger ensembles, culminating in his masterpiece, Music for 18 Musicians, which he began writing in 1974, recorded in 1976, and finally saw released in 1978. As with Come Out, the world premiere of this piece was staged at Town Hall in New York City. His players rehearsed the work at his loft at 624 Broadway in Soho,
00:19:59
Speaker
and premiered a prototype of the piece in a series of concerts held at the kitchen, a non-profit performance arts space operating out of a loft in Soho at the corner of Worcester and Brim Street between 1973 to 1986.
00:20:13
Speaker
Notable artists who made appearances at the kitchen in the 1970s include Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, Brian Eno, Arthur Russell, who worked as its musical director for a number of years, and later Glenn Branka and the No Wave roster, being Lydia Lunch, Mars, Swans, and James Chance and the Contortions. The Beastie Boys would actually stage one of their early shows at the kitchen in December 1983.
00:20:38
Speaker
Reich's influence would extend well beyond the world of minimalism into pop music, electronica and hip-hop. His emphasis on repetition and overlapping rhythms is the main reason Harper's magazine gained Reich's music a higher form of disco in a 1984 article.
00:20:55
Speaker
It's easy to see the influence of Reich and music for 18 musicians in particular, and albums by electronic artists such as AFX Twin, E2E4 by Manuel Gotching, and Where You Go I Go 2 by Hans-Peter Lindstrom. Listen to Blood on the Leaves from the Kanye West album Yeezus, and see how the manipulation of the Billie Holiday vocal sample and extract from the culturally charged classic strange fruit echoes the style of Steve Reich's Come Out.
00:21:22
Speaker
While working on Low with Brian Eno, David Bowie attended the Berlin Premier of Music for 18 Musicians in 1976. The pulsing marimbas and vibraphones off Weeping Wall on Low are supposedly an homage to Reich's enduring masterpiece.
00:21:54
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you
00:22:06
Speaker
The kitchen took its name from the venue's original home between 1971 and 1973 in the galley of the Mercer Arts Centre, located in the eight-storey Broadway Central Hotel at 673 Broadway and 240 Mercer Street.
The Evolution of New York's Art Venues: From Broadway Central Hotel to The Kitchen
00:22:21
Speaker
The formerly opulent hotel, the largest in the country at the time of construction, with 630 rooms, has stood for more than 100 years.
00:22:30
Speaker
Its marble fireplaces, crystal chandeliers, and high-end catering, making it a favourite of wealthy tycoons in its 1890s prime. The opulence of the neighbourhood declined at the turn of the century, when High Society moved uptown. By the 1960s, the building was a dilapidated retreat for junkies and prostitutes, and had by 1970 become a welfare hotel, operated by its owners with city funding.
00:22:56
Speaker
Club promoter Art Delugoff, who was instrumental in the establishment of the jazz venue The Village Gate in Greenwich Village, bought the first two floors of the building, by then known as the University Hotel, and renovated it for about $500,000, with funding from the Jovial air conditioning tycoon and famed race car driver Seymour Kalbach. The aim was to create a downtown version of the Lincoln Centre, the prestigious performing arts centre situated on the Upper West Side.
00:23:23
Speaker
The main floor of the Broadway Hotel housed two larger theatres, the Mercer Hansberry Theatre and the Mercer Brecht. The second floor had four cabaret theatres.
00:23:33
Speaker
the O.K.C., the Oscar Wild Room, the Shaw Arena and the Kitchen, then known as the Mercer Media Repertory Theatre, which staged video art, poetry and performance art, 35,000 square feet of air-conditioned performance space in total. There were also other bars and boutiques contained within, including the chic Blue Room Cabaret, which drew comparisons with the Maloko bar in A Clockwork Orange.
00:23:58
Speaker
The Mercer Arts Centre was founded in December 1971 by actor-director Jean Frankel, in conjunction with the actor Vivica Linfors, video artists Steina, Woody Vasilka and actor Rip Torn, who starred in a production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as part of the grand opening program.
00:24:17
Speaker
Predating the opening of CBGBs by a few years, The Mercer was the incubator for punk rock in the early 1970s, with regular shows by The Magic Tramps, New York Dolls, Wayne County, Frank Zappa, Jonathan Richmond's Modern Lovers, and early shows by one of New York's greatest ever bands, Suicide, who had a residency in the Oscar Wild Room after winning the favour of Syke Kaibach, who seemed taken by the nervous energy of Alan Vega and Martin Reave when they met at his office.
00:24:44
Speaker
As with the avant-garde musicians of the jazz lofts, these artists were outsiders that the popular mainstream was just not ready for, but who needed space to develop their own sound with a live audience.
00:24:56
Speaker
In June 1971, in the kitchen's original Mercer Street location, a stone's throw from Soho's Northeastern tip, where it was named the Electronic Kitchen, founders and Czech emigres Steina and Woody Vasulka sent out invitations for artists to make use of the new space that could seat up to 200 audience members and would operate 7 days a week.
00:25:18
Speaker
The Vasilkas were mixed media artists who arrived in New York in 1966. With funding from the New York State Council of the Arts, Woody Vasilka recorded rock events, jazz concerts, theatre and dance performance for a living.
00:25:33
Speaker
On New Year's Eve, 1969, he recorded the famous concerts by Jimi Hendrix, performing with the band of gypsies at the Fillmore East in New York City. The Vasilkas attended regular parties with like-minded artists at venues such as Global Village, Raindance, The People's Video Theatre, Andy Warhol's Factory, and Jonas Makis Filmmaker Cinematheque on Worcester Street, a space for independent film that was a precursor to the more famous anthology film archives.
00:26:01
Speaker
The first significant event in the world of new media art being cultivated by artists such as the Vasilkas was the Nine Evenings event created by Robert Rauschenberg and Billy Kluver in 1966 under the label EAT, meaning Experiments in Art and Technology.
00:26:18
Speaker
Engineers from the Bell Telecommunications Research Laboratories in New Jersey had collaborated with Rauschenberg and other artists including John Cage on the event which was held at the 69th Regiment Armory, Lexington Avenue, New York.
00:26:33
Speaker
The artists and engineers developed performances and installations using cutting-edge technologies including closed-circuit television, fibre optics and infrared television cameras along with portable radio transmitters. Musician Steve Reich would contribute to EIT with the invention of a device he named the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate.
00:26:55
Speaker
Many of the East Coast video collectives such as Raindance, Ant Farm, Radical Software, Gorilla Television and Video Freaks saw video as a reproductive and distribution apparatus that would revolutionize American culture. Their view was that its democratizing effect empowered participants to short circuit and decentralize the control of corporate or state mass media
00:27:16
Speaker
by way of traditional mainstream television and radio.
Technological Advancements in Art: Portapak and Video Synthesizers
00:27:20
Speaker
Woody Vasilka saw the struggle for media, even if it is for example public television channels, as a struggle for power.
00:27:28
Speaker
Equipment such as the 1965 Sony Portapak camera and video recording system, weighing only £25 and priced at a relatively low $1500, was seen as liberating for artists like Nam Chun Pike, whose first use of the Portapak camera was reportedly to record images of the Pope's visit to New York from the back of a taxi, which he displayed that same evening at the Café of Gogo in Greenwich Village.
00:27:52
Speaker
The ease with which the Porta Pack allowed users to sync sound and vision and the portability of the equipment was seized on by artists and video collectives such as Metropolis Video, many of whom worked at the Manhattan Cable Television's Public Access Department. These young students and aspiring filmmakers used the Porta Pack to document the New York punk scene and record numerous concerts by Talking Heads, Blondie and the Heartbreakers at CBGB's Oak from 1975 onwards.
00:28:20
Speaker
The kitchen fostered a community aesthetic, with performing artists often becoming involved in the management of the venue. Directors became known as cooks. Otherwise, unavailable cutting-edge video technology was made accessible for use by attending artists. The initial run of the electronic kitchen coincided with the invention of video synthesizers.
00:28:41
Speaker
devices which controlled the electron beam of a cathode ray through a vector deflection circuit, enabling programmers to rotate and manipulate images in 3D. This was the beginning of computer graphics, and a number of the early pioneers were regular attendees at the kitchen.
00:28:58
Speaker
Bill Etra, co-creator of the Root Etra video synthesizer, an analog manipulation device used for image processing and real-time animation, showed frequently at the kitchen during the Vasilka's tenure. Walter Wright, who worked at Computer Image Corporation as a video animator using New York's only available video synthesizer, would develop his own video projects on Sundays when the CIC office was closed.
00:29:24
Speaker
After putting together a visual piece to accompany Yoko Ono's paper shoes, which was shown at the kitchen, he was invited to become an associate. Eric Siegel, another virtuoso inventor, teamed up with the Vasilkas under the brand Perception to apply for state funding.
00:29:41
Speaker
Through connections made via Segal, the Electronic Arts Intermix, an emergent not-for-profit organization started by gallerist Howard Wise, became the kitchen's primary financial sponsor until it eventually became incorporated as Haleakala Incorporated, the corporate entity it has traded under ever since. New York's downtown experimental scene represented a renegade alternative to the uptown classical establishment.
00:30:07
Speaker
the Kitchen's music series was launched under the management of Rhys Chatham. On 4th October 1971, its inaugural concert was by Laurie Spiegel, performing harmonic rhythms on a Buechler modular synthesizer borrowed from the Bleecker Street studio operated by electronic composer Morton Sibotnik, who had founded the San Francisco Tate Music Centre in 1962. Attended by early electronic explorers like Pauline Oliveros and Tony Martin,
00:30:36
Speaker
When introduced to the Pucla, Spiegel said that music went from black and white to colour. She revelled in electronic instrumentation and the manner in which instruments like the Pucla synthesizer allowed for instant processing and the immediate realisation of her compositional ideas.
00:30:54
Speaker
Only a few years later, in 1977, renowned astronomer Carl Sagan would select the music and other sound recordings to be placed on NASA's Voyager probes, now billions of miles from Earth.
Laurie Spiegel and the Fusion of Art and Technology
00:31:06
Speaker
The gold-plated 12-inch albums on board featured a selection of music, sounds and images on the off chance that some intelligent alien civilization encountering them would hear them and determine there was intelligent and artistic life on Earth.
00:31:21
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On the Sounds of the Earth section of the recording is an excerpt of Laurie Spiegel's electronic sonification of Johannes Kepler's 1619 astronomical work Harmony of the Worlds, an attempt to record in musical formula the motion of the planets through the solar system. Coincidentally, Carl Sagan was an old college friend of Philip Glass.
00:31:43
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Born in Chicago in 1945, Lori Spiegel learned to play guitar, banjo and piano without any formal lessons. She studied music at Oxford University England and Juilliard School of Music in New York. While experimenting with synthesizers in 1969, she envisioned the use of electronic equipment to replicate the patterns of folk music.
00:32:03
Speaker
Like German pioneers Kraftwerk, she was determined to uncover the emotional potential in electronic music and to utilise the technology to maximise the creative output of her artistic imagination. In 1973, courtesy of US telecommunications giant Bell, with the designation of resident visitor, Spiegel was granted extensive access to the company's New Jersey research labs and computers during out-of-office hours.
00:32:30
Speaker
Bell enjoyed a monopoly on telecommunications in the US up until 1984, when it was broken up into smaller companies. Its research division was directed towards innovation in telecommunications technology, but also pure research into human perception, cognition and memory. Bell was a fertile site for creativity, with many researchers given free rein to explore new technologies without any overt pressure from the commercial wing of the company to develop products for the telecoms market.
00:33:00
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Digital audio technologies had been developed at Bell decades before consumers were buying CDs on mass scale.
00:33:09
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Utilizing three rooms of computer equipment, Spiegel worked between 1974 and 1976 to create the music that would comprise her masterpiece, The Expanding Universe. Spiegel explained the album's title as applying to the expansion of our consciousness coming out of the 60s and also to the expansion of the musical universe, both aesthetically and technologically.
00:33:32
Speaker
The sophisticated computer technology Laurie Spiegel was given access to was not available to private individuals, only institutions such as governmental and military departments, universities, and insurance companies. In her original liner notes for the album, Spiegel thanked John Duarte, Michael Chisowski, and Max Mathews of Bell Labs, who had designed the Groove system, aka generating real-time operations on voltage-controlled equipment by which the album functioned.
00:34:02
Speaker
Max Mathews was the director of departments involved in cognitive and perceptual research, investigating how the human memory is organized. Mathews had rendered the voice of the dying Hal 9000 computer system in Stanley Kubrick's 2001 A Space Odyssey as he's deprogrammed by astronaut Dave Bowman while singing the song Daisy Bell, Bicycle Built for Two, the first ever music performed by a computer, specifically the IBM 704 at Bell Labs.
00:34:33
Speaker
There is some poetry in the knowledge that Laurie Spiegel's music has been able to travel physically farther into space than even Stanley Kubrick's imagination.
00:34:42
Speaker
As with the Vasoka's view of emergent camera technology for filmmakers, Spiegel considered her work at Bell Labs to be representative of how the democratization of music making could be enabled by electronic technology. She correctly foresaw that musicians would no longer be hindered by the physical and financial requirements of virtuosic musicianship and the traditional mechanics of record production.
00:35:05
Speaker
Lori Spiegel cites the accessibility of synthesizers and instruments of electronic composition at the time as having been an effective means to bypass reliance on conductors, orchestras and recording studios, the traditional means of musical production in a male-dominated industry.
00:35:20
Speaker
She posits this attribute as being one of the reasons for the abundance of female pioneers in early electronic experimental music. For an eloquent exploration of this particular theme, be sure to watch Lisa Rovner's brilliant 2020 documentary Sisters with Transistors, which features exhilarating footage of female electronic artists such as Susan Ciani, Pauline Oliveros, Elianne Radig, and moving footage of Laurie Spiegel herself.
00:35:46
Speaker
who exudes the serene but charismatic aura went on screen, framed against the backdrop of excited birds at sunrise in New York City. Electronic music, as pioneered by artists like Laurie Spiegel, represented creative and economic liberation, and the opportunity for total freedom of expression, a common theme for the multitude of artists making music in New York at that time.
00:36:08
Speaker
There's a trace of the expanding universe in the music of acts from the Sheffield electronic label Warp, boards of Canada in particular. The music captures the adrenaline rush of moving into the scientific, emotional and spiritual unknown, but was delivered by way of intricate technical patterns and beautiful melodies.
00:36:51
Speaker
The kitchen quickly became known as a venue for cutting-edge performance, televised images often becoming part of the musical performances by way of fruitful collaborations between musical and visual artists. Kitchen artists would begin linking their instruments to video synthesizers, frequently to startling effect.
00:37:08
Speaker
Reese Chatham and Laurie Spiegel would collaborate with Tony Conrad from the Theatre of Eternal Music at the kitchen on 11 March 1972 when they performed 10 years in the Infinite Plane. Conrad had built the amplified long string drone instruments.
00:37:23
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Spiegel played the bass pulse, and she then performed electric guitar. Conrad's droning violin fed into the loops of strobing black-and-white vertical lines gradually interlaced to form new image configurations, the video footage being mixed live for playback in the visual monitors by Woody and Stein of Ahsoka themselves.
The Resilience of Art Venues in NYC's Changing Landscape
00:37:41
Speaker
The kitchen's directors had already made the decision to move to their new Soho space at Worcester and Broome Street, but the physical collapse of the building housing the Mercer Arts Centre on 3rd August 1973, killing four residents and injuring 12 people, made the move a necessity. The victims of the collapse sued the hotel owners, Matilda Edwards and Gertrude G. Latham, who in turn pursued the operators of the Arts Centre for $2 million, alleging that reckless alterations had been made.
00:38:10
Speaker
It transpired that, in February 1969, a major load-bearing wall in the basement had been removed without an official permit. This, combined with the vibrational activity of the adjacent BMT subway, is believed to have been the cause of the collapse. In 1980, Justice Edward J. Greenfield ruled that New York City was 30% liable for damages because the breach of regulations was missed by the building's department.
00:38:35
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but this ruling was overturned on appeal in 1983. The site was fully demolished and rebuilt and today the location is used as the NYU dormitory for its law school students.
00:38:48
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One immediate effect of the Broadway Hotel collapse was that Mayor John Lindsay ordered all pre-1901 structures in the city to be re-evaluated. This was to put severe pressure on theatre and nightclub operators like David Mancuso, whose Loft House party at 647 Broadway had joined the building which housed the Mercer Arts Centre. The city's regulatory bodies went into overdrive, with snap inspections and arbitrary fines, accelerating the gentrification of downtown Manhattan
00:39:15
Speaker
with property developers waiting in the wings to demolish and rebuild. Suicide and punk rock would eventually find a new home at the Bowery at CBGB's in 1974. The Broadway Hotel collapse marks time for the end of an era, after which experimental art and underground disco nightclubs would move out of the lofts and underground venues
00:39:35
Speaker
in a more visible space like Le Chardin, Studio 54, and the kitchen's new home on Worcester and Broome Street, ultimately consolidating their position in the mainstream of American popular culture. The physical condition of the city would again impose itself on its residents as if it will. Rock-a-rockin' U.S.A. She pumped up along the way
00:40:07
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Maybe someone right around Right around where he was gone
00:40:21
Speaker
Thanks for listening. In our next episode we're going to take a detailed look into how artists, musicians and business people operating in the creative arts collectively moved into the abandoned industrial lofts of Soho in the 1960s. These artists organised politically and created a new form of urban development in New York. In doing so, they managed to effectively spearhead opposition to the Lower Manhattan Expressway project
00:40:45
Speaker
a long gestating infrastructure project that would have decimated Soho and much of the surrounding area. Their efforts helped preserve downtown New York for the explosion of progressive art and music that would be created there in the late 60s and early 1970s.