Douglas Leedy: The Electric Zodiac

“Time is, perhaps, the MOST fundamental aspect of a musical experience. It separates it from almost all other art forms. It takes place over an expanse of time and creates different conceptions of what temporal experiences are, and, in general, western music has been, for the last hundred and fifty years, very linear and very goal-oriented. In a Strauss tone-poem, you can point to and say “this is the climax” and ‘this is where it’s going”. Even in a Bach chorale you have harmonic progressions that go towards a certain goal. Play those harmonic progressions backwards and they don’t sound good because they don’t go towards a goal. They head away from it, and it’s like music that’s falling apart instead of making itself more and more clear as it goes along.”

“I’m interested in writing music where the sense of time is lost.”

An Interview with Douglas Leedy (Ear, vol. 4 no. 4, April 1976)

Douglas Leedy spent his formative years studying composition at the University of California with La Monte Young and Terry Riley. The three of them went on to become respected composers of experimental music although Leedy never achieved the notoriety accorded Young and Riley.

Yet, to describe Leedy’s contributions as negligible would be a mistake. The composer’s Entropical Paradise, a triple album of moogsplotation, remains a classic of the genre (albeit obscure) while his approach to composition continues to inspire and stimulate.

In the 1960s, Leedy taught music at the University of California where he played a central role in the design and construction of the university’s electronic music studio. While at UCLA, Leedy experimented with his Ognob Generator as well as his Moog and Buchla synthesizers which he used on his early albums. The Electric Zodiac is a product of that period.

The Electric Zodiac is a dense sonic nappe moving across a timeless space where frequencies and electronically-generated sounds compete and quarrel senselessly. It is continuous music – challenging and enthralling.

Leedy describes his close-to-40-minute piece as “a continuum of music of the cosmos.” “There is no beginning and there is no end.”

The Electric Zodiac is therefore well suited to the endless loop 8-track tape (if we put aside the fact that the piece has to be split into four programmes).

Listen to Programme A below and get your own copy of Entropical Paradise here.

Programme A: The Electric Zodiac

Stereo 8 (Capitol 8XT368) – Track Listing:
Programme A: The Electric Zodiac
Programme B: The Electric Zodiac
Programme C: The Electric Zodiac
Programme D: The Electric Zodiac

LP – Track Listing:
Side A: The Electric Zodiac Part 1
Side B: The Electric Zodiac Part 2