Quad-8 Subotnick: From Touch to Sidewinder

Morton Subotnick, co-founder of the San Francisco Tape Music Center and illustrious advocate of the Buchla electronic music box, befuddled many of his fellow electronic music composers when Silver Apples of the Moon was released in 1967. The piece had been commissioned by Nonesuch Records. It made history by becoming the first electronic composition conceived specifically for commercial release on LP.

Subotnick was amongst the first composers to fully embrace the vinyl format. “The early records, Silver Apples of the Moon and The Wild Bull, were kind of imagined chamber music in the sense that chamber music would be played in people’s homes,” Subotnick explained in an interview with Barry Schrader. “These works were conceived for records, and I had an image of the record as being a future chamber music. These records were not recordings of pieces that could exist in another format.”

Silver Apples of the Moon and The Wild Bull were but two of several Subotnick albums dedicated to bringing new music directly into people’s homes. Starting in the late 1960s, the composer started to explore questions of sound distribution in space. The then-emerging quadraphonic technology provided him with unprecedented opportunities. In 1969, Columbia Records released Subotnick’s Touch on both Quad vinyl and Quad 8. The album was the first of a series of quadraphonic recordings commissioned by the label. Sidewinder followed a couple of years later.

Released in 1971, Sidewinder is a fantastic voyage into the composer’s aesthetic prism. The album best exemplifies the chamber music of the future that Subotnick imagined when he first started working with the Buchla synthesizer. Sidewinder offers an uncompromising yet delicate exploration of timbres, textures and dynamics. It is a superb piece of electronic music which provides – even today – an escape from the dull sound of monotony.

Quad versions of Sidewinder remain available online (used LPs or Quad-8 cartridges) for those of you equipped with vintage quadraphonic playback systems. Otherwise, you might want to put your hands on a copy of Subotnick’s Volume 2: Electronic Works (available on both CD and DVD). This collection includes Sidewinder (new 4.1 surround sound version with liquid light show by Tony Martin) and Until Spring (a 1975 composition available for the first time in 5.1 surround sound).

Excerpts below…

“sidewinder – part a”