Morton SUBOTNICK - Silver Apples Of The Moon

Morton Subotnick’s ‘Silver Apples Of The Moon’ adventure is a foundational piece of electronic music.

Created on a then freshly-commissioned Buchla modular synthesiser, it was the first electronic record released by a classical music label and heralded a wave of synthetic music exploration which has birthed many of the sounds we know and love today. In light of the impact created by Charles Cohen’s recently excavated Buchla Recordings, and the resurgence of artists in thrall to the possibilities of free-styling, pulsating techno and synth noise, the timing of its release could hardly be more apt, holding up a primordial soup of manic rhythms and chaotic blips.

Subotnick was a founder of the San Francisco Tape Music Center alongside Pauline Oliveros and Ramon Sender, but also worked alongside Don Buchla himself on the development of the early synthesizer “Buchla Series 100” . Moving to New York he become an artist-in-residence at the newly established Tisch School Of The Arts of the New York University where he also set up his own studio, which is where he recorded “Silver Apples Of The Moon”, an album commissioned by Decca as the first electronic composition especially conceived for a vinyl release.