Dusted:
For anyone still only familiar with Raymond Scott’s music as used in classic Warner Brothers cartoons, this set is going to be an ear-opener. For those in the know, it will be further confirmation of the man’s singular genius. In 2000, Basta released Manhattan Research Inc., a double disc devoted to the pioneering engineer, inventor, composer and music philosopher’s electronic music. It was a listening exercise in contradiction, embodying the goofy seriousness, or vice versa, that typified Scott the man and the artist. Now, 17 years later, Basta offers up another double helping residing somewhere between sequel and prequel. At least some of the music constitutes the next chapter in Scott’s sonic legacy, taking us right to 1971, when he moved from Long Island to California as head of electronic music research and development at Mowtown, but we are also treated to revisitations, or deconstructions, of material heard on that excellent set of nearly two decades ago.
As with every Basta release of Scott’s music, the documentation is thorough and superb. Scholarly research is juxtaposed with family reminiscences, vintage photographs and first-hand observations from those who knew, worked with and learned from the secretive, imaginative and sometimes paranoid maverick. As we learn in the exhaustive notes, Scott documented everything, kept every take and left hours and hours of sound, in varying phases of completion and quality. This state of becoming is reflected in these many and fairly brief bits, scraps and fragments, each of which, somehow, takes on life and personality.
Of the varied electronic instruments Scott designed, the electronium takes center stage in this collection. It is discussed most frequently and in the most detail throughout the booklet, and with good reason, as it is the most mysterious of Scott’s inventions. Briefly, it was a composition machine, guided rather than played, as Scott himself explains. It went through several generations, decreasing in size as it increased in power and diversity of output. Three Willow Park allows its audition in great and graphic detail, but one example stands head and shoulders above the rest. “First Class Electronium Pt. 1,” from 1970, affords a stark demonstration of just how diverse the forms and timbres it generates can be. The piece is based on a descent, but that’s the only unifying factor in this absolutely riveting study of constantly varied repetition. There is no definite tonal center or, quite often, even definite pitches, just a series of metrically shifting cascades, dead center of the soundstage, in which articulation and filtering become playthings of the machine. Scott’s widow remembers that he would go and have lunch, leaving the electronium running while they ate, and she was amazed at the beauty of the patterns, melodic and otherwise, emanating from it. While this particular piece is not beautiful in any conventional sense, its diversity of phrasing and inventive development of sound and structure speaks volumes for its design and facility. For a more user-friendly introduction to its sound world, take “Cindy Alternate – Pop Rock,” a rollicking little calypso-type number featuring sharply delineated and punchy rhythms from the electronium and a beautifully syrupy melody on clavivox, a keyboard instrument able to make very convincing use of the note-to-note slides and glides a violinist might employ.
There, embodied in what is little more than a sketch, is the contradiction at the heart of the man and his ideas. On the one hand, he wanted his instrumentalists to be like machines, precise and exactly repetitive, while, as he stated, he wanted his electronic music to quiver. There is something romantic about his quirky visions, something slightly humorous in the sounds often squeaking and brapping from his devices, as if nothing could be taken completely seriously at all times. Revel in the electro-acoustically saccharine “Portofino 3,” in which high-register women’s voices and saxophone pepper the electronic ripples and arpeggios. This whimsy even applies to his own corpus, as heard in the completely reworked and daffy version of “Toy Trumpet” from 1966, complementing the longer one that can be heard on MRI. It’s Scott’s most well-known melody, but it’s given a complete makeover, as Miles Davis might have done with “So What” or Chick Corea did with “Spain.” Then, there are the positively zany sounds taken from the effects reel for Jim Henson’s 1966 film “The Organized Mind,” whose soundtrack is heard complete on MRI. Hearing the sounds divorced from context, like little misshapen galaxies, is instructive and a bit unnerving, a few jump-cut and smile-inducing moments notwithstanding. It’s all very far removed from the “serious” worlds of Stockhausen, Berio and the weighty concepts they imagined and championed. You’d never find any of them writing jingles like the ones Scott crafted, components of which abound throughout this collection.
Ultimately, despite its complexities of vision and execution, there’s something endearing, almost childlike, in Scott’s music, something wondrous, sparking the imagination to travel paths similar to the trails its creator blazed. As with MRI, the set is organized in lopsided cycles and repetitions, mirroring the electronium’s improvisational dashes toward formal intrigue. Each track is an experience, but the set is proving more and more fun to take in as a whole. It would make an excellent introduction for the newly initiated, and for Scott fans, it’s more of what only his music can provide. Buy or don’t buy the claims that Scott was prefiguring electronic music modernity — though they resonate in this listener’s ears and experience — but you’d have to cover a lot of terrain to hear anything comparable to the serio-comic flights of fancy lovingly refurbished and elucidated for this collection.
