Probes
In PROBES #37.2, Chris Cutler opens a conversation with crooners, experimental artists, and rock legends in order to exchange notes at their EA (Electricionists Anonymous) meeting on their mutual dependency on microphones and loudspeakers (feedback welcome).
In PROBES #37, we consider the revolution ushered in by the thermionic valve and, in particular, the disorienting but transformative changes electrical amplification brought into a world until then predicated solely on acoustical laws. We then examine the cybernetic entanglement of its mirrored portals (the microphone and the loudspeaker) through the generative instability of feedback which, it turns out, has accessible expressive powers...
In PROBES #36.2, Chris Cutler encounters more claviolines, ondiolines, musitrons, solovoxes, electroniums and ondiolas as they shape-shift to accommodate the (sometimes out there) needs of pop, jazz, lounge, experimental, soundtrack and avant garde composers.
In PROBES #36, Chris Cutler continues to follow wildly diverse applications of novel electronic keyboards; the shape-shifting Ondioline, the many variations of the Clavioline and the electric Sackbut - from Sun Ra to Scelsi, Al Kooper to the Marvelettes – and we definitively settle the question of John Lennon, the Beatles and the orange.
The PROBES AUXILIARIES dig deeper into the main programme topic but are also programmed for your ecstatic listening pleasure; so examples here are edited and sequenced and cut together on the wheels of steal; there’s no talking either (at least not by me), so you need to download the playlist to get the details, backstory and relevance of each of the pieces featured. In this new episode, Hammonds talk, sing, swing, soar, strut and contemplate the universe, and Jerry Goldsmith takes the Novachord out into space and down to the bottom of the sea.