David Rosenboom: Future Travel

“Future Travel (1981) is a journey in sonic imagery. It is set sometime in the future and its starting point is Earth. The traveler, whose point of view we imagine, is a spirit being, representing the first awareness of a new form of consciousness to which humans have evolved. At an earlier point in the evolution of the Earth human beings had become aware of the unstoppable momentum of the course they had set and the unlikelihood of their surviving. Consequently, attention was turned towards learning to direct the process of their evolution to a new form. This form is a macroscopic one, a large-scale organism, to which all, individual entities of earlier Earthly forms contributed. The first awareness of this new form of existence is beginning now. “And Out Come the Night Ears (1978) is a solo for piano interfaced with an electronic system developed through a particular improvisation practice that manifests anew in each performance. Because this practice has an identity in my mind associated with specific piano exercises I composed for myself, certain musical materials, particular interactive electronics techniques, and a body of performances, it is as such a piece that is not a piece and I call it a piece. The recording presented here is extracted from an approximately one-hour-long performance given in a concert that was coincident with the rollout of the then new Buchla 300 Electric Music Box. I sometimes think of the piano as if it was an orchestra, and in this rendition, the Buchla 300 provided a means of extending that orchestra. –David Rosenboom