Alien Territory: Radical, Experimental & Irrelevant Music In 1970s San Diego explores the radical music scene that developed in San Diego in the 1970s, kickstarted by composer and instrument maker Harry Partch and developed by the likes of Pauline Oliveros, Kenneth Gaburo, Roger Reynolds, Diamanda Galás, Warren Burt, David Dunn, Robert Turman and Master Wilburn Burchette.

The following playlist is a selection of tracks included in the accompanying boxset The Alien Territory Archives: A Collection of Radical, Experimental, & Irrelevant Music from 1970s San Diego, released by Nyahh Records.

Robert Turman
“Relay”

While artists at University of California San Diego (UCSD) huddled over their computers and synths in well-funded studios a stone’s throw from the Pacific ocean, across town in San Diego’s working class East County, Steve Hitchcock, Boyd Rice, Robert Turman and a handful of friends were looping tape, spinning turntables and mounting the stage at tiny punk clubs. After recording the first NON single with Rice in 1977, the contemplative Turman left that aural assault unit and embarked on a series of frequently hypnotic lo-fi solo recordings, such as “Relay”, which was recorded around 1977.

Harry Partch
“Two Studies On Ancient Greek Scales”

The visionary composer, theorist and instrument inventor spent his final years in San Diego, and while his association with UCSD proved to be short lived and occasionally contentious, Harry Partch found a remarkably loyal and capable group of collaborators in town who continue to spread his influence and guard his legacy long after his death. Chief among them was Danlee Mitchell, Partch’s close friend and musical director who can be heard, along with Judith Mullen, playing for a group of students on this May 1968 recording of the 1950 composition “Two Studies On Ancient Greek Scales”, where Partch’s bespoke harmonic canon and bass marimba bring instrumental colour to what is, by the composer’s ambitious standards, a fairly straightforward piece.

Joji Yuasa
“My Blue Sky In Southern California”

Joji Yuasa, a pioneer of electronic and tape music in the post Second World War Japanese avant garde, first visited the UCSD campus in 1976, where he created a computer aided sequel of sorts to “My Blue Sky”, a composition completed the previous year in Tokyo. Working with UCSD’s John Celona, Yuasa composed “My Blue Sky In Southern California” for four channels as a series of shifting, sliding electronic pulses that unfold like recurring fractals through space. After observing rehearsals of the Extended Vocal Techniques Ensemble – a performance ensemble cum performance group residing on campus – Yuasa created a second version of the piece that incorporated EVTE’s unique palette of vocal effects, opening the music up from a somewhat technical exercise in computer sound generation into something more expansive and lively.

Whereas Yuasa’s own multi-tracked vocals in the Tokyo recorded “My Blue Sky” had an intentionally rough, untutored quality, the four virtuosos of EVTE dart around the stereo spectrum in a frenzied swarm of clicks, smacks, trills and ululations. Conceived in 1973 as an 11-piece that included Roberto Laneri and Warren Burt, by 1976 EVTE was down to a quartet consisting of Deborah Kavasch, Ed Harkins, Phil Larson and Linda Vickerman, though William Brooks was known to fill in on occasion when Larson was unavailable.

Diamanda Galás
“Scalatron Music”

“Scalatron Music”, which Galás used to open her Wild Women With Steak-Knives performances in the 80s, was recorded by her in 1981 in the basement studio of UCSD, where she would go at midnight to improvise and record. There, as she recalls, she would “sing/shriek” while playing the instrument – a carny freak show considered radical by the art and film students who worked in other studios. By this time, after years on the local club and gallery circuit, Galás was a rising international star, known for her formidable vocal technique and harrowing performances. San Diego was certainly too small to contain her. Improvising on the scalatron, a microtonal organ designed by Herman Pedtke and admired by Harry Partch, Galás kicks up a storm, leaving the 70s, a tumultuous decade of experimentation, in the dust. Though she now regrets not using the piece in her work soon afterwards with director Wes Craven for The Serpent And The Rainbow, the melody did pop up again years later in her 1998 composition “Supplica A Mia Madre” which adapts a poem by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Alexina Louie
“Molly”

Now a highly regarded contemporary classical composer in Canada with numerous honours, including a Juno, to her name, Louie was looking to escape her conventional musical background when she arrived at UCSD in 1970. The campus, then at its hippie zenith, was happy to oblige. At the initial gathering of graduate students John Silber led the class in a group improvisation that quickly turned feral. “I remember thinking,” Louie recalls, “what am I doing here? It’s a graduate music school and I’m crawling on the floor with my fellow graduate students.” Pauline Oliveros, with whom Louie played in the ♀ Ensemble, proved even more influential. Louie’s 1972 composition “Molly” – a four channel tape piece setting Molly Bloom’s erotic closing soliloquy from Ulysses within a field of electronics, acoustic instruments and multiple voices – was submitted as part of her UCSD thesis and it shows the influence of her mentor both in its feminist themes and in its construction.

Peter Gordon featuring Kathy Acker
“Greetings From The SLA”

Before Peter Gordon became a fixture of the downtown New York music scene – celebrated for his own work as well as collaborations with the likes of Laurie Anderson, Robert Ashley, David Byrne and Arto Lindsay – he was a disgruntled student at UCSD. Though he didn’t care much for the school itself, which he found musically snobby, he nonetheless found a robust pool of steady collaborators that included musicians Warren Burt, David Dunn and Ron Robboy as well as Gordon’s romantic partner, Kathy Acker, an experimental, transgressive writer whose fusion of punk and postmodernism would soon prove wildly influential. Recorded in the Bay Area, where the couple found the progressive cultural climate more amenable than staid old San Diego, “Greetings From The SLA” uses a recorded missive from Patty Hearst and her captors in the revolutionary Symbionese Liberation Army to evoke the fear, dread and confusion that hung over the libidinally liberated city like a bad fog. “I had been fascinated by the SLA communiques on the radio,” Gordon recalls, “which seemed to be programmed alongside recordings by Donna Summer and other nascent disco artists.”

KIVA
“Pure Intellect, Serpent Power, Inner Frames”

Founded in 1975 by trombonist John Silber and composer/percussionist Jean-Charles Francois, KIVA was an improvising ensemble that took on many collaborators and many forms over its long – over 25 years – lifespan. What remained constant was the group’s commitment to spontaneous, non-idiomatic improvisation that bore some resemblance, musically and ideologically, to the kind of 70s European free improvisation embodied by AMM. Inspired by the example of Harry Partch, KIVA also employed their own homemade instruments, such as a waterphone constructed from a washing machine. “Pure Intellect, Serpent Power, Inner Frames”, recorded in May 1976, is as epic and elusive as its title: sounds, mysterious in origin, come and go as though floating past on dark currents, never to reappear; storms erupt and pass; a ghost rattles its chains; a distress cry sounds in the distance; massing drones hover on the edge of feedback.

What exactly is happening is anyone’s guess, and even Jean-Charles Francois remains stumped. “I like it, but cannot recall the circumstances!” he mused upon being presented with this recording. “I certainly recognise John Silber’s playing and my own in it. But as for other participant or participants I am not sure.” He speculates that the collage-like effects may be the result of live electronic processing or maybe something else entirely. “It could also have been recomposed somewhat? By whom? John Silber? Not me in any case.” I could swear I hear a bass in there, which I might attribute to frequent collaborator Bert Turetzky, but ultimately the lack of certainty speaks to the ensemble’s success. Embrace the mystery, I say.

Julian Cowley’s review of The Alien Territory Archives boxset is published in The Wire 501. Pick up a copy of the magazine in the online shop. Byron Coley’s review of Bill Perrine’s The Alien Territory Archives book was published in The Wire 472. That issue is sold out but subscribers can read the review online in the digital library.