Audiopile Review: It’s testament to the enormous role women played in experimental electronic music’s development that the title of 1977 compilation ‘New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media’ makes no reference to gender. But all the composers represented therein are women. How and why electronic music became a realm in which the gender imbalance that blighted the arts (and pretty much everything else) seemed to matter so much less is a question beautifully explored in the documentary film ‘Sisters with Transistors’. And two of our favourite composers featured in that film, Pauline Oliveros and Laurie Spiegel, have tracks on the comp. There are also tracks by Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson, plus a couple of early compositions by Laurie Anderson. The appearance of a legit rock star like Anderson might attract a lot of people to this new reissue of ‘…Electronic and Recorded Media’, as might the inclusion of Spiegel’s classic ‘Appalachian Grove’. But the big bonus for us is the discovery of pieces by two composers we’d honestly never heard of before. Johanna M. Beyer’s ‘Music of the Spheres’ is a satisfying slice of classic analogue weirdness (legendary synth inventor Don Buchla lends a hand). Megan Roberts’ ‘I Could Sit Here All Day’, meanwhile, is a primal mixture of pounding rhythms and raw-throated vocalizations. The latter piece adds some real avant-garde edge to this mostly very approachable introduction to the era’s experimental electronics. An important historical document and a great listen, which manages to throw in some real curveballs to stop the whole affair getting too cozy.

Marking its first decade of activity, Blume returns with the first ever vinyl reissue of the seminal New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media, from 1977, the third and final instalment in a suite of releases that includes James Tenney’s Postal Pieces and Ben Vida’s Vocal Trio. Unquestionably among the most important collections of experimental music to emerge during the 20th Century, New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media is the original feminist presentation in its context, releasing the work of Johanna M. Beyer, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Megan Roberts, Ruth Anderson, and Laurie Anderson under its collective banner. Includes newly commissioned liner notes by Jennifer Lucy Allen and Bradford Bailey. New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media can be understood within two simple frameworks. On one hand, it is an astounding document of the landscape of experimental music toward the end of the 1970s. On the other, it is a historically significant feminist statement, being the first collection of experimental music entirely dedicated to female composers, a number of whom were grossly under-celebrated at the time, but have since gone on to be regarded as among the most important composers of their generation. The eight pieces gathered by New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media might be regarded as the first cohesive vision of alternate proximity or expression of experimental music to what has always been a frustratingly male dominated environment, and to the tropes, temperaments, and sensibilities that have been historically perceived to define it. It is an expanded vision of truth. While its historical significance and groundbreaking nature cannot be debated in its totality, nearly half a century on New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media remains compelling in both its musicality and the palpable sense of its lasting influence. Every composition across the album’s two sides is not only engrossing and deeply compelling — feeling as fresh and relevant as the day it was laid to tape — but clearly tangible in their lasting influence. Absolutely seminal and not to be missed.