Album Notes

Tod Dockstader's "organized sound" has captivated, delighted, and sometimes frightened listeners for several decades. With dozens of highly enthusiastic reviews, Starkland's two CDs have led to the recognition of Dockstader as one of the finest electronic music composers yet to appear. The Washington Post calls Dockstader "one of the giants in the field," while Stereophile places his output "on a par with the best."

The two CDs, each containing over 70 minutes of strikingly original music, offer significantly improved sound over the limitations of the original LPs. Dockstader carefully supervised the transfer from his original master tapes to the final digital masters. The Washington Post notes that the extraordinary sound of the CDs "at last, is equal to the remarkable sounds Dockstader has produced."

These Starkland CDs have received extensive praise in the media. For example, The Wire wrote that "The obsessive care with which Starkland have compiled these extraordinary recordings should ensure that Dockstader will be remembered as the innovative, visionary figure he undoubtedly was."

The first CD opens with Water Music. Dockstader comments that the piece "began with the sound of water; there is little else in the piece… There are six short parts, each one of varying degrees of density, acceleration, loudness. Some are lyrical, some violent – both, I feel, are qualities of water."

This CD also presents the darkly ominous, 45-minute work many regard as Dockstader's musique concrete masterpiece, Quatermass. The composer offers some thoughts about this extraordinary piece:

"Quatermass was intended, from the start, to be a very dense, massive, even threatening, work of high levels and high energy… By the time I did Quatermass, I guess I had a library of around 300,000 feet of tape (125 hours at 15 ips). From this mass, I would select cells that seemed like they might work together into a piece... I'd guess the forty-six minutes of Quatermass were wrenched out of probably a dozen hours of mixed tape... Song and Lament does indeed have a song and a lament. Tango, although it doesn’t start like a tango, becomes something like a tango, and Parade is sort of a pompous, John Philips Sousa crashing about. Flight continues the source-ideas of Tango on a darker level, and the final part, Second Song, is a long working-out of the energies, and an attempt at balancing the weights, of the first four parts."

The CD also offers Two Moons of Quatermass, unused sections from Quatermass that were heard on this CD for the first time. Dockstader writes that "Two Moons of Quatermass were spin-offs from Quatermass: they were flung out, in the long process of editing, as outs... They separated themselves from the main work because: the first Moon was too languid to work into Quatermass, and the second Moon was more playfully chaotic than Quatermass."

Reviewing this CD, one New Zealand critic concludes that "This crushingly good 73:11 disc...is the best that I've heard...never been surpassed...a masterpiece!" And Fanfare calls the disc is "an astounding technical and artistic success."

Anyone who has an interest in musique concrete and electronic music should hear Tod Dockstader's powerful, classic organized sound.