BRAND, MAX: Kabelbrand

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Born 1896, Jewish Austrian composer Brand was forced to emigrate in 1937 and, after much travel, wound up in the USA. In the early '50s he decided to work in the new field of electronic music and built his own studio. One thing and another led him to Bob Moog - who was then just setting up shop - from whom he commissioned a synthesiser - which was both an updated take on the Trautonium and the first Moog (known as the Moogtonium, a largely forgotten but important step in Synthesiser history). This CD features new pieces for the rediscovered and restored original instrument; pieces which, fundamentally, I find neither here nor there - though they point up starkly the differences between the old generation and the new: I find them all very one dimensional. If that was all, this CD would not be in the catalogue; it's here for the last 2 tracks (just over 36 minutes of music) which are unreleased works by Brand himself, and worth buying the whole CD for. Made in the early 1970s, these are neither primitive electronics, nor the glossy electrocaoustics which came later, but an amalgam of Sun Ra's Moog explorations and the planned aesthetics of electronic music - at the time when it was still exciting and hard work. This release is doubly important because, as a mostly overlooked maverick, more or less none of his work was ever released, and nothing at all is currently in print. Nicely designed.