Saturday, 7 January 2017

Sounds Astounding: London Audio Workshop - Stereo Gold Award 1974

Well this is eye-catching enough; these days even those top shelf magazines dedicated to the appreciation/exploitation of the naked female form wouldn't get away with having uncensored nipples on their covers, and yet here we have, bold as brass, two sets without a bye or leave. Or, rather, one set mirrored in a possible visual pun on the 'Breathtaking Stereo' promise of the sleeve. 

All good clean fun in the mid seventies from whence this came I guess - 1974 to be exact - and I'm not here to tut tut over casual sexism from supposedly less enlightened times; sex has always sold. It's what's in the grooves beneath that cover that interests me, but I suppose when it seems necessary to use such blatant female nudity (complete with incredibly phallic 'cans') in order to pique the interest of the casual browser (which, let's be honest, worked well enough on me over forty years later), then I immediately smell a rat.

Ostensibly presented as a platform to demonstrate the capabilities of those new fangled synthesiser things, 'Sounds Astounding' is basically a straight performance of some popular standards from the classical repertoire (as played by the London Symphony Orchestra no less) with added electronic accompaniment from the 'London Audio Workshop'. Sounds a worthy enough project on paper I guess, but in practice there's more sand than oil between these gears.

Let's start with the classical pieces themselves, conducted here by Douglas Gamley (best known to me for scoring seventies horror movies like 'The Beast Must Die', 'Asylum' and 'From Beyond The Grave'). I don't hold myself up as a connoisseur of the genre, but to these ears the orchestration and performances are perfunctory at best; at worst they're just plain flat, lifeless and struggle to pull themselves clear of the grooves. True, that needn't be a major headshot - after all, the orchestra here is not the focal point and is meant to be playing second fiddle to instruments that plug in. That's fair enough. But then the second problem arises in that, instead of integrating seamlessly in and around the past masters via clever arrangements, the synthesised parts crudely fart, buzz and burble like bees in a biscuit tin, either independent of the main score (at the start and end such as on the otherwise die straight take on 'Also Sprach Zarathustra') or else slobber straight over the top of them like square pegs trying vainly to fit into round holes that they never quite manage to find.

The blurb on the back proudly boasts of 'Speaker to speaker interplay of specially scored orchestral works with scintillating sounds augmented by synthesisers. The full range of audio frequencies beyond the range of human hearing' which sets a high bar for expectations, but by the mid seventies mixing the old with the new in this way was hardly breaking any new ground. It had already been done before and done better. Walter Carlos had released an album of classical music played on Moog synthesisers a full six years earlier ('Switched on Bach') and had gone on to provide electronic treatments of Beethoven and Rossini on 1971's 'A Clockwork Orange' soundtrack. And as a convenient point of comparison, Carlos' take on the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on that soundtrack remains a sparky gurgle of dread that still sounds like a creepy tomorrow. By contrast, 'Sounds Astounding' version of the same is a harsh charge of cheap stereo effects that have all the grace of something knocked up via wires and batteries from the Thomas Salter Electrical Lab playkit.

All of which adds up to the conclusion that, rather than something unique or 'astounding', 'Sounds Astounding' would have sounded crude in 1974 and sounds even cruder now. About as crude as that cover to be honest - truth be told, if you wanted something that sounded astounding that showed off your swanky new record player in 1974 then you were already spoiled for choice. In the previous year, Pink Floyd had released the hi-fi enthusiast's wet dream of 'Dark Side Of The Moon', and if you wanted to hear synthesisers working at the cutting edge in 1974, then Tangerine Dream's 'Phaedra' was available, along with releases from other genre big hitters like Jarre and Vangelis. If you wanted to hear how they sounded playing classical, then Tomita's 'Snowflakes Are Dancing' was made up entirely of arrangements of Claude Debussy's "tone paintings" and already in the shops. These are random (and rather obvious) examples. Others abound and they all served to make 'Sounds Astounding' almost obsolete before its time. No wonder they felt the need to sex it up a bit.

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