electronic music, live?

[Danny Wyatt <danny@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Another list member asked me to post this:



	A sudden chorus of whoops and yibbles burst from a kind of juke box at the
far end of the room.  Everybody quit talking.  The bartender tiptoed back,
with the drinks.
	"What's happening?" Oedipa whispered.
	"That's by Stockhausen," the hip graybeard informed her, "the early crowd
tends to dig your Radio Cologne sound.  Later on we really swing.  We're the
only bar in the area, you know, has a strictly electronic music policy.
Come on around Saturdays, starting midnight we have your Sinewave Session,
that's a live get-together, fellas come in just to jam from all over the
state, San Jose, Santa Barbara, San Diego---"
	"Live?"  Metzger said, "electronic music, live?"
	"They put it on tape, here, live, fella.  We got a whole back room full of
your audio oscillators, gunshot machines, contact mikes, everything man.
That's for if you didn't bring your ax, see, but you got the feeling and you
want to swing with the rest of the cats, there's always something
available."
	"No offense," said Metzger, with a winning Baby Igor smile.

(Pynchon, Thomas.  _The Crying of Lot 49_.  New York:  Harper & Row, 1965.)




The point in posting this is not to lament that I haven't found a bar with
Stockhausen on the jukebox and a bring-your-own-oscillator jam session, nor
that people should start calling their PowerBooks "axes," but that even in
1965 it was considered usual to react incredulously to the prospect of live
electronic music.


--Danny Wyatt
creating and meeting .microsound's Pynchon needs since 1999.