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Laurie Spiegel: The Expanding Universe

In 1977, American astronomer Carl Sagan selected the composer Laurie Spiegel's computerized realization of Johannes Kepler's 1619 treatise "e;Harmony of the Worlds"e; for inclusion aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft's "e;Golden Record"e;. Kepler's "e;Harmony of the Worlds"e; was the lead cut on a collection that held recordings of natural sounds, greetings in 55 languages, selections from Beethoven, Mozart, Blind Willie Johnson, and Chuck Berry, for the sake of demonstrating to other life forms in the galaxy that there is intelligent life on our planet. And now, Laurie Spiegel's music has traveled to the edge of our solar system.

Back on Earth, the New York label Unseen Worlds has obliged us with more Laurie Spiegel, reissuing her 1980 album, The Expanding Universe, and adding over 100 minutes of additional music. At a time when crucial female electronic composers like Pauline Oliveros and Suzanne Ciani are receiving new recognition for their work, Spiegel's music continues to resonate and often sounds strangely contemporary. That her work can be simultaneously dystopian and luminous speaks to Spiegel's talents. She can evoke the chilling cosmos while also crafting something small-scale and warm. When Voyager launched, President Jimmy Carter said: "e;This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings."e; His statement applies just as readily to The Expanding Universe.

Spiegel attended Julliard before researching at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, and at Connecticut's Electronic Music Laboratories on the nascent music systems being developed there. (Ultimately, she chose to pursue programming, forgoing musical composition altogether.) The notes within this reissue show the room-sized computers with which Spiegel concocted her music, and her anecdotes recall disk drives the size of washing machines preserving mere seconds of code. She offers details like: "e;This 32k DDP understood FORTRAN IV and DAP II 24-bit assembly language. It could do an integer add in as little as 3.8 milliseconds but a floating point multiply could take up to 115.9 microseconds. You can bet we all wrote the tightest, smallest, fastest code we could."e;

Whatever its heady origins, Spiegel's music is inviting, playful, and visceral. As she explained to The Wall Street Journal recently: "e;There were all of these negative images of computers as giant machines that would take over the world and had no sense of anything warm and fuzzy or affectionate."e; Yet "e;Patchwork"e; has the buoyancy of the ARP figure from the Who's "e;Baba O'Riley"e;, "e;Old Wave"e; is woozy and syrup-slow, and a number of melodies anticipate the analog splendors of Jürgen Müller or Boards of Canada. Her intellectual curiosity led her to investigate African and Indian polyrhythms-- which inform the throbbing and lively "e;Drums"e;-- as well as the modal Celtic tunes she heard while studying American folk music in the Blue Ridge Mountains, which permeate three iterations of "e;Appalachian Grove"e;.

Thrilling as these shorter studies might be, it's in her longer, more contemplative works that Spiegel's sensibilities become clearest. "e;The Expanding Universe"e; is nearly a half-hour of swelling, evolving tones, and she stresses that the composition is neither "e;minimalist"e; nor "e;ambient,"e; and that it exists wholly in its own space. Even if Spiegel's music weren't already launched into the firmament, it would finds its natural home there; it's when she contemplates orbits, heavenly bodies, and the cosmos through sound that her imagination is unparalleled. While Kepler mused that the "e;Harmony of the Worlds"e; would be audible only to the ear of God, what reaches human ears via Spiegel's realization is bracing, menacing, and disorienting, the piercing tones not unlike a choir of air raid sirens. An alien life form encountering it on Voyager's "e;Golden Record"e; would conclude that our world was a maddening, maniacal place.