Sunflower Geranium - Don Slepian (1985 analog video technology compilation)
Posted Feb 6, 2019, 9:22 AM UTC
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The more I listen to Don Slepian music, the more I like it.
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Slepian's Sea of Bliss is one of my favorite albums of all time. I missed out on the VOD compilation unfortunately.
Another one from that era I wish would be rediscovered is Bernard Xolotl. Favorite Xolotl is Return of the Golden Mean but Journey to an Oracle and the first one (Music by Xolotl) are also excellent.
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Bernard Xolotl
Sadly, none of the albums you mentioned are on apple music, off to youtube to search. But the 1983 Procession album seems to be pretty awesome.
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Procession -- the collaboration with Daniel Kobialka. He's another one! Timeless Motion (1982) is great, and still available on Apple Music. Like Slepian he also went in a purely classical direction. Early new age is kind of a bottomless pit, there's just so many quality releases.
Yeah, like most of these "OG" artists, they're pretty bad about keeping stuff available on the most popular channels, and so stuff is either not available, or in this case, spread all over the place.. Xolotl's bandcamp has one release currently: https://bernardxolotl.bandcamp.com/album/journey-to-an-oracle
Many others are on Amazon, including (most importantly) Return of the Golden Mean.
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=bernard+xolotl
I also really like Mexecho (1991) but that's in a different style. Still very unique.
The weird thing is I got into Xolotl a number of years ago through Iasos, because he's a friend of Iasos and the latter was plugging him on his website. But I really haven't been able to get into Iasos much at all, I mean he's "OK", I want to like him because of his vision and quirky interviews, I like the *person* that he is, but I feel I'm just missing that thing that so many people latch onto in the music. The music just isn't weird or deep enough for me, or maybe it's the complete lack of connection to Berlin school electronics which you sort of hear in Xolotl, or some other thing.
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Don Slepian of course was the guy who devised the stereo / multi output mod for the Mirage, too :-)
He also described how to program microtonal scales on the ESQ-1.
He does microtonal stuff somewhere? Truly prolific. It's great to discover someone who has a massive back catalog. I'll be discovering new stuff for a while.
I don't know of any recordings that are microtonal. But he was at least interested in it around 1986 or so.
Yeah, it looks like he uses a highly customized keyboard when he plays live. But I did not know about the Mirage mod, thanks for the heads up.