Nikolais was scoring his own weird theatre before most synthesizer owners knew what they had, and this collection proves he wasn’t just padding out interdisciplinary gestures with electronic wallpaper. The Moog work sprawls across textures—metallic drones, percussive sequences, abstracted melodic shapes—that feel neither quaint nor retro because they were always in service of movement, never about the synth itself. A genuine precedent for anyone making sound to accompany physical or visual work, which is more than most electronic music from this era can claim.

Often credited as the father of multi-media theatre, Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) took complete creative control over his productions - including cutting-edge approaches to lighting and costume that transformed human bodies into shifting sculptural shapes, while also composing wildly innovative electronic music as accompaniment.

After initially experimenting with musique concrète and tape manipulation (as demonstrated on the 1959 LP Choreosonic Music of the New Dance Theatre of Alwin Nikolais) Nikolais became the first owner of Robert Moog's synthesizer at the Audio Engineering Society convention in New York in late 1964. Relying heavily on the Moog and later the Synclavier synth/sampler, these 21 tracks document Nikolais' highly-prescient compositions across the mid 1960s through to the late 1980s - existing not only as extensions of his other-worldly choreographic pieces, but standalone pieces of foundational mid-century American electronic and experimental music.

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"Born in Southington, Connecticut in 1910, Nikolais’s early years and early career were in acting, music and puppetry. It was not until the late 1930s that he began his work as dancer/choreographer in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was commissioned by the Avery Memorial Theatre, a part of the Wadsworth Atheneum, to create an evening-length work to the music of Ernst Krenek. Previously his work and study as a pianist-organist found him accompanying silent films. This sort of accompaniment required from the musician not only a playing skill but also a versatility in improvisation, matching movement to sound, and evoking mood to situation.

Nik was drawn initially to dance by his involvement with the percussion scores used by the illustrious early twentieth century German dancer Mary Wigman. In trying to learn more about percussion, he was lured into dance class and thus his career began. His development of music and dance occurred simultaneously. His introduction to the twelve-tone technique opened his mind to the expanding areas of atonal music, and his dealing with music as sound per se. In 1948, after being appointed director of the Henry Street Playhouse in New York, Nikolais formed the Playhouse Dance Company, later known as the Nikolais Dance Theater, and began his aesthetic orientation toward dance as a study of motion. By the 1950s, he had ceased creating literal dances and began his explorations and eventual milieu as an abstractionist.

Sound became an important part of his abstract theatre. For his first dances, which involved his new thinking of dance as both a visual and kinetic art, he used live percussion scores in which he directed his dancers to play instruments of all nature. There was a combination of children’s toy instruments as well as harsh and resonant automobile brake drums, and other pitched auto parts which he also used to accompany classes. Once he installed his own tape recording machines, he quickly used the limited range these instruments provided in a new way, slowing and increasing speed and reversing sound. He also made the sounds adhere to the choreographic structure (not the other way around), thereby giving the dance its independence from the musical phrasing. But the real need remained: the search for new sound. Nik made a sound library, recording noises and percussion and vocal sounds, which the French aptly called musique concrète. Needless to say, he became a master at splicing bits and pieces.

From 1956 to 1962 Nikolais composed eleven major scores for his theatre pieces using such techniques. In 1963, James Seawright, who at the time was assisting Nik in his productions and also working at the Columbia-Princeton Center for Electronic Music, recorded a sound bank for the production Imago (1963). With this material, Nikolais created his first synthesizer score. Imago won the Paris Grand Prix in 1968 and launched the Nikolais Dance Theatre towards its national and primarily international acclaim.

During the same period, Seawright came to Nik and told him of a young man who had invented and constructed a simplified synthesizer and insisted that Nik visit the electronic fair currently being held in New York. Nik did so and met Robert Moog. He was completely taken by the new machine and after making some suggestions to Moog, (which Moog made), Nik bought the inventor’s first machine with the aid of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Moog himself was astonished by what his machine could produce for Nik. This machine was later acquired by the Museum of Musical Instruments at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor as the first Moog synthesizer. The Synclavier was Nik’s next source of sound and since the mid-1970s remained the major instrument in the Nikolais soundroom.

Alwin Nikolais has been honored and awarded throughout the world. He has received the French Legion of Honor, the Kennedy Center Honors, National Medal of the Arts, two Guggenheim Fellowships, as well as Mellon, Ford, and Rockefeller grants. He has been a recipient of NEA grants since 1966, been awarded five honorary doctorates, all for his remarkable achievements in Dance Theater. His genius has influenced several generations of artists."

—Murray Louis

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Two Swedes with a Moog each, locked into what sounds like a negotiation between melodic minimalism and pure synthesis drift. Malmberg’s Mother-32 threads repetitive figure-work while Möller’s DFAM adds percussive friction and unexpected timbral shifts—neither player seems interested in consensus. It’s less about modular showiness than the particular tension that emerges when two people aren’t quite playing the same composition.

Eric Malmberg: Moog mother 32

Ulf Möller: Moog DFAM.

Mastered by Daniel Westerlund

By 1980, Lennon had spent half a decade out of the spotlight raising his kid—a choice that itself felt radical in rock circles. Double Fantasy documents his attempt to re-enter the studio as a married man with something to prove, alternating his streamlined pop songs with Ono’s more abstract contributions. The result sits uncomfortably between comeback record and artistic statement, neither fully convincing. History remembers the album mostly as a footnote to tragedy, which is precisely why it deserves hearing on its own merits: a document of two artists at odds with their own mythology.

Double Fantasy is the fifth collaborative studio album by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, the seventh studio album released by John Lennon under his own name, and the final one before Lennon's death. Released in November 1980 on Geffen Records, the album marked Lennon's short-lived return to recording music full-time, following his five-year hiatus to raise his son Sean. Recording sessions took place at the Hit Factory in New York City between August and October 1980. The final album features songs from both Lennon and Ono, largely alternating between the two in its track listing. Other tracks recorded by Lennon from the sessions were compiled by Ono for release on Milk and Honey in 1984.

William S. Burroughs Recites Edgar Allan Poe’s The Mask Of The Red Death.

Crisci and Ruhig’s collaboration sits in that liminal space where post-industrial drone meets something almost devotional—synth tones that feel half-buried in tape hiss, stretched across stretches of nothing much at all. It’s the sound of waiting in a room you can’t quite leave, patient and slightly hypnotic rather than blissful despite the title. For those who’ve worn out their copies of Penderecki and found mainstream minimal too clean.

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I feel

strangely

normal.

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