I was interested to read this article in Wired about some very obscure 70s electronic music that underscored a sequence in the movie The Hunger Games.
It's an amazing 9 minute experimental drone piece by (to me at least) an unknown composer called Laurie Spiegel who produced it in her apartment in Manhattan. Unfortunately it is not on the soundtrack album to the movie (a whole other story!). I was curious and found a bit more on YouTube such as this (wonderfully entitled "Improvisations on a Concerto Generator").
I think that it'll be worth delving deeper. Incidentally her ancient-looking personal website contains a lot of conceptual stuff about her work AND this pretty great tribute from the rather better known experimental composer Terry Riley, who described music as - "Some pretty amazing heartfelt molecular inner-happening soundscape soul journeys" (molecular inner-happening soundscape soul journeys!!! wow - must remember that the next time someone asks me why I seem to enjoy listening to lengthy atonal noise pieces). It's always interesting coming across these female pioneers of experimental electronic music (especially because the genre in it's modern guise is a mainly male domain) and along with Laurie Spiegel I recently stumbled upon the work of another female artiste, Suzanne Ciani who is actually quite a successful composer for film and TV (she has been nominated for Grammys numerous times). Turns out a lot of her early work was quite "out there" and a decent compilation of her more experimental electronic compositions has just been issued on the ever-reliable Finders Keepers records. Here's a track by her off that album...and like the Spiegel track in the Hunger Games this is also a lengthy "tone" piece ... very hypnotic and beautifully textured.
It'd be stretching it to say that this hitherto obscure female aspect to early electronic music reveals a whole new layer to the genre but it certainly adds an interesting counterbalance to the "men-in-labs" narrative that usually springs to mind. I think it probably suggests that there is a whole lot more out there to discover in terms of artists and the styles of music they were writing and producing with the new sound technologies which were being invented throughout the 20th C. So good news for record crate-diggers everywhere. The gems are still out there (in all genres).
