Track Listing

1. Touch, Pt. 1 - Morton Subotnick
2. Touch, Pt. 2 - Morton Subotnick
3. Jacob's Room, Pt. 1 - Erika Duke, Joan La Barbara, Morton Subotnick
4. Jacob's Room, Pt. 2 - Erika Duke, Joan La Barbara, Morton Subotnick

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #522948 in Music
• Released on: 1993-06-28

Customer Reviews

The Brilliant and the Annoying
Touch is an incredible piece of music, a brilliant construction of sounds from the Buchla Modular synth and a must listen for anyone even remotely interested in "electronic music". The palate of sounds are both electronic and organic sounding and are more mature than those on Wild Bull and Silver Apples, both ground-breaking albums in their own right.

Touch is the precursor of music to come from Mr. Subotnic. Four Butterfiles, Sidewinder, Until Spring (all sadly never release on CD) are all great works of electronica. Nobody does Subotnic better than Subotnic; his sense of timing, pace, dynamic, timbre and texture are at the top of the scale. So IMHO Touch being the only mid-late work avialable on CD is a must have. As stated in both of the previous reviews, one can ONLY wonder WHY once of his other CD's like Until Spring, Sky of Cloudless Sulpher, Four Butterfiles, ect was not the second selection for this CD.

I wish I could say something positive about Jacob's Room but I simply find it dry and sterile. It has none of the charm and organic qualities of his "early" works and leves me cold. It is actually kind of annoying to listen to. Bummer! So three stars are for the CD as a whole, (5) stars for Touch.

Touch, yes; Jacob, no
I have always been a Subotnick fan and was overjoyed when The Wild Bull and Silver Apples of the Moon appeared on CD. I was equally delighted to discover that Touch, another Subotnick favorite, was now available. Subotnick, like W. Carlos, has excellent taste in sound. Touch consequently exhibits sonic textures and contrasts that are still fresh, even after three decades and the digital revolution (despite what the CD label says, Touch is not computer music). Part II of Touch, however, still seems like record filler--everything Touch has to say it says in Part I. The piece has also suffered a bit in the transfer to CD. The smoothness the LP had is gone, one passage has been strangely distorted, and some annoying location modulation "ping-ponging" that was absent on the original album has been introduced. It's still enjoyable, though.

Jacob's room was an odd choice to pair with Touch; another Buchla work would have made a lot more sense. This composition, with its Yoko Ono-like vocalizations and cello/computer accompaniment that quickly degenerates into boring minimalism, strikes this listner as pretentious (it might have been saved by leaving out the spoken text). "Jacob" is simply too full of itself to enjoy, so the three stars I'm giving this CD are for "Touch".

Proof that intuition outshines intellect.
Herein lies a strange marriage. Touch, the 1969 daughter of two towering classics of analog electronic composition (Silver Apples of the Moon, 1967, and The Wild Bull, 1968), and a mid-80's pseudo-intellectual property composed for computer-assisted synthesis, voice and cello (an opera based loosely on a passage from a Virginia Woolf novel). The former, which could have more happily coexisted with another Subotnick Buchla 100 series analog synthesizer composition, is of lighter weight than its ancestors, possessing neither their breadth of emotion nor their range of compositional density. It favors a sparse landscape, which only rarely reaches that delicious polyrhythmic state where musical elements hurl you along seemingly random trajectories, neither clashing, nor coalescing, but somehow always moving you toward an uncertain future-a state which Subotnick's earlier works explored with madcap perfection. Still, Touch possesses Subotnick's superb sense of musical intuition. It remains an organic and original piece, even if it does not measure up to its immediate predecessors. Of the latter selection on this CD, I cannot be so kind. Subotnick's heavy emphasis on meandering, jerky, sixteenth note staccato phrases and annoyingly pretentious dramatic content in Jacob's Room drives this listener to absolute distraction. In the original liner notes of The Wild Bull, which derived its title from an ancient Sumerian poem, Subotnick states, "There was never an attempt to 'portray' the poem (I don't think music is about that)..." Well, he certainly abandoned that sentiment in the this 1986 composition. Not only does the soprano's recitation of the innocuous libretto become melodramatically inflamed, but the musical content quivers and distorts to echo her vocal gesticulations. There's nothing heart-felt about this bad boy: Jacob ought to have been locked in his room, never to see the light of day again. So . . . after listening to Jacob's Room, Touch sounds downright fabulous. One thumb up for the 60's and musical intuition, two thumbs down for the 80's and its inherent intellectual pretense.