Flight of the Atom Bee photo by Luciano and Mira Donato, Italy www.mirabiliaimages.com
1. The Big Shimmer 7:38
2. Wild Pink Yonder 4:58
3. Flight of the Atom Bee 9:28
4. [Hydraulic] Serenity Applicator 4:52
5. March of the Molecules 5:25
6. The Blue Man Wept 6:59
7. World’s Night 5:19
8. When We Were Machines 7:52
9. Fountain of You 4:16
Realizing that vast strides had been made in digital audio technology in the years since I originally recorded this song, I recently got out the old 1″ tape on which resides the original recording of the title piece of the cd, took it down to Wally Sound Studios in Oakland, redigitized the audio and took the resultant audio file to Oakland Wunderkind Charles Stella, who also mixed and mastered my “Pop Down The Years” and “the seasons” cds, and had Charles apply his advanced noise-reduction magic to the track.
I then had Thomas Dimuzio, well-known in the avant-garde music world, remaster all the songs off this strange and beautiful work, unique in the canon of analog synthesis, “Flight of the Atom Bee.” Click here for the story about the actual creation of the title song, “Flight of the Atom Bee.”
Some years ago, I released a version of the cd with my novel, “Flapping,” with some songs deleted and others added from what is now the “Deus Sex Machina” cd, which I also recently had Thomas remaster and release, but this songlist is the original “Flight of the Atom Bee.” It had been my intention to make the cd more “commercial” with the subtraction of some songs and the addition of others. As friend and collaborator Shoji Kameda, of the On Ensemble and Hiroshima, kindly pointed out, there really is no way to make “Flight of the Atom Bee” commercial.
It is, nonetheless, a work very near and dear to my heart. Very electronic. My first attempts and merging the orchestral and the electronic into a modern classical idiom, electronic pop for the ages.
Listen to three songs (The Big Shimmer, Flight of the Atom Bee, and Wild Pink Yonder) from “Flight of the Atom Bee” on MySpace.
Get “Flight of the Atom Bee” on iTunes.
The Serge modular system I used for Flight of the Atom Bee.
Unfortunately, this is not the photograph of the Bee patch itself: there were five positions across several panels where banana cables were piggy-backed five-high, routing control voltages hither, thither and yon. And, of course, many more spots where plugs were stacked two-, three-, or four-high, a symphony of brightly colored spaghetti strands.
For a more detailed description of the constuction of the bee, bird, bee-thought sounds, the drone, etc., please continue reading. But first ….
Ubi Mel Ibi Apes, along with my composition 3 seconds before Maia smiled, another song built around unique analog sounds from the Serge, are in the permanent collection of the SF Museum of Modern Art, as part of Glenn McKay’s lightshow installation, Altered States. What does this mean? It means I got my name on a wall not in a public restroom for once.
The three blue panels on the left were built by Roy Sablosky at CalArts in the late 1970’s. None of the modules had any markings whatsoever, although ins, outs, CV, and audio were color-coded. {This was the era where a squadron of guerilla synthfreaks surreptiously comandeered part of a building on campus to create a de facto serge assembly plant. “Built by bohemians on speed for bohemians on speed,” as Sound Transform Systems mastermind Rex Probe put it in his inimicable delicate style.}
Roy, and collaborator Greg Jones, both students of Mort Subotnick, performed selections from their landmark electronic album No Imagination at the Savoy Tivoli in San Fracisco’s North Beach in the very early eighties using the blue and four-panel Serge systems. When they performed a piece of Roy’s, Forced – possibly the most acoustically violent piece of pulsed and gated white noise ever created- at top volume, the punk rockers in the audience went berserk and started screaming, pelting them with projectiles of various mass. It was not pretty. To be honest, I could empathize with the audience in this case. Forced was a brutal piece of music, an ear-shattering sonic onslaught.
The beauty of the Serge systems is the great range of sonic texture, color, and expression one can coax from the open architecture.
In the case of The Flight of the Atom Bee, the Analog Shift Register module in the center blue panel actually engendered the the whole piece. I was experimenting with it, sending bucket-brigade control voltages to an oscillator, timing pulse generated by the TR-606 drum machine (on the right of the picture) and achieved, after a time, the bee-thought cascading counterpoint which opens the song. I called Jeffrey McEachin, then known as mr808 on the Analogue Heaven mailing list, and played it for him over the phone. His response after a moment:
—It needs a space cricket sound to go with it.
I got off the phone and fiddled around or a while, unable to construct a cricket sound to my liking. And suddenly, the thought popped in my head: No, it needs a bee sound. I will always be grateful for mr808 putting me on the insectoid path to satori. I played electron slides-and-ladders for the next week to create the sonic Bee and other audio components for the piece.
In the picture above, we have (in the foreground) a Serge Touch Keyboard and a custom panel of oscillators and modifiers built by Rex Probe and crew at Sound Transform Systems in Oakland. I used the TKB for voltages to micro-tune the drone and also the filter cutoff and resonance for Atom Bee. On the panel behind the TKB I used the New Timbral Oscillator in conjunction with a Precision VC Oscillator to create the birdy sounds – modified only by a Roland Space Echo on the recording.
The Bee was comprised of three separate sounds: the buzzing of the wings, the whoosh as the bee banks left and right, and the slightly exaggerated, distorted wing-stress sound as wingtip vortices create momentary turbulence.
The four-panel box in the back was built by Serge Tcherepnin himself in the mid-seventies. On a later post, we will take a closer look at the panels, including the brown resin he poured over all the circuitry inside to protect his designs from copycats.
It was at one time in the experimental music department at Mills College in Oakland, Ca. They paid composer Greg Jones with as payment for writing a manual for their new Serge system. He paid me with it for designing a new logo for his company.
This box was the core of the Bee. The basic buzz came from one of the three old oscillators in the upper-left panel. A simple saw-tooth, modulated slightly to round-out the waveform with a rising and falling control voltage. There was also, the obvious rising and falling pitch generated by the Dual-Slope Generator over on the right. The DSG also triggered the Stepped-Function module to send out another voltage to raise and lower the over-all pitch of the buzzing bee, in steps, of course.
The distorted wing-stress sounds were made with the Triple-Wave Shaper and mixed in with VC Gates.
The Whoosh was filtered white-noise and the phase-shifter, which Greg Jones pulled out of a Mutron guitar pedal and kludged into the panel on the lower right. Also gated.
These three elements were mixed and sent out in a mono feed to another Roland Spaced Echo. 
Timing pulses all generated by the Roland TR-606, which can be heard on the song. The only other sound on the song was the chord, which was made by a Roland JX-8P with the keys taped down and fed into the mixing board.
The whole Bee patch ran non-stop for over two months in the Love Shack studio. I couldn’t turn the synths off because I was afraid that if any components cooled, it would affect tone, or pitch, or timbre. Finally, hearing the Fear in my voice, mr808 flew down from Portland and helped me record the song. He also recorded a 26 minute mix which I will post at a later date, with his permission.
Recording of Flight of the Atom Bee was one live pass, mixed on the fly, using a noisy old Soundcraft mixer that had been used at Eli’s Mile High Club, a blues institution, in Oakland for many years. I hesitate to think how much whiskey and cigaret smoke adorned the circuitry of that board. We could only get one mono channel out in to this old Otari 8-track 1″ analog tape system, and even that was so noisy we had to do massive noise reduction when putting the cd together.
Pictured above: the bee patch. Sorry it isn’t very clear.
I am happy to share with you the final art for the long-awaited digital release of the analog classic “Flight of the Atom Bee.” I will be posting some articles about some of the vintage analog instruments used on the cd, as well as some words about the songs themselves, over the next month.
I found this image on the website Mirabilia Images. The utterly charming couple, Luciano and Mira, whom I assume to be residing in Italy, do some wonderful work: perfectly matched, in my opinion to the music found on “Flight of the Atom Bee:” beautiful, strange, sexy, and otherworldly. I was so happy when I found the site.
I wrote to them about licensing an image, along with a link to the music and they wrote back with a yes, and very complimentary words about the cd, which I of course appreciate. So we came to an agreement on the license and they sent me the image and I spent some time putting in the Atom Bee and … here we are!
CD Master and artwork go off to the distribution center next week, to become available online everywhere within the next few weeks.
Mark Tucker
Fame Magazine
I reviewed Knox Bronson’s Pop Down the Years a little while back (here) and Seasons has followed with gratifying swiftness but also with an almost shockingly rapid maturation. Completely instrumental in a slow languid pace that urges the listener to relax and luxuriate, where Pop was quirky, interesting, and prog-oriented, Seasons is chambery in the Impressionist sense with tantalizing echoes of Eno (Summer of ‘68 uses the intriguing slow hooning of Discreet Music), Peter Baumann (ca Transharmonic Nights), Peter Michael Hamel, a tranked-out Terry Riley, and the more sensual of the electronicists.
The disc contains just four long songs for an hour’s submersion in
intelligent, slow, spare processionals and ambiences. Michael Hoenig
peeks out occasionally from Autumnal Sun, though the estimable German
never wrote like Bronson does, slowly shifting in sound fields,
coloration, and environmental palette. The attention to perfection here
is bracing, resulting in a piece of spacey furniture music, high art
wanting for nothing, content to take its time in seeping through the
speakers and into cerebellums. Mix the hedonism of the Ibiza crowd with
the seriousness of old Brit/Kraut ventures, then add a sprinkling of
the silently uncanny ideas of Vidna Obmana, and you have a starting
point.
Despite the fact that the quartet of songs was composed during a
dark period in the writer’s life, every minute of Seasons sparkles.
Even the moody segments have a shine and glow lifting them above the
melancholy, indicative of the redemption art brings. The entire
enterprise is pensive but never existentialist, remarkably zen in many
ways, unattached to judgementalism, formula, and tradition. A goodly
portion of the entirety is Debussy-esque, borrowing heavily from tone
poem concepts for heady textures and gestures nailing down authenticity
in genteel certainties alongside intriguing ambiguity. Pore over the
progressive, electronica, and ambient catalogues as you will, you’re
not likely to find very many releases to stand with this one.