Martin Bartlett - Muscle Music

Martin Bartlett - Anecdotal Electronics: Live experiments & other recordings (ALE009)
Release date: April 26th, 2019
Vinyl: http://bit.ly/MartinBartlettALE009
CD: http://bit.ly/MartinBartlettALE010
SHOP: https://arclighteditions.bigcartel.com/

Martin Bartlett should be a familiar name. As well as working with a who’s who of electronic music, he was an inspiring
His music is distinctive for its warmth and fleshiness, for taking joy from the incidental and anecdotal, and it remains a characterful counterpoint to much contemporary electronic music. It is his preoccupation with building aleatoric elements into electronic music that distinguishes his work, and he devised elegant and open interactions for instrumental performers and computer-controlled synthesizers. This included building his own electronic devices, and extensive work on the Buchla 400.
He worked with or studied under Pauline Oliveros, John Cage, and David Tudor, and collaborated extensively with Don Buchla, and some of their live performances are included on the LP Anecdotal Electronics. He also studied Carnatic vocal music with V. Lakshminarayana Iyer in Madras and then on to Burma, Thailand, and Indonesia where he studied shadow theatre. He studied South Asian music with Pandit Pran Nath, gamelan with K.R.T. Wasitidipuro. He was particularly interested in the Javanese gamelan, which led to him founding the Vancouver Community Gamelan in 1986.
His performances were often collaborative – for the Western Front’s second anniversary in 1975 he devised the four-channel piece One Piece for Everyone, a composition where he prepared and cooked a cauliflower curry on a table connected to a synthesizer he had built while reading from texts on food. When the curry was cooked, the piece ended, and everyone was fed.
Bartlett was a prolific writer, and he expresses himself in fresh, lucid, and wonderfully descriptive prose, offering clear thinking on social aspects of electronic music performance; on the barriers between the performer and the ‘black box’ and on possibilities for organic systems in electronic music. He also wrote accounts of his sailing trips, a treatise on performance practices, and technical academic articles on the systems he built, along with the incandescent manifesto-like piece Electronic Recalcitrant (which forms the cover artwork for Anecdotal Electronics), in which he hoped that electronic music would be imbued with “organic codes of growth and metamorphosis” so that he could
“pluck elegant and fleshy electronic sound fish from the frothy algorithmic sea of possibilities”.
It is unclear why Bartlett’s work remains unknown. Perhaps it is because it remained largely inside the academy. Perhaps his commitment to live performance and community activity means it was more transient than the work of others. Perhaps his openness about his sexuality played a part in his music not receiving much recognition – one can only speculate. But correspondence in his archive shows that rejection and general lack of interest from labels was a source of great personal discontent, leading to Bartlett working again with the Western Front to release his final opus Pythagoras’ Ghost shortly before his death.
Bartlett died young, of AIDS-related causes, in 1993, but his music remains a rich source of inspiration and is characterized by an irresistible and unselfconscious charm that renders his sound unique.

Credits
Compiled and edited by Luke Fowler with Jennifer Lucy Allan. Artwork by DR.ME.
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.