condition (record/cover): NM / EX

The first release on Nonesuch Digital, the label's short-lived audiophile imprint, recorded direct-to-digital and pressed with the new format's premium-quality lacquer cuts. A Sky of Cloudless Sulphur (1978), Side A, is fully electronic, realised on the Buchla 200 Series in Subotnick's CalArts studio: roughly fifteen minutes built around the kind of long pulse-driven evolution that Silver Apples had introduced thirteen years earlier, but with the harmonic sophistication of late-seventies Buchla programming. The title comes from a phrase in Shelley's Adonais.

Side B is After the Butterfly (1979), one of Subotnick's first "ghost score" pieces: trumpeter Mario Guarneri plays against a pre-recorded tape that responds to his live amplified signal via voltage-controlled processing in real time. CalArts Twentieth Century Players ensemble, conducted by Subotnick. Engineer Tom Steenland. After the Butterfly is the work that signalled Subotnick's move from pure-tape composition to the live-electronic processing that defined his work for the next decade.