Crystal World collects the electronic trilogy that the German composer and pianist Michael Obst wrote between 1983 and 1986, with the Intermède that belongs to it. All four pieces were conceived as quadraphonic electronic music and were made in studios in Cologne, Stockholm and Paris. Asian percussion, synthetic voices and transformed attacks are their material.

Obst was born in Frankfurt in 1955. He studied piano with Alfons Kontarsky and Aloys Kontarsky in Cologne, and composition with H. U. Humpert at the Studio for Electronic Music of the Cologne Academy of Music. From 1981 to 1991 he was pianist and founding member of Ensemble Modern, and from 1986 to 1989 he also performed with Karlheinz Stockhausen. He was invited to work at EMS in Stockholm, at IRCAM, at the SWF Strobel foundation in Freiburg and at the WDR electronic studio in Cologne. The CD was produced by Obst in the digital studio audiorent in Recklinghausen, with Stephan Behrens as engineer.

Crystal World I (1983-85), made at the electronic studio of the Cologne conservatory, derives its processes from graphic patterns combined with sounds of Asian percussion. Planes of sound stand against complex, randomly produced point-clusters, and the metallic timbres grow brighter from beginning to end. Crystal World II - Chorale (1984) was realised at EMS Stockholm with CHANT, software developed at IRCAM to imitate the human voice. Its percussion sounds imitate the glottis. Crystal World III (1985-86), commissioned by IRCAM and the Ensemble InterContemporain, sets a female voice against transformed percussion, with warmth and cold as dimensions of the form.

The trilogy was heard first at Bourges (part I in 1985, part III in 1986) and in Cologne in 1987. Its rhythm, especially in the third part, is built on the original attacks of the instruments. The disc belongs to Digital Music Digital, the CD series that Johannes Goebel initiated with Wergo in 1986, among the first to use the new medium for digital music.

CD, Wergo WER 2011-50, first issued in 1987; Discogs lists this barcoded version as a reissue. Published by Breitkopf & Härtel. Total time 47 minutes 18 seconds.