Metal Drops brings together three electronic works by Michael Obst realised in the early 1980s: Inside (Infinite Chambers), Metal Drop Music and Ye-Na-Je. Schott describes all three as prize-winning, and the disc shows what a synthesizer studio of the time could do, from close imitations of violin or piano to sounds placed in spaces that do not exist.
Obst, born in Frankfurt am Main in 1955, studied piano with Alfons and Aloys Kontarsky at the Cologne Musikhochschule, passing his concert examination in 1982, and composition with Hans Ulrich Humpert in the Studio for Electronic Music of the Cologne Musikhochschule between 1979 and 1986. He was a founding member and pianist of Ensemble Modern from 1981 and later played synthesizer for Karlheinz Stockhausen in the Licht cycle. The first two pieces were realised in the Cologne studio, the third in cooperation with the IPEM studio in Ghent and Cologne. Obst produced the disc himself and supervised the Ghent sessions; Marcel Schmidt engineered in Cologne. The recordings date from 1983.
Inside (Infinite Chambers) is the main work, over 26 minutes long. Metal Drop Music, about eight minutes, is the short piece that gave the album its name. Ye-Na-Je, fourteen minutes, is the work made between Belgium and Germany. Across all three the synthesizer is used both to imitate acoustic instruments convincingly and to build timbres that have no acoustic model. According to IRCAM, Metal Drop Music and Ye-Na-Je were among the electronic works that won prizes at festivals such as Bourges and Varese. Critics heard in them a way of thinking instrumentally that was quite unusual in electronic music.
Obst also worked at the WDR electronic studio in Cologne, and his works have won numerous prizes at international composition competitions. From 1986 he gave more time to composition and less to the piano, and the studio work shaped his writing for instruments: he wanted to give them the expressive means of electroacoustic music, working on sound quality and spectra. Obst named the Berio of the 1960s and 1970s as a strong influence. Larger forms followed: Crystal World III for the tenth anniversary of IRCAM in Paris in 1987 and Miroirs at the Donaueschinger Musiktage in 1989. Then came a score for the complete version of Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse, nearly five hours long, in 1991, Diaphonia for orchestra, a Donaueschingen commission of 1994, and the chamber opera Solaris at the Munich Biennale in 1996. From 1997 he taught composition at the Franz Liszt music university in Weimar.
CD, Wergo SM 1043-2, a 1992 reissue of an album first published in 1984.
