Michael Czajkowski

Nicely timed replication of this 1969 Vanguard “Cardinal” series LP, offering a pair of side-length “Automatic” Buchla pieces by Composer / Producer Michael Czajkowski - then and now known mostly in music circles for his odd, post-production contributions to Buffy Saint-Marie’s “Illuminations” LP.

Recorded at NYU’s famed Intermedia Center - see Charlemagne Palestine’s 60s Electronic Music, Morton Subotnick’s “Silver Apples” - this one falls squarely into the “hands-off” master-patch canon of synthesizer music - Douglas Leedy’s “Entropical Paradise,” George Harrison's “Electronic Sound.” Using a stereo-panning “Groove” as something of a leitmotif throughout, Czajowski introduces a series of alternatingly dense / sparse patterns into the fray, all bathed in the Buchla’s trademark “Hot” spring reverb. Even amidst the second side’s floating filter-blobs, there’s always a rhythmic underpinning that comes & goes, sometimes only as a master-clock click, but the re-appearing as crude drum-machine lineage patterns and stroboscopic filigree.

One of the better recent C.P. titles for the “Synth-Mafioso” set - way more tapped-in to current sensibilities than anything Subotnick ever wrested from the early Buchla beasts.