Music for New String Instruments, composed and performed by Allan Bryant. A pioneer of underground American electronic music, Bryant helped push the boundaries as a founder member of Musica Elettronica Viva alongside Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum. Following his departure in 1968 he continued to independently compose, record, and archive live vintage MEV sets on his own IRML imprint until his death in 2019. During a period in the early to mid 1970s, Bryant channelled his obsession with self-made instrumentation and raw electricity into the solo works collected here on Space Guitars - originally released on the CRI label in 1977 it’s now reissued on vinyl for the first time, revised and expanded on this 2LP.

"One way to find new ideas and to make music a little different from anyone else's, is to make your own instruments. They automatically supply you with sounds and techniques you probably never could have imagined otherwise. The new instruments I use in Space Guitars produce unusual virtuoso effects that are sometimes similar to those of electronic music. They are not electronic instruments however. Aside from amplification, there are no electronics used to produce or modify the sound, and there is no tape manipulation. They might be called "bridge" instruments — something between the traditional manual ones and new electronic ones. They are amplified string instruments, each constructed in a different manner in order to make use of varying new and unusual techniques, sounds, and effects.

"That many of these effects sound electronic is probably due to the fact that I made these instruments originally for concerts that were billed as Musica Elettronica Viva (Live Electronic Music). In these concerts we purposely created electronic sounding music even when we used normal instruments. But for the last few decades a great deal of music, both pop and serious, has been electronic influenced. For serious music, the electronic influence has provided a valuable exit from '12-tone alley.' There's an entire new organisation and logic made possible with these new sounds. I consider the orchestral music of Penderecki and 2001-Ligeti to be striking examples of this; there are strange new electronic influenced effects and combinations, including blocks of sound that are held for a long time or that slide in different directions, often with a lot of internal movement, with irregular rhythms, tremolos, trills, bubbling, bouncing, waving, wobbling, etc.

"This list of effects can give some impression of what these pieces are like. Also, the titles give some clue since they are an attempt to match the sound of the pieces as well as possible with some external sound or program. The titles make space-impressionistic music out of what was originally written as just abstract music, but who knows whether something similar wasn't in my subconscious at the time? From working at Cape Canaveral for a year, I certainly have the magnificent sound of a rocket take-off still in my ears. An earlier piece in this series, Pitch Out, has a beginning that I only recognized later as an attempt to imitate that sound. I wonder how far I can go in equating titles with just finding out what was supposedly there in intent all the time? Whatever the case, the listener is free and welcome to create his or her own titles if they have more suggestive meaning." - Allan Bryant