Ornery Electronics

Subtitled : More Musique Concrete But This Time The Real Stuff

Please read this enlightening interview with Ilhan Mimaraglu to get an idea of his misanthropic bitterness. I suppose he's justified in being so cantankerous. After creating some of the most compelling and lovingly crafted electronic music of the last 40 years to little or no real acclaim he saw lesser avant composers (like that snake-oil salesman Subotnick for heavens sake!) become relatively famous. Subsequently he spent most of his life doing recording work for other people at Atlantic records. At least he had a modestly enjoyable job, I suppose.

I was introduced to the wonders of Ilhan by a bunch of weird-record lovers in Wollongong during the late 70s. Their favourites included Trout Mask Replica, Yma Sumac, Faust and Mr Mimaroglu. As long as you're not feeling paranoid, his pieces are the perfect accompaniement to a drugged night in: the lounge room seemed enormous with incongruous sound elements flitting in and out of range, heavy panning making your eyes water and some very, very soft sounds in the background suddenly appearing right in front of your nose. Listening to them whilst not heavily sedated was an almost equally thrilling experience. So it meets all the criteria of great music, then.

His first record was "Wings of the Delirious Demon" released in 1972 and, for the most part, it contains tracks that are created solely from the sounds of a single reeded instrument, pushed into strange shapes by tape manipulation, filters, oscillators and noise generators:

mp3: Provocations

"Coucou Bazar" from 1973 was electronic music for a Jean Dubuffet ballet. His style is firmly in place but, just like P16.D4. did (see below) , he also augmented it with drones to lovely effect (in fact, I really do adore a deep sonorous tone with electronics flitting about - very magical):

mp3: Fragmentation

1974's "Face The Windmills, Turn Left", like all these, was also on his own Finnadar label (on which he also released a lot of classy experimental jazz, btw). It doesn't veer from his trademark style but it seems even more lovingly constructed:

mp3: Prelude No 6

His works are hard to find on CD but you can buy some of his stuff here.

And read a little guff at the bottom of the page regarding the use of his name at the fabulous Mimaroglu Music.


In closing... I tried my darndest to imitate Ilhan when creating some of my own electronic pieces but failed miserably. I just loved melody, harmony and repetition too much for my mind to handle the complexities of this style. This glimpse does have some nice moments, though:

mp3 : High Righ