Our listening habits have changed so much since the creation of these pioneering electronic works, spanning 1960 to 1970, that the static harmonies and synthesized drone of Harold Budd’s The Oak of the Golden Dreams might make your finger itch for your CD player’s fast forward button. But these reissues from Advance Recordings LPs (credit is due to Advance’s guardian Gino Robair) offer a splendid introduction to Richard Maxfield, a proto-minimalist cult figure who died following a fall from a window at the age of 42. Particularly appealing are Maxfield’s 1963 Bacchanale, a wild “concrète” collage mixing folk material with Greenwich Village jazz and underwater clarinet, and the 1961 Piano Concert for David Tudor, another collage in which the avant-garde pianist plays only on the strings, scrapes them with chains, spins gyroscopes on them, and showers them with tiddly-wink disks. Maxfield’s fuzzy warble tones and Budd’s 1970 Buchla Box improvisations remind us how early minimalism, which astonished us less than 30 years ago, already sounds nostalgic. [10/30/1999]
