Morton Subotnick – Touch (1969)

In a recent post, I mentioned that I love Subotnick’s first two Buchla Box pieces, Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) and The Wild Bull (1968), but have found what I’ve heard of his later work timbrally thin and unsatisfying.  (Possible exception: Trembling (1983).)  Given that, it seemed like the obvious thing to do was to start at the beginning and see what he did immediately after those two early pieces.  Strangely, though, despite having been written only a year later and created using the same technology, Touch is already considerably colder in sound than its predecessors.  Admittedly, there are a few warm passages here and there, my favorite being one in which clipped syllables are filtered to sound like cut-up bits of speech.  And the piece does have other virtues, particularly its witty use of rhythm, from abrupt pulse shifts to stuttering polytempo grooves.  But it never even approaches the ecstatic joy of its two predecessors, especially the incredible robot rave in the second half of Silver Apples — partially because, for the most part, Subotnik opts for the extremely unexpressive “plastic xylophone” sound that would take over the computer-music world about a decade and a half later.

Timbre isn’t the only problem, though.  I feel like there’s also something missing here on the conceptual level.  The piece has all sorts of interesting ideas and sounds in it:  allusions to African drumming and Balinese kecak, a passage that sounds like telephone button sounds having a party with a police siren, and an abrasive drone-shriek that comes out of nowhere.  But why are they all in one piece?  It’s certainly not clear to me after two listens.  I know I’m missing some of the piece’s content because I’m listening to a stereo reduction of something that was originally written to be projected quadrophonically — but I don’t think spatially redistributing the sounds would make the piece more coherent on a sound-material level.  I hate to say it, but maybe there’s a reason Subotnick is kind of a two-hit wonder.