Early Works Part 1
SUNY Binghamton Electronic Music Studio

RICHARD: These works are among the first electronic compositions I ever wrote; "The Sun-Dog Trail" is the very first. I composed (or "realized," as they used to say) all the pieces in this group at the SUNY Binghamton Electronic Music Studio, where I studied music from 1971 to 1973. The studio was well-equipped with a Moog Model IIIC synthesizer, two keyboards, a ribbon controller, 4-channel monitoring, and (at the time) top-of-the-line Scully 4-track, 2-track, and mono tape decks.

The last piece I wrote at Binghamton, "Dark Chambers" (which I didn't include here because it's a 4-channel work for which I currently have no digital mixdown), was my first One Sound composition, and the first to use only sine waves as its sound source.

Note: Richard encoded all the music tracks in stereo as high-quality MP3s. Just click on each track name to play it in your browser. You'll need to have an appropriate MP3 player for your system installed to hear them.

*If we liked a sound we would play it for an hour, didn't matter how many repetitions it went through. I think there were times when we found this type of stillness in the center of repeated sound. This was something that came through in Richard's work and I truly loved to hear it. It was magic, it was magic being there in the center of that. — Guitarist Jim Sande on playing with Richard.

MUSIC:  Early Works │ Walking Slowly Backwards │ ROMworks │ Five Nocturnes │ WDFH August 25, 2005 │ KymaWorks │ BuchlaWorks