The MiraculousOctober 2023Music
48. 1972-19, Valencia, California; New York City
Word count: 401
Paragraphs: 4
Born in France to a classical pianist from China and a Russian composer (the family later immigrates to the United States), a musician who has studied with some of Europe’s most experimental composers is hired to teach at a Southern California art school. Among both students and faculty in the school’s music department there is a great deal of interest composing with and for synthesizers, but while the school has several music studios that are equipped with state-of-the-art synthesizers, gaining access to the instruments is difficult. Because they are expensive and complex machines, to say nothing of being rather bulky, the synthesizers are kept in locked studios available only to faculty composers and a select group of students. The teacher and two students decide that there is only one way to transform this unacceptable situation: they will build their own synthesizers, and they will be affordable and portable. The first instrument gets built in the teacher’s home, but because there is so much demand, they soon set up a kind of guerilla assembly line at their school, selling kits that the buyers have to help assemble.
After earning his MFA, one of two the student “assistants” moves to New York City, taking a synthesizer with him. There, he answers an ad in the Village Voice: “Drummer Wanted: Detroit raunch schooled preferred. Must be fast, tight, and tasteless” and soon finds himself playing in a chaotic rock band. In the few recordings that have survived one is subjected to waves of guitar sludge, strangled vocals, random noises (one song features a dentist’s drill) and weird synthesizer sounds. The synthesizer expert, whose later career would find him writing comedy for a big network TV show and penning an advice column for the New York Times, recruits an art-school friend who supplements his viola playing with the chatter and static from several police radios clipped to his waist. After five live shows around New York and a profound lack of interest from record labels, the group breaks up. It’s possible that the band’s name, which references an infamous political murder, contributes to their lack of success, but their real problem is that they are too far ahead of their time.
(Serge Tcherepnin, Randy Cohen, Rich Gold, Robin Hall, Chris Gray, Steve Barth, Boris Policeband a.k.a. Boris Pearlman, a.k.a. Mark Perlman, George Scott)
Raphael Rubinstein is the New York-based author of The Miraculous (Paper Monument, 2014) and A Geniza (Granary Books, 2015). Excerpts from his recently completed book Libraries of Sand about the Jewish-Egyptian writer Edmond Jabès have appeared in Bomb, The Fortnightly Review and 3:AM Magazine. In January 2023, Bloomsbury Academic will publish a collection of his writing titled Negative Work: The Turn to Provisionality in Contemporary Art. Since 2008 he has been Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Houston School of Art.