Orange Planet, by Ron Levy

Orange Planet

by Ron Levy

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Orange Planet 23:36

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about

Orange Planet was created in Spring 1984 at the UCLA Electronic Music Studio. The creation of this piece was truly spontaneous; I sat down at the keyboard, started improvising, and several hours later emerged with a magical, uncategorizable master tape.

The process began as an improvisation performed on the New England Digital Synclavier Synthesizer and recorded to a Stephens 8-track recorder running 2-inch Ampex tape at 30 ips. The tape was then played back at half-speed, it's signal routed to a cluster of high-frequency Moog oscillators. (The result resembles white noise but is actually a cluster of pitches from the oscillators being disrupted through frequency modulation by the audio signal coming from the recorded "organ" improvisation. You can hear this relationship culminate in an open fifth interval near the piece's apotheosis.)

A solo part was then improvised on the eMu modular synthesizer. The part began as a flute-like song, but by the end of the twenty minutes, manipulations of various knobs on the eMu had resulted in a gong-like sound repeating at regular intervals. This gong-like event was then re-recorded "as is" onto a separate track from the beginning. It runs through the entire piece, finally running into itself as the piece winds down.

For a long time, I referred to it as "The Spacey Piece", finally giving it the name, "Utah", since it drew much of its inspiration from a recent camping trip to Zion National Park and to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. But eventually I settled on "Orange Planet" as a more apt title – mostly inspired by the cover art.

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