Journalists, musicologists, and historians alike are quite fond of the concept of the music scene. Scenes are a helpful prop, a methodical way of connecting artists’ individual stories into remarkable overarching narratives. But the process of envisioning an artistic milieu implies a degree of apophenia, of establishing relevant connections even when, in truth, they might be tentative or absent, conceived post-hoc and without recognition from the scene’s participants. Investigations such as documentarian Bill Perrine’s dive into the “radical, experimental, & irrelevant music” from 1970s San Diego, then, become extremely delicate endeavours, careful to balance the desire to tell intriguing stories with the sometimes dry reality of documented histories.
In his 2023 book Alien Territory, Perrine posits a view of San Diego’s 1970s scene as awakened by the strong influence of Harry Partch after his relocation to Southern California in 1964, and subsequently shaped by the University Of California, San Diego’s forward-looking music department. In reality, Partch’s contributions were limited in time and breadth and many of the musicians created their most compelling works outside UCSD walls.
Yet, even in that short period, the US composer and builder had imprinted himself in San Diego’s terroir, allowing the city’s musical landscape to blossom into a fertile ground for experiments of numerous artists – known and unknown, local and visiting, belonging to both UCSD and non-academic undergrounds. Perrine appears studious, honest, and enthusiastic in his approach to this topic, quickly expanding focus from Partch to a cast of disparate musicians – Pauline Oliveros, Robert Erickson, Boyd Rice, and Robert Turman, among many others – while exploring their works through detailed histories, anecdotes, and reviews.
Born from a meeting between Perrine and Nyahh Records label head Willie Stewart and sourced from UCSD’s archives, The Alien Territory Archives compiles previously unreleased works by artists belonging to the 1970s San Diego scene. The four CDs feature several inclusions that, not without a sense of thrill, expand the canons of familiar composers, sometimes in unexpected directions. Like the book it accompanies, this set of music is scholarly, enthralling, and exhaustive.
The usual suspects part of the repertoire includes two mystical sounding pieces that Harry Partch seemingly plucked from classical antiquity, ‘Two Studies On Ancient Greek Scales’ (1968) and ‘Two Duets From And On The Seventh Day Petals Fell In Petaluma’ (1968); the harrowing, carnivalesque microtonal miniature ‘Scalatron Music’ (1981) by San Diego native Diamanda Galás, an announcement of the radical things that were yet to come on her 1982 album Litanies Of Satan; Kenneth Gaburo’s otherworldly choral work ‘Ringings’ (1976); and Warren Burt, Pauline Oliveros, and Reinhard Berg’s intricate ‘Phrases Please, Or My Name Is Country And Western Oatmeal, Boys And Girls’ (1972), which grows into a delightfully dissonant accordion recital.
While Perrin had already prepared a playlist to accompany an excerpt from his book for tQ, what sets this compilation apart is its intent in unearthing even stranger experiments, impossible-to-come-by compositions, and works by otherwise under-recognised artists. Here, David Dunn features with two abstract, noisy drones, ‘Arroyo’ (1975) and ‘Oracles (Paragraph 6)’ (1975), of which the latter gestures towards the composer’s sound ecologist practice by layering the crushing sound of ocean waves over the perpetual buzz of an alarm-like frequency. Warren Burt’s ‘For Charlemagne Palestine’ (1973) expands and contracts a saturated and impossibly dense texture, making it glow with golden overtones. An unruly saxophone turns Citizen’s Band’s ‘Untitled Music From Citizen’s Band’ (1978) into a proper free jazz/improv romp. Meanwhile, Dary John Mizelle’s ‘Polyphonies II’ (1973) and Ernie Morgan’s ‘Mono-Melodies 1’ and ‘Buchla Bounce’ are what they say on the tin: explorations of, at the time, still emerging possibilities of synthesizers.
The choice of segmenting the cuts into discs based on style (Drones & Tape, Ensemble, Synthesizers, and Vocals) to “smooth out the listener experience and impose a little structure” is the only questionable aspect of the compilation. This is experimental music, after all, and a more daring sequencing would have been preferred. However, even in its current form, The Alien Territory Archives is an essential document of an intriguing period in the history of music and a treasure trove of strange, atemporal sonic expressions, which to this day sound invigorating and fresh.
