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Late last year New World Records issued a fascinating document of the work of the League of Automatic Music Composers, a Bay Area group that in the late 70s and early 80s became one of the first to use computers as real-time musical instruments. Few people have ever heard the brazenly experimental material produced by the LAMC–a group of largely self-taught tech geeks that included John Bischoff (pictured), Jim Horton, and Tim Perkis–but their canny exploitation of early microcomputers like the KIM-1 (which went for around $250 when it was introduced in 1976 and operated with a mere 1 K of user RAM) presaged whole worlds of music making that would open up in the decades to come. They formed an interactive band of networked microcomputers, wiring three or four separate machines to one another to produce spastic, unpredictable, and deliberately raw blasts of synthetic blubbering, squealing, squelching, and humming.

“A typical League session would consist of setting up our computer systems in a living room and laboriously connecting them together. With wires running everywhere and our computer programs finally debugged, after several hours we would eventually get the system up and musically running. Then we would play, tuning our systems and listening intently as our machines interacted. When surprising new areas of musicality appeared, we took notes on the parameter settings of our individual programs with the hope that recalling those settings in concert would yield similar exciting results.”

Bischoff, currently teaching music at Mills College in Oakland, has produced a small but strong body of solo work since the dissolution of the LAMC. His most recent album, Aperture (23five, 2003), uses current software (namely the fairly ubiquitous Max/MSP), but spontaneity and chance remain vital components of his music–the album was recorded in real time, and there are no overdubs. A beautiful piece like “Piano 7hz” uses piano notes as source material, but the sustained notes from the keyboard are not only processed but seem to be triggering other elusive sounds–pings, ringing bells, water drips. I won’t pretend to know how all this stuff works, but I can say that the results can easily be appreciated without such knowledge. On Saturday night Bischoff gives a rare local concert at Lampo, where he’ll perform four recent pieces.