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445,329 Albums + 604,843 Individual Songs
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Suzanne Ciani - Flowers Of Evil (1969) FULL ALBUM
Playing Next: The Anita Kerr Singers āā Spend This Holiday With Me 1969 (full album)
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Finders Keepers Records āā FKR099LP (UK, 2019)
https://www.discogs.com/Suzanne-Ciani-Flowers-Of-Evil-/release/13759420
PURCHASE: https://bit.ly/2KBZ5pc
00:00 A1. Flowers Of Evil - Based On The Poem ĆlĆ©vation By Charles Baudelaire
14:08 B1. Glass Houses
19:05 B2. Token Spokes, Pt.1
21:22 B3. Token Spokes, Pt.2
As a genuine vanguard of electronic music composition at the forefront of the modular synthesiser revolution in the late 1960s, Suzanne Cianiās forward-thinking approach to new music would rarely look to the past for inspiration, which makes this unheard composition from 1969 a rare exception to the collective futurist vision of Ciani and synthesiser designer Don Buchla. In choosing to adapt the controversial prose of French poet Charles Baudelaire, Suzanne would join the ranks of ongoing generations of pioneering musicians like Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Serge Gainsbourg, Etron Fou Leloublan, Celtic Frost and Marc Almond (not forgetting Star Trekās William Shatner!), all equally inspired by the 19th century writerās works of āmodernitĆ©ā (modernity), a self-coined term dedicated to capturing the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, best exemplified in his symbolic, erotic and macabre ode to Parisian industrialisation, Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers Of Evil).
In her varied career that would combine art gallery installations, major film soundtrackings and commissions for Atari, Suzanne Cianiās earliest experiments remain some of her most challenging, beguiling and timelessā¦ Flowers Of Evil ticks all the above boxes and flicks switches that would power-up a new uncharted universe of her own musical modernitĆ©. For the many enthusiasts that have already drawn the parallels between Baudelaireās writings and experimental/ electronic music (a relationship rivalled only by the likes of J. G. Ballard and Aldous Huxley) some might instantly recognise an unconscious sistership between this recording and another 1969 electronic adaptation of Flowers Of Evil by celebrated female electronic composer Ruth White. An interesting distinction of Whiteās excellent version of Flowers Of Evil (released via Limelight records, home to the likes of Fifty Foot Hose and Paul Bley) is that its dark tone generation and vocal manipulation was created with a Moog synthesiser, the commercially triumphant rival to Suzanne and Donās Buchla Systems (Buchla and Moogās historic, simultaneous, neck-and-neck synth developments are well documented.) The fact that Cianiās version was never intended for commercial release (not unlike her 1975 Buchla concerts, which could easily have taken Morton Subotnickās Bull by the horns!) is also poetically reflective of the nature of Ciani and Buchlaās alternative perspective. The choice to present this extract from Flowers Of Evil in its intended French language further distances Cianiās faithful reaction from some of its better-known variations. Having attempted to voice the poem herself, the multilingual Italian-American composerās French accent did not meet her own standards, resulting in the request for a fellow unnamed French student who lived on campus at Mills College in Oakland to accurately verbalise the section of Baudelaireās collection entitled ĆlĆ©vation.
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