Tod Dockstader Organized Sound: Drone; Two Fragments From Apocalypse; Water Music

Tod Dockstader was born in 1932 in St.Paul, Minnesota. In 1955 moved to Hollywood to work as an apprentice film editor, cutting picture and sound for animated cartoons including “Mr.Magoo”. Dockstader became a self-taught sound engineer and sound effects specialist and apprenticed as a recording engineer in 1958. In 1960 his first composition Eight Pieces later to be used in the soundtrack of Fellini’s Satyricon.

Dockstader was part of the first wave of electronic musicians, who, before the advent of synthesizers in the early 1960s, worked with whatever hardware they could find: reel-to-reel tape machines, sine wave generators and a wild array of homemade circuits and military surplus gear. In the process, they created a universe of electronic music that still sounds unique and prescient today.

Dockstader used to create electronic music was a piece of used military equipment. “A lot of this [electronic music] hap¬pened because, after the war, a lot of the stuff was available,” he said. “Normally a person, a civilian … wouldn’t be able to get that tube, this device or that device. That fascinated me.”

In the late 1950s, Dockstader worked as a sound engineer at Gotham Recording Studios in New York. At night, he worked on his own music, which eventually led to a series of impressive albums of electronic music, including THE ORGANIZED SOUND here reissued on DOZ.