Imagine the deafening sound of Beatles fans’ scratched heads and befuddled mutterings when they heard—IF they heard, rather—George Harrison’s second solo LP, Electronic Sound. Even in a post-“Revolution 9” world, Electronic Sound isn’t what Fab Four aficionados really expected or wanted from their idols. But multimillionaire musicians are gonna do what they please, aren’t they?
So, if the sitar-loving Beatle wants to put out two sidelong Moog synthesizer demos, he’s gonna damn well do it. One has to admire the bull-headedness and lack of concern for commercial prospects shown by a member of the world’s most popular rock band, with regard to Electronic Sound—even if the music therein lacks what many people seek in synthesizer records—coherence, thematic development, rhythm, melody. But if you enjoy zoning out to a panoply of strange sounds that can’t really be replicated on traditional instruments, you may find Electronic Sound to be your cup of LSD.
“No Time Or Space” is actually an edit of a synth demonstration given by American composer and Moog representative Bernie Krause (of the great Beaver & Krause; see the review of their awesome Ragnarök in our archives). He and Harrison convened in LA when the latter was producing an album for Apple Records artist Jackie Lomax. Krause didn’t know his noodlings would appear on Harrison’s album, and holy shit, was he angry about it, because the piece was destined for a forthcoming Beaver & Krause release. Rough cock-block, Sir George! Krause asked to have his name removed from Electronic Sound‘s credits, and one surmises that thereafter, Bernie would change the station whenever “Here Comes The Sun” came on.
Dramatic backstory aside, “No Time Or Space” can be a fun headphone listen if you’re properly dosed or drunk or just wandering around a desolate city after 2 am. Fans of Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, Morton Subotnick, Throbbing Gristle and, indeed, Beaver & Krause should find plenty of interesting episodes per minute occurring during the track’s nearly half-hour running time. It’s a series of unnerving, sometimes terminally dystopian emissions spraying out in many directions—the product of toxic circuitry. You can also hear echoes of this piece in the synth freakout of Edgar Winter Group’s “Frankenstein.” Harrison… er, Krause really exploited the hell out of that Moog, unleashing dozens of extreme expressions from it, Jackson Pollocking all over the stereo field.
“Under The Mersey Wall,” by comparison, clocks in at a mere 18:41, and offers way fewer thrills per square inch than its counterpart. George still displays a fairly deft grasp of the Moog’s capabilities, and damn if a lot of “Mersey Wall” doesn’t foreshadow some of Gil Mellé’s queasy moves and diseased tonalities on The Andromeda Strain soundtrack.
An anomaly in Harrison’s catalog, Electronic Sound is a curio for the die-hard George/Beatles head who’s game for expanding said head.
[There is confusion about which track is which, due to errors in the original pressing, which were corrected in subsequent reissues. It’s possible I have reversed these pieces when describing them. Nevertheless, the analysis holds and, as Sonic Youth put it, confusion is sex.] -Buckley Mayfield
