CREEL PONE

The Wire, 2010

by Simon Reynolds
At some point in the middle of the last decade, a series of mysterious
CDs began popping up on the "New Releases" lists of certain left-field
music distributors. Sometimes they'd materialize directly on the
shelves of a handful of esoterica-oriented record shops (surprising the
owners, who couldn't recall having ordered them). These discs were
packaged neither in plastic hard shells nor thick cardboard cases, but
with thin card sleeves covered by a protective sheath of shrink wrap:
they looked like five inch vinyl records, basically, rather than CDs.
This effect was further intensified by the Deutsche Grammophon-style
gold seals that each release sported. The legend proclaimed the
series's name, its mission, and its means of production: CREEL PONE
-- Unheralded Classics of Electronic Music - 1952-1984 -- 100 - Hand
Assembled.
Eye-catching and intrigue-piquing, the covers were immaculate
replicas of the sleeves of musique concrete and electronic records
from that post-WW2 surge into the sonic unknown. They reproduced
in miniature not just the original artwork but also--to take just one
example, Andre Almuro's Musiques Experimentales--the six differently
sized circles cut out of the front cover as spy-holes to a garishly
psychotropic inner sleeve. Any liner note booklets or textual matter
accompanying the original LP was likewise meticulously reproduced,
and each CD-R was printed with the label of its source recording in
vivid color. Great pains had clearly been taken to provide the
purchaser with as close as possible to the sensation of having 'n'
holding an original vinyl copy. But the retail price these avantbootlegs went for--around ten dollars-- suggested a labour of love
rather than an exploitative exercise in niche marketing. These were
gifts for fans, made by fans.

Creel Pone's catchment stretched from the output of lesser-known

state-funded or university-sponsored sound laboratories (60s and 70s
compilations like From Czech Electronic Music Studios, the Flemish
Elektronische Produktie Van IP.E.M, Musica Electroacustica Mexicana,
New Zealand Electronic Music, Anthology of Dutch Electronic Tape
Music, and, most mindblowing of all in a fiercely competitive field,
Hungarian Electronic Music) to works by individual composers (Denis
Smalley, Herbert Eimert, Phillippe Arthuys, Luis De Pablo, Ruth White,
etc). The catalogue also encompassed "outsider electronics" selfreleased by synth-wielding mavericks unattached to any institution
(Edward M. Zajda, Nik Pascal, Pythagoron Inc), along with one-off
forays into sound by visual artists (kinetic sculptor Nicolas Schffer,
abstract expressionist painter Karel Appel), musique concrete made

by animators like Norman McClaren (Music of the N.F.B.) and library

music releases and movie scores by the likes of Tod Dockstader,
Zanagoria, and Gil Melle (the splendidly hair-raising Andromeda Strain
O/S/T.).
As the buzz about the quality, fetish appeal and sheer obscurity of
Creel Pone output grew among electronic music fiends, so too did
curiosity about the cryptic perpetrators of these exquisitely executed
but wholly unofficial and unsanctioned reissues. Distributor
advertorial for Creel releases alluded to a Mr. P.C.C.P. , a/k/a Pieter
Christophssen. But suspicion mounted that this gentleman collector,
who allegedly operated out of Iceland, was in fact a fiction: a Karen
Eliot-style alias smokescreening the activity of a loose collective of
crate-diggers and technicians. At the hub of this curatorial cabal, it
transpired, lurked the experimental musician Keith Fullerton Whitman,
who also runs the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based weird-music
distributor Mimaroglu Music Sales.

The Creel Pone project came to a halt in the late summer of 2009 with
the 99th instalment, Reinhold Weber's Elektronische und phonetische
Kompositione (the "100" in the gold seal referred both to the plan to
put out one hundred immaculate releases and to the approximate
number of copies of each reissue made). Creel Pone may reactivate at
some point, but, according to Whitman, it has most likely reached its
"natural end".
Surveying the Creel catalogue as a curated body of work, two things
emerge. One is that, as much as it was an idealistic international
movement dedicated to opening up a new frontier of sound for
humankind, the post-War electronic surge was also a craze that
convulsed composers across the globe. Every developed nation (and
quite a few developing ones) simply had to have its own electronic
music research centre. Even the Catholic University of America had a
resident concrete composer, Professor Emerson Meyers, whose 1970
LP Provocative Electronics was resurrected as Creel Pone #77.
Whitman compares the runaway evolution of the music and the
faddish excitement of its makers to the techno and jungle scenes he
was immersed in during the Nineties: empowered by new technology,
a swarm of second-division producers pick up on the breakthroughs of
a few innovator- producers, ripping them off but in the process
intensifying and mutating the innovations. "You'll hear a technique
that's invented in 1954 in Japan going out to Berlin, then to Spain...
trademark sounds that become part of this general lexicon of
transformation, individual composer's tricks that enter this grand pool
of ideas." Early electronic music, then, was about scenius as much as

genius; Creel Pone revels in the generic-ness as much as the

singularity of the sounds generated.

The other aspect relates to the "1952-1984" time-span Creel Pone

marks off as its Golden Age. (Some of the Creel Pone seals varied the
dates slightly: 1947-1983 was one variant, as above). Whitman
argues that this was the most concentrated period of innovation in
human history--not just in music but across the entire spectrum of
culture and society. In terms of electronic music specifically, though,
the cut-off point of 1984indicates the eclipse of analogue by digital.
"From the early Eighties onwards you had digital synthesiers and
samplers like the Synclavier, you had computers," says Whitman.
Citing the deterioration of outfits like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop,
he argues that "the early music made using digital audio technology
has dated very badly." He believes that the approach encouraged by
sequencers and computers is "'I'll fuck around and see what
happens'" whereas tape-based music required so much planning and
time investment it led to superior results. For someone like Herbert
Eimert, a two minute piece took a month of 18 hour days to achieve.
It involved sitting down with a piece of paper and scoring out your
sounds, making a chart of all the different combinations. And then
actually doing it. You get music that's really thought-through." The
Herculean effort, the heroic spirit of risk-taking, imbues the music
with an intangible but undeniable aura. "Also analogue sounds are
just better."