A stereo reduction of an eight channel work comprised of electronically modified field recordings made throughout Rohnert Park, California. Originally composed in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of Rohnert Park's incorporation, the Friendly City was conceived as a piece for pianos, percussion, electronics and quadrophonic tape. The electronic portion was then remixed and expanded upon for a stand-alone electronic piece for eight loudspeakers.

Wollmer  Friendly City Eight For 2

Performed by the Trio Ariadne. Carol McGonnell, clarinet; Sæunn Thorsteinsdottir, cello; Elizabeth Joy Roe, piano

Wollmer - Planting Potatoes In The Land Of Rocks

The comprising tape loops were generated from a recording of the composer playing four notes on the piano  and with the aid of a computer, the sound was stretched to roughly 1000% of its length. Multiple delays were then applied to the over-extended loop, smoothing out any gaps from the prior process. Through the manipulation of delay times, equalization, and feedback the result was a harmonically rich and resonant sound that may be described as more vocal than instrumental. Perhaps to those needing illustration, imagine the sound of a thousand eastern lamas chanting on a hillside. The resulting tape loop was then sped up and slowed down 11 individual times to approximate a relation to the chromatic scale and thus arranged by serial means.

The composer invites the listener to lay back and relax, perhaps with their eyes closed, and let their mind roam free to wherever the music takes them, allowing themselves to be enveloped in a sonic womb.

Wollmer - Nimbostratus Virga


The title and text of this piece are derived wholly from promotional copy provided by CBS to promote their television program "The Big Bang Theory," a program that the composer admittedly does not watch. The copy was in the form of clickbait, the pesky internet liter that promises to educate the reader about such items of cultural import such as "34 Disfigured Child Stars - Look at them now!" and "Hollywood's Greatest Mormons." In this case, the CBS promotional department was extolling the charm and virtues of one of their stars, an attractive petite blonde actress, Melissa Rauch. Ms. Rauch apparently has 21 very important things that are imperative for us to learn about her.

Instead of the general hyperbole that the average media consumer might have expected to encounter the composer was greeted by a character study that more than exceeded effusiveness resembling the obsessive rantings of a paranoiac. A succinct list of reasons to gush over Ms. Rauch, it was a litany of comments ranging from the admiring ("everyone is envious of her style"), the beatific ("she is a vision in yellow"), and the ontologically neurotic ("she's really real"). The tone was not as much as the voyeuristic celebration that American advertisement is well known for, but rather one of grotesque pathology and secular rapture.  It is not apparent if it were the intention of the copywriter to describe Ms. Rauch's virtues in a manner reminiscent of a parody of bad love poetry, or if he were a stalker furiously longing in an unfinished basement wallpapered with pictures of the actress. Reading this PR hagiography, the composer was reminded of Mimaroglu's "Threnody for Sharon Tate" where reciters creepily intone such testimony about Ms. Tate's murderer such as  "He is the son of man, he is the son of God, he is the evidence of God, he is the victim of God ... He made me feel I can play a guitar, he made me feel like I could hold a knife" over a cheery antiphon of "Kill, kill, kill."  The good people at CBS provide a somewhat more banal text, but it can be read just as disturbingly.

Benjamin explains that for the production of popular art, "what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else. " This is the apotheosis of the celebrity that our culture revels so much in. A favorite star is not a mere folk hero, but deifide like Caesar's corpse upon his public pyre. While a celebrity can be in its basic form a symbolic persona in which the many values, virtues, vices, and excesses of a society are tightly packed in, at its very worst the worship of these people underscores the tyrrany of economic and cultural oligarchy.

To paraphrase Luciano Berio in his notes for Visages, this piece is intended as a tribute to the internet as the most widely used means of spreading useless words.

Albert Wollmer,
Spring, 2015

This recording is a stereo reduction of what was originally a quadraphonic recording.


Wollmer - 21 Facts You Need To Know About Melissa Rauch

All sounds heard within this piece are derived from simple wave forms that were then manipulated by fairly simple electronic processes, such as delay, equalization, and various splicing techniques. No synthesizers or sequencers were used.  

The meaning of this piece is completely open to the interpretation of the listener.

Wollmer - You Can Send a Child to Summer Camp

38F for tape, Second Movement "What Kind of Girl Shows You the Inside of Her Piano on the First Date"

38F - a piece that can be described as an electronic concerto for tape manipulated piano - was conceived many years ago as part of the as-of-yet unfinished phonograph ballet Future Teen Idols of America, and only a basic sketch of the necessary compositional operations was made  i.e. grotesque sounding electronically modified varispeed pianos. The composer is delighted to finally have the piece presented outside of his brain. Solipsism may be fun, but beware of the company you keep. 

38F mixes both serial techniques  and the methods of the electronic music studio. The first provides enough variance and expansion through contrapuntal and crude arithmetic means, while the latter provides disctinction through changes in timbre, temporality, and modes of transmutational ontology (viz. magic).

The second movement, presented here, is primarily derived from playing the strings inside the piano, an atmospheric juxtaposition from the first and third movements which concentrate on serial expansion and variation of compositional themes.

Wollmer - 38F - Movement 2  - What Kind Of Girl Shows You The Inside Of Her Piano On The First Date

Picking-Up Girls Made Easy: A Satire for 4-Channeled Sound
Albert Wollmer

The source material of this piece was extracted from Eric Weber's instructional LP Picking Up Girls Made Easy!, an audio curio of the sexually liberated 1970s  - one perhaps considered borderline offensive to the present day listener - consisting of step by step instructions on how to fulfill the title of said album. The subject of this piece lies in the "Department Store Pick-Up," where our unctuous suitor hero (clad in sharp sport clothes), walks the fine line between seduction and sociopathy. Maladroitly and with stilted blandishment, he coaxes his feminine mark in trying out a blouse for his "sister's" 21st birthday present.  Of course, we learn that our hero's sister is a mere fabrication that he uses to get the girl to try on a variety of blouses, ultimately giving her the blouse over dinner. All the while, a narrator gives a play by play analysis of the tactless exchange.

In this piece the narrative form is juxtaposed with the detached abstraction of electronic music. The interpolation of the electronically manipulated sounds derived from the record, as well as the electronic manipulation of the narration, provides an effect that is at once, satirical and surreal. (The composer would refer the listener to Kenneth Gaburo's Fat Millie's Lament for another example of a piece of tape music that works in this manner.) Meaning is derived from beyond the explicitness of the spoken word and comes to rest with the extrapolated extra-textural elements. Non-narrative moments of sound, though simultaneous with and derived from parts of the narrative that exist beyond it,. It is these elements that possess a nature that is both musical, and one that is beyond what we consider music everyday. However, combined with the dynamism of the phonograph play, a new and cohesive aesthetic is formed.

Albert Wollmer

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