George Harrison :: “Electronic Sound” - Zapple Records
All I did was get that very first Moog synthesizer, with the big patch unit and the keyboards that you could never tune, and I put a microphone into a tape machine … So whatever came out when I fiddled with the knobs went on tape – but some amazing sounds did happen.
– George Harrison, 1987
Both blissed out and sophisticatedly wicked in sonic sorcery throughout its two-track entirety, Harrison’s second LP, entitled “Electronic Sound”, came after the fascinatingly chaotic nature of the young musician’s isolating introduction into the world of solo music with a momentary glimpse into what life would be like after the Beatles dissolved with his 1968 solo debut, “Wonderwall Music”. Harrison, remaining true to his lifelong connection and embrace of spirituality, began laying the gracious groundwork for both an artistic and emotional exit, while his participation and creative connection with the Beatles, by this time, was obnoxiously obvious by the end of the decade. This pulverizing period in Harrison’s life and career is smothered in over-rated obituaries and published books that are stacked high like silly skyscrapers by the masses, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t something still left for re-entry from the ritualistic residuals left behind from one of the most historically trailblazing periods in the musician’s early solo career.
“Electronic Sound” is considered to be one of the earliest, if not the very first, entries into the realm of electronic/synthesizer music made by a rock musician. Harrison entered the studio with an out-of-this-world weight and pressure from the Beatles, one could safely assume, but this doesn’t appear to be eagerly expressed, or resentfully represented in the fibers of the album, yet its anatomically aggressive, skeletal soundscape whispers this maddened meditation into the void for anyone to hear. It could also be safely assumed that Harrison was simply trying to have fun, or express his artistic genius outside the guise of the guitar for once in his life. Though the album wasn’t received, or held in any sort of high regard by writers and calculated critics at the time, “Electronic Sound” stands as this rare response to the potentially existential extraction from popular music, by gifting the collective community's ears with a hazardously expressive puzzle into the future of sound, depths of rhythm and the lingering isolation of cultural cohesiveness that inevitably became the late 60s.
From one of the most influential and disturbingly original musicians of all time, came some creative controversy at the expense of the album’s assistance producer, Bernie Krause. Having called Harrison out for plagiarism during the creation of the track, “No Time, or Space”, in which Krause later reported that Harrison recorded the demonstration performed in the studio without his consent or knowledge, therefore jeopardizing a future project Krause had already begun to set in motion. Harrison finished what would eventually become the A-side of the album, “Under the Mersey Wall”, once his Moog system arrived at his home in Surry, leading to the album’s release during the last summer of the 1960s. Within the visceral vibrations of the limitless ecosystem of electrifying expression and groundbreaking works in the decade to follow, Harrison would quickly return to his maverick roots and set out on a solo career that separated him from his past like no other.
"It could be called avant-garde, but a more apt description would be (in the words of my old friend Alvin), 'Avant Garde Clue'!"
– George Harrison, 1996
