Pioneering Composer David Behrman’s 1978 Debut - “On The Other Ocean” :: Lovely Music, Ltd.

Swells of swollen liberation capsize the eagerness and willingness to explore the tectonic likeness of angelic praise and the harmonious hands of a home-bodied hermit, whose strangled grip palms the nothingness of time and space. With significant hallucinations blurring the brilliance of seasonal change and electronic economics, a forever fluorescent spectacle emerges from the depths of catatonia to embrace the ruptured memories of total cultural fall out. Reorganized and significantly displaced into the dreamlike categories of inhale and exhale, an almighty atmospheric collection of Sutra sounds and temporary logistics via the lingering chants of partially molded temple tombs rings out loud for all to hear. While stirring in its ancient sleep, a wall of rain sings into the ears of all creatures both local and holographically imported, admitting the shimmering rainbow, whose loot is spent and weakened by consistent attempts at the subconscious intellect. It’s here that a crack will form, giving an opportunity for anyone brave enough to take it.

Born just a few years shy of WW2 in Salzburg, Austria, legendary pioneering composer David Behrman was born to parents that both participated in the arts. Growing up with the impeccable influences of both music and film during his formative years, his family eventually relocated up north in the states, where Behrman made a serious connection and desired to invest in his education. Attending the Phillips Academy boarding school where he met fellow legends Hollis Frampton, Frank Stella, Carl Andre and Frederic Rzewski, it was here that these cosmic connections would influence and inspire the young musician immeasurably for the rest of his career. In the early 50s, Behrman went to a summer camp in Indian Hills in Connecticut, where he was taught the humble logistics of modern music by Wallingford Riegger. Eventually receiving his BA from Harvard towards the end of the decade, he formed one of the most important friendships of his life, both in and outside of music, with Christian Wolf. Continuing his education, Behrman moved to Germany for a few years in the summer of ‘58 to attend Darmstadt, where he met Nam June Park, La Monte Young, and eventually received yet another degree, but this time at CU after his return towards the beginning of the 60s. As the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s continued to unease, Behrman became a producer for the up-and-coming Terry Riley and his influential release of “In C” back in 1968, while working for Columbia Records’ “Music of Our Time” series.

Some of Behrman’s earliest recordings, prior to the release of the groundbreaking 1978 classic, “On The Other Ocean”, were a collection of early electronica meditations entitled “Wave Train”, that took place between 1959 and 1968. Featuring such numbers as “Runthrough”, “Players With Circuits”, “Sounds From A Film By Roberts Watts” and “Canons”, Behrman was joined by fellow musicians and composers David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, Alvin Lucier and others to help bring this intensely textured body of work to life. While the wild world was being inhabited by such legends as William S. Burroughs, Kerouac, Brion Gysin and Allen Ginsberg at the time, to half hazardously name a few, it was this form of miraculous music that truly embodied the radicalism of poetics and the labor-intensive exercises of being an artists during the ultimate cultural shift of the 50s and 60s across Europe and America at the time.

Behrman recorded perhaps one of the most influential albums of the 1970s that most have never heard, or more specifically, aren’t truly aware of how significant its impact on music as a whole truly was. 1978’s “On The Other Ocean” is a prime example of complete mastery that has changed the atmosphere of transcendental music forever like that of John Cage, or Eno. Based on a pitch sensing computer music system, “On The Other Ocean” breaks through this romantic cell wall and into the soulful soundscapes of a whole new horizon in music. Both captivating and cinematically boundless, Behrman succeeds in influencing the dormancy of the New Wave scene that’s just around the corner by introducing the scent of the Cold War science fiction boom with a mesmerizing hue of digital color and sublime shape-shifting signals.