Touch

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

Morton Subotnick

1969

Music/Sound

The Listening Room

Description

Morton Subotnick’s Touch was the third LP to showcase the Buchla Electronic Music System, an instrument he co-commissioned with Ramon Sender for the San Francisco Tape Music Center in 1963. With a $500 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, they asked Don Buchla to design a device that would allow composers to create entirely new sounds, rather than imitate existing ones. Subotnick envisioned the Buchla not as a traditional synthesizer but as a modular system for recording, layering, and sculpting electronic sound directly to tape.

Commissioned by Columbia Records for the emerging quadraphonic format, Touch embodies Subotnick’s idea of the record as a performance medium, composed specifically for home listening on four-channel stereo systems. The title plays on the Italian toccata (“touch”), the term Baroque composers used to name virtuosic display pieces. Across its movements, Touch demonstrates the Buchla’s astonishing range, from bell-like tones and percussive cracks to eerie winds, electronic gulps, and sweeping crescendos. The result is a flamboyant, tightly structured composition that dramatizes both the possibilities of electronic sound and the virtuosity of the composer manipulating it.

The LP’s striking cover art, Return to a Square (1967) by the Japanese Computer Technique Group, situates Touch firmly within the avant-garde of sound and image.