In continuing Orange Mountain Music’s series From the Kitchen Archives which documents the outstanding musical recordings made at the legendary multi-disciplinary art space founded in 1971 in Greenwich Village, the Kitchen, this fourth release features live recordings from two series of performances in 1977 and 1978 by the pioneering collective of electronic musicians centred around David Tudor called Composers Inside Electronics.

Known for creating sound works with the home-built circuitry devices they favoured over commercial synthesizers, Composers Inside Electronics would bring together many of these custom-made instruments for each sound installation or performance, often linking them together differently for unique sonic results each time. While electronics were the primary focus, the compositions on this CD also include acoustic sound sources such as a gong, a saw, and an amplified conch shell.

Groundbreaking in its day, the music brought together here continues to feel contemporary 30 years later, as many younger musicians and sound artists take on this legacy, seeking new possibilities of sound production, manipulation, and composition through both analogue and digital music. The performances demonstrate the kind of exciting electronic innovation happening in the late 1970s with tracks from David Tudor, John Driscoll, Phil Edelstein, Martin Kalve, and Bill Viola.

American pianist and electronic composer David Tudor (1926-1996) is best-known for his collaborative relationships with composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham – after Cage’s death he took over as music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. As a pianist, he gave the premieres of pieces by Stockhausen, Morton Feldman and La Monte Young as well as Cage's Music of Changes, Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and the notorious 4' 33".

Bill Viola (born 1951) is today renowned for his hugely significant contributions to the genre of video art, widely acknowledged on the international stage, but from 1973 to 1980 he studied and performed with David Tudor in the new music group Rainforest – latterly renamed Composers Inside Electronics.