On June 20th, the Brooklyn-based music label RVNG Intl. will release Craig Leon’s early synthesizer albums Nommos and Visiting as the 2xLP Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1.
Leon became involved with the early New York City punk scene after having moved there in 1973 to become the assistant to producer Richard Gottehrer, at Sire Records, and he is credited with having helped to discover and develop bands like the Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, Richard Hell, and Suicide. The same year that Leon arrived in the city, he would also attend the Brooklyn Museum for an exhibit of sculptures by the Dogon people, from the Republic of Mali, and the young producer and composer would go on to be profoundly influenced by those works, as well as their cultural belief that they had been visited by an ancient, interstellar race of beings they called the Nommos. Remaining fascinated by the cultural transmission that might have occurred between the two races, Leon wondered, in particular, what the musical practices of the Nommos might have sounded like…
After meeting musician and label owner John Fahey in the late 70’s, he would go on to propose a musical project that would utilize some of the most advanced analogue synthesizers of the time as tools for imagining what the Nommos’ advanced sonics may have sounded like. Recorded with his wife and partner Cassell Webb at a studio in Austin, TX, on instruments like the Oberheim OB-X, Roland JP-4, Arp 2600, and Roger Linn‘s early drum machine, the LM-1, Leon would release Nommos in 1981 on Fahey’s imprint Takoma; with the follow-up, Visiting, coming out a year later in 1982 via Enigma Records.
RVNG Intl’s amazing archival efforts, here, mean that this double album has been re-editioned with Craig Leon’s close guidance. The label reports that the records have been re-mastered under the musician’s close supervision, explaining;
“Leon has in fact re-animated Nommos by re-recording the exact audio signals as preserved in the album’s original studio notes. Every patch, tape-delay speed and outboard setting was transcribed as first scored, materializing the best possible audio from an album whose masters were lost in major label merger milieu years ago.”
In addition to this exacting care, RVNG says that Leon has made some “subtle edits and compositional additions” to the pieces, continuing to develop the albums’ “connectivity and encourage infinite interpretation”. Today, we take a listen to the first composition off side C, “One Hundred Steps“, which is accompanied by stunning footage of the kind of Dogon sculpture that initially inspired this amazing music.
