For the particularly impressionable secular mind, American synth pioneer and minimalist icon David Borden creates music that proves the existence of some rarefied godlike consciousness within the meat sacks that constitute our corporeal forms on this plane. When presented with a seemingly infinite expanse of percolating arpeggios, re-harmonizing bass notes, and yearning lead melodies, this overwhelmed mind prepares its fleshy avatar to bow and perhaps to weep. Other emotional responses will not suffice. But Borden’s “higher power” is not necessarily a spiritual one, though such an argument would be easy to make. His hands-on-patch-cables pragmatism and collaborative experimentalism within a small group of friends and co-performers paint him as the everyman’s synth deity, coaxing his masterworks note by note from the systems of keyboard instruments he pieced together as a labor of curiosity and personal fascination. His work both with the Mother Mallard Portable Masterpiece Company and under his given name exudes a unique godliness by virtue not only of its cleanliness, but of its humble confidence in the manifestation of an ancient idea: consonant and complex music is naturally enjoyable to listen to.
Borden’s career-defining epic “The Continuing Story of Counterpoint,” composed between 1976 and 1983, has reached his devotees in multiple arrangements possessed of varying rosters of electronic vs. acoustic instrumentation (see, for example, Cuneiform’s more acoustic-leaning issue of the cycle in the late 80s). Spectrum Spools’ forthcoming reissue of Borden’s relatively unheralded 1981 LP Music for Amplified Keyboard Instruments restores two movements of “Counterpoint” from his private master tapes. Press play on “Part Nine,” below, and enter the maestro’s tumbling network of synth harmonies. Borden utilizes counterpoint principles to maximum dramatic effect, crafting a labyrinthine narrative of communicative lead passages and seismic transitions. Over the course of nearly 15 minutes, his real-time synth mosaic blooms in increasingly complex floral configurations, prodding listeners closer to ecstasy on the way to a massive denouement that highlights a stuttering two-note motif for longer and longer durations, like a funnel narrowing down to its focal tip.
• David Borden: http://mothermallard.com/David/Mother_Mallard.html
• Spectrum Spools: http://editionsmego.com/releases/spectrum-spools
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