André Stordeur – Oberheim SEM 8 Voice 1979-80

Unreleased track “Oberheim SEM 8 Voice” (1979-80) with selected works circa 2000 by a key composer of Belgian electronic music, André Stordeur. Released in Sub Rosa’a Early Electronic series.

André Stordeur (March 01, 1941 – April 07, 2020): Belgian electronic music composer. His musical career started in 1973 with a tape composition for the soundtrack to a film on Gordon Matta-Clark titled Office Baroque. Later in the 1970s, he participated to avant-garde music ensemble Studio voor Experimentele Muziek, founded in Antwerp, Flanders, by Joris De Laet. Since 1980, Stordeur composes exclusively on Serge synthesizer, either a Serge series 79 and a Serge prototype 1980, which was especially built for him by Serge Tcherepnin himself. In 1981, Stordeur composed the music of Belgian film director Christian Mesnil‘s documentary Du Zaïre au Congo. He studied at IRCAM in 1981 with David Wessel and then flew to the US to study with Morton Subotnick. Stordeur became an influential sound synthesis teacher and, in 1997, completed his Art of Analog Modular Synthesis by Voltage Control, a guide to everything modular.

Oberheim: While “Oberheim” is the centerpiece of this LP, Sub Rosa pressed for the first time on vinyl three pieces from the session André called Synthesis Studies, previously featuring on Complete Analog and Digital Electronic Music, 1978-2000. “I was helped in my studies by a must-have book: The Techniques of Electronic Music, by Thomas Wells and Eric Vogel (University Stores, 1974). That book aside, I learned synthesis on my own. After a trip to India in 1968, I discovered Indian music and took tabla and sitar classes in New Delhi; my teachers were students of Chatur Lal and Ravi Shankar. Later, in the 2000s, while living in the US, I tried to recreate through synthesis all the Indian musical instruments I loved so much.’ ‘Drone’ is one of his most spectacular works.”