The end of the summer in the USA is marked by a holiday for workers. The Labor Day of September 3rd, 1990, was marked by rally cries of cacophony created by George Gibson, C. Goff III, and Robert Silverman.

Having spent the previous months composing from pre-planned themes and performance-related plans, these members of Herd Of The Ether Space were ready to let loose with a heavy dose of unbridled free improvisation. They powered a variety of instruments, non-instruments, television feeds, phonograph records, and tapes into a four-track cassette deck, producing complex layers of audio disturbance.

Two compositions that were created that day were released by Taped Rugs Productions in 1992 on the cassette album, C4H10O (which is the chemical formula for Ether). “Retrograde On A Curve” is a blend of two improvisations recorded on opposite sides of a single cassette, one improvisation recorded forwards, the other backwards. Goff twiddled the knobs to create the mix for the cassette release. The reversed mix, however, as one might suspect, is equally as interesting as the one offered on the cassette, and is presented to the public here for the first time in its full glory (of about 17 and a half minutes).

“Infinitely Elastic” is a pure improvisation and was presented on the C4H10O cassette album unedited, just the way that it was made on that Labor Day so long ago. A noteworthy aspect of this recording is the bit of television news quoting President George H. W. Bush in a speech he made about Operation Desert Shield in Iraq. A few months later he took the world to war in Operation Desert Storm, which served as the subject for an Ether Show with a powerful punch. That show will be featured in a future podcast, but for now it’s:

1 (the reversed) “Retrograde On A Curve”

and

2 “Infinitely Elastic”