"All pieces on this CD were recorded in 1959 at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center with the following exceptions: Track 3 was recorded in 1944 in the Middle East Radio Station of Cairo. Track 9 is an excerpt from a piece that Halim recorded by walking around San Marco Basilica in Venice in 1961 with a reel-to-reel tape recorder. If you listen closely you can hear his daughter cry out his name near the end. Track 6 is an excerpt of a piece that was a combination of manipulated audiotape and sound sculpture, recorded in a New York art gallery circa 1974."
"Halim Abdul Messieh El-Dabh (حليم عبد المسيح الضبع, March 4, 1921 - September 2, 2017) was an Egyptian-American composer, musician, ethnomusicologist, and educator, who had a career spanning 60 years. He is particularly known as one of the earliest pioneers of Musique Concrete and electro-acoustic music. It was while he was a student in Cairo that he began his experiments. Borrowing a 'wire recorder' [early reel-to-reel. --S] from the offices of Middle East Radio, he took it to the streets to capture outside sounds, specifically an ancient 'Zaar' ceremony, a type of exorcism conducted in public. According to El-Dabh 'I just started playing around with the equipment at the station, including echo chambers, voltage controls, and a specialized room that had movable walls to create different types and amounts of reverb. I concentrated on those high tones that had different beats and clashes and started eliminating the fundamental tones, isolating the high overtones so that in the finished recording the voices are not really recognizable anymore.' He thus discovered the potential of manipulating raw sounds to compose music."
