{"id":13948,"date":"2018-01-17T05:30:42","date_gmt":"2018-01-17T10:30:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=13948"},"modified":"2018-01-17T09:10:54","modified_gmt":"2018-01-17T14:10:54","slug":"allen-ravenstines-terminal-drive","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2018\/01\/17\/allen-ravenstines-terminal-drive\/","title":{"rendered":"Allen Ravenstine’s “Terminal Drive”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Note: An edited version of this feature appeared previously in<\/em> Keyboard Magazine.<\/p>\n

\"\"Allen Ravenstine is best known as the synthesist for Cleveland’s underground experimental rockers Pere Ubu; his work is featured on all of the albums that band made through 1991, and a number of live and compilation releases. But around the time of recording Pere Ubu’s debut single (1975’s \u201c30 Seconds Over Tokyo\u201d) Ravenstine had created one of the most intriguing items in his catalog. Working with the primitive yet powerful EML ElectroComp 200 synthesizer \u2013 and joined by bassist Albert Dennis \u2013 he recorded a fifteen-minute work called \u201cTerminal Drive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though pieces of the track have surfaced in the past \u2013 most notably in the form of a track called \u201cHome Life,\u201d included on a bonus disc that was part of the 1996 Pere Ubu box set Datapanik in the Year Zero<\/i> \u2013 the complete \u201cTerminal Drive\u201d was long thought to be lost. But through a still-murky series of events, a tape recently surfaced, and Smog Veil Records release the track on vinyl in September 2017.<\/p>\n

By the time Ravenstine recorded \u201cTerminal Drive,\u201d the availability of user-friendly synthesizers was on the rise. But he had chosen the EML. \u201cI wish I could answer why,\u201d Ravenstine says. \u201cI don’t remember doing a lot of research and deciding.\u201d He does recall that the Connecticut-based company’s back story impressed him. \u201cWhether it’s true or not I can’t honestly tell you,\u201d he says, \u201cbut my understanding is that EML was contracted by the state of Connecticut to design a synthesizer that could teach school children the basics of electronic music. And it had to be indestructible.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"For Ravenstine, the relative simplicity of the EML 200 was a feature, not a bug. \u201cIt had no internal patching whatsoever, and it had no keyboard,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd that was fine with me because I didn’t have any use for a keyboard, anyway.\u201d He also thought the unit was aesthetically pleasing. \u201cI liked the fact that when you wired it up, it looked like an old switchboard. It had a lot of appeal on a physical level.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ravenstine also liked the fact that whenever there was a question or problem with the EML 200, he could just pick up the phone. \u201cUsually when I would call over there, somehow I’d end up talking with the guy who built it,\u201d he says. But when he explained that he was planning to use the 200 in live performance with Pere Ubu, the EML people were skeptical. \u201cThey were surprised that anybody would try to use it in a live situation,\u201d he says. \u201cSo they helped me come up with some extra pieces that might make it more friendly.\u201d The upgrades included an EML 300 controller unit featuring a primitive sequencer and a 4×4 matrix of control buttons that could trigger sounds.<\/p>\n

But for \u201cTerminal Drive,\u201d Ravenstine had used only a 200 model. \u201cIt had one button, so you could organize things and then trigger an event with that one button,\u201d he says. \u201cSo it wasn’t completely reliant on knobs.\u201d<\/p>\n

The structure of \u201cTerminal Drive\u201d is halfway between composed and improvised. \u201cI worked then exactly the same way that I work now,\u201d Ravenstine explains. \u201cI come up with something that’s interesting to me, and I play it. So in that sense it’s improvised. And then I lay it down on a track and listen to it. Then that thing suggests another thing to me.\u201d On-the-fly composition might be an accurate way to explain Ravenstine’s process. \u201cIt’s never happened that I sat down and had an outline for something that I was going to try to make,\u201d he says.
\nThe avant-garde, proto-ambient \u201cTerminal Drive\u201d is evocative of Ravenstine’s situation at the time: he lived in a seedy, low-rent section of Cleveland, a city then characterized by an industrial, polluted landscape rife with urban decay. \u201cAll of us are products of everything that ever happened to us and the way we see the world,\u201d he says. And Ravenstine found a kind of beauty in his surroundings. \u201cThe Cuyahoga River is a very winding river; for a number of miles in Cleveland, it may have more bridges over it than any other river in the world,\u201d he says. Those iron bridges \u2013 many of which were built in the 1800s \u2013 feature giant rivets. \u201cThey were very attractive to me structurally,\u201d Ravenstine says. \u201cThat environment had a lot of appeal to me; it had a black-and-white photograph kind of appeal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"But it was scary, too, especially for a white 25-year old who had grown up in the suburbs. \u201cI didn’t really have any exposure to the inner city, to crime, to any of that kind of stuff,\u201d Ravenstine says. \u201cSo that was very much a rude awakening to me. And I’m sure that it affected me in many ways.\u201d<\/p>\n

All of that \u2013 the grotesque industrial beauty as well as the sense of lurking danger \u2013 is reflected in \u201cTerminal Drive.\u201d \u201cMy method when I’m thinking about a particular sound,\u201d Ravenstine explains, \u201cis not to try to find a way to duplicate it, but more to try to evoke the essence of it.\u201d The icy, buzzing, throbbing textures of Ravenstine’s EML and Dennis’ bowed bass combine to paint an aural portrait of the then-crumbling Cleveland and its environs.<\/p>\n

Ravenstine admits that he doesn’t know exactly how and why the full \u201cTerminal Drive\u201d suddenly showed up some forty years after its recording. A couple of years ago, Robert Wheeler (Ravenstine’s replacement in Pere Ubu) phoned him and let him know that a label had expressed interest in releasing the legendary recording. \u201cI told them I’d be delighted to let them have it,\u201d Ravenstine recalls. \u201cBut I<\/i> didn’t have it, and I didn’t know who did. I didn’t have any idea what happened to it.\u201d Still, he promised to look for it.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did everything I could do to find it,\u201d Ravenstine says. He contacted Suma Recording, one of Cleveland’s premier studios. \u201cI thought they may have been involved,\u201d he says. But he had no luck. Eventually he gave up. \u201cI just wrote it off as, ‘whatever, not gonna happen.’\u201d Not long after, he was contacted by Frank Mauceri of Smog Veil Records, who sent him some audio snippets and asked Ravenstine to identify them.<\/p>\n

\"\"\u201cIt was very odd,\u201d Ravenstine says. \u201cIt was sort of like when you’re at the airport and they have an announcement: ‘If you lost your wallet, please return to Gate 12 and be prepared to identify it.’\u201d He believed that Mauceri had access to something<\/i>, but wasn’t sure if it was the real \u201cTerminal Drive\u201d and didn’t want to reveal the whole thing until the deal was finalized. Ravenstine listened to the brief clips and told him, \u201cYou know what? I think this is it.\u201d Mauceri worked out a deal with the person who had possession of the physical tape, and a release was scheduled.<\/p>\n

More recently, Ravenstine reached out directly to that individual in hope of obtaining the original tape. \u201cI asked him, ‘How in the world did you end up with it?’ And he didn’t know. That’s what happens: after forty years, there’s an awful lot of things people don’t remember.\u201d But talking to the unnamed individual, he did learn one thing: what had been found wasn’t the 1\/4\u201d original master, done on a 15 ips TEAC machine. \u201cI think that what Frank got from this seller in Ohio is a cassette,\u201d Ravenstine says. In any event, the fidelity of the new release \u2013 from an unknown-generation dub \u2013 is surprisingly good, a testament to the technical quality of the original.<\/p>\n

Looking at a chronology of Ravenstine’s musical credits, one notices a lengthy gap. Not counting retrospectives and box sets, his prodigious output stops completely after 1991, and doesn’t pick up again until 2013, when he recorded a pair of releases (Farm Report<\/i> and City Desk<\/i>) with Robert Wheeler. In fact Ravenstine quit music for many years, becoming a commercial airline pilot. It was only around the time of the documentary I Dream of Wires<\/i> that his interest in making music was reignited.<\/p>\n

Ravenstine was asked to be involved in the film, and when he learned that Robert Wheeler would also be featured, he had an idea. \u201cI said, ‘Robert and I have never played together; would it be possible for us to do that while we we’re in the studio doing this movie?’\u201d The result of that collaboration is the pair of CDs released in 2013.<\/p>\n

He released a solo work, The Pharaoh’s Bee<\/i>, in 2015; another album is in the can, and yet another is nearly finished. And along the way, Ravenstine has added a number of components to his music-making setup. He received a Moog Theremini as a gift, and soon thereafter purchased a Doepfer Dark Energy and a Rare Waves Grendel. \u201cToday I work with analog synthesizers, some digital synthesizers, digital recordings of instruments, and Apple Logic,\u201d he says. And he still has the old EML 200 he used to make \u201cTerminal Drive.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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