Bruce Gilbert / Ron West, Frequency Variation (side A)

Bruce Gilbert is of course known for his guitar playing on classic Wire albums.  Ron West was in less-well-known bands during England's punk era.  If Gilbert did not go on to achieve such massive success, his electronic art school experiments from 1974 would have been forgotten.  In 1998, they were reissued as a vinyl LP, Frequency Variation.  The music here was made with an oscillator, a tape delay, some control over panning, and a filter.  The oscillator is used to create little melodic swirls that give the music structure.  It lacks the neatly-controlled patterns of a Subotnick piece, for example—everything is a bit more chaotic and unpredictable.  It definitely gives no hint that Bruce Gilbert would be a significant figure in the punk movement.  The reissue was mastered and pressed with impressive care, with a balanced and very clean frequency distribution.  The sparse, minimal packaging fits with the era of the album's release, not the era of the music's creation.