líthos klásma (1995) was commissioned as the acousmatic score to the dance piece “Meshing” by Dave Wilson and the Parahumans. It premiered as part of the show Coded in October 1995. Part composition, part soundscape, it was a self-contained production on the Korg 01/WFD workstation, which was a convenient and affordable way for me to work.
The score is typical of my style at the time, incorporating modified factory patches, ambient synth drones, drums, metallic percussion, canonic loops, and digital noise gestures. The waveform shaping, automated mixing, panning, and precision reflect several years of exploration using the above device and its predecessor, the Korg M1.
The workstation is set to a just intonation tuning as follows (in cents deviation from equal temperament): C -16, C# -31, D -12, D# 00, E +39, F +4, F# -33, G -14, G# -2, A -49, A# +2, B +41.
Composed and recorded September-October 1995
Korg 01/WFD, live transfer to CD-R, August 2000, unmastered
Image: my birthday, January 1995
Music and composer’s notes copyright Bruce A. Russell 2025
These are the years of Kool & the Gang you may not know as well. They’re just as monumental in shaping Black dance music, hip hop and sampling history as the early or peak years.
Between the release of funk anthems culminating in the gold-certified Wild and Peaceful album and the start of a chart-topping, mainstream run with the platinum-certified Ladies’ Night, the band created some of their most refined, eclectic and inventive self-produced music. Sometimes they innovated; often, they borrowed from their contemporaries or leaned heavily on referencing earlier work, and they began to struggle for traction. Some critics didn’t get it. Throughout, the band’s work remained expertly crafted, soulful, joyous and stanky, with a positive spiritual message, all without a lead singer.
While not easily defined as a style period, the middle years are fully evidenced in the six albums represented here. The band’s sound is saturated with influences, presenting new variations on other styles already in the air, then resolving back to their core jazz and funk roots. Virtually all of the music is driven by Robert “Kool” Bell’s bass, Ronald Bell’s (Khalis Bayyan’s) arrangements, tenor sax and spacy synths, George Brown’s solid, often-sampled drumming, and those signature horns.
Everybody’s Dancin’ (excerpt) | Everybody’s Dancin’ (1978) L-O-V-E | Open Sesame (1976) Mighty Mighty High | The Force (1977) Universal Sound | Love & Understanding (1976) Ride the Rhythm | Spirit of the Boogie (1975) I Like Music | Everybody’s Dancin’ Ancestral Ceremony | Spirit of the Boogie Gift of Love | Open Sesame Just Be True | The Force All Night Long | Open Sesame Summer Madness | Light of Worlds (1974) Here After | Light of Worlds Free | The Force Sunshine | Open Sesame Peace to the Universe | Everybody’s Dancin’ Love & Understanding (extended version) | Kool & the Gang Spin Their Top Hits (1978) Spirit of the Boogie | Spirit of the Boogie
All albums released on De-Lite Records
Kool & the Gang: Middle Years 74-78
Compiled 2021-22 Lightly mixed tempos and keys, retaining original long fades August 2025
Study for Two Pianos and Tape (1990) is a collaboration with Garnet Willis. We were electronic music students of Philip Werren and composition/music history students of James Tenney at York University. The piece was recorded live at a student recital, where both Werren and Tenney were in attendance. This is a single mic recording that has survived several stages of media storage.
I created the tape by layering synth lines, drones and homemade samples, varying the tape machine speed during mixing to create glissando effects. I then added a series of very quick cuts with a razor blade and blank leader tape.
Garnet is playing a grand piano, and me a partially prepared upright, which he later detuned while I played to create further glissando effects. The piano parts are semi-improvised around a D-flat extended/microtonal tonic centre. A classmate volunteered to mix the tape around the room speakers during the performance. There were random pans and fade ins and outs, to which we responded with active gestures, minimalism and a hint of romanticism.
Garnet is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist, audio engineer, composer and instrument builder. I highly recommend exploring his groundbreaking work. He’s also one of the first friends I made in Toronto.
Note: this recording is dynamic, beginning quietly and becoming loud in several segments.
Recorded in concert, April 5, 1990, DACARY, York University Two pianos, reel to reel tape (Yahama DX-27, Roland S-50, DEP-5 effects) DAT recording transferred to cassette in 1990, transferred to CD-R in 2003
Artwork: sketch for the concert program, artist unknown
Music and composer’s notes copyright Bruce A. Russell 2025
I’m very pleased to share the studio recording (see below) and performance video of Sequences (2000 rev. 2024), featuring the University of Delaware Percussion Ensemble directed by Dr. Gene Koshinski, who gave the concert premiere of the piece in April 2024. The recording and video shoot were done in the weeks following the premiere. My thanks to the UD team for showing such care towards my work.
I composed Sequences at the start of a 20-year hiatus from the arts world, when I was composing in private and before any of my notated music had been played. I’d always hoped it would one day be performed, and it’s wonderful that it can have its own rebirth and reach listeners.
The title refers to sequences both in the sense of a musical phrase that repeats with a variation in pitch each time (in this case, with a variation in rhythm as well), and in the sense of arrangements programmed electronically using a sequencer.
The piece is a study in diatonic rhythms (the different phases of a 7-stroke pattern in a 12-beat cycle) which are paired with harmonically diatonic melodic canons. With each change of chord root, the overall pattern changes once or more. Four chords are used exclusively: D dominant, C major, G major and A minor, i.e., V – IV – I – ii in the key of G. There is a separate chordal flow and cadence on E minor in the bridge section.
Parameters vary within a narrow range: harmony, rhythmic phase, register that expands or contracts symmetrically from pattern to pattern, and interval quality, i.e., one pattern may feature predominantly small intervals and another, widely spaced ones. As the piece progresses, new sets of patterns emerge on the same four chords. Harmonic rhythm is slowed through increased repetition and variation.
Sequences shares some material in common with my string quartet Madra, as these compositions emerged during the same period (along with Kalimba Canon). My primary interest during this period was fusing a pop sensibility with minimalism derived from West African traditional structures.
The piece is not unlike a pop song in terms of its structure, duration, and harmonic character; however, a tension exists between this aspect and the statistical regularity of the material from beginning to end. The marimba parts require virtuoso players, while the “beat” is a relatively straightforward alternation of kick and cross stick with constantly varying accents in 3/2 metre, in response to the marimba music. The beat should support but not overpower the marimbas.
The piece initially included a TR-808 style electronic kick drum tuned to a single pitch, and in 2020, I expanded this part into a bassline for a tunable kick sound/bass synth. This can be played on a keyboard or pads, with the range of pitches being G0 to E1. The bassline exactly doubles the rhythm of the unpitched kick; the two lines should blend without either sound dominating the other.
Depending on tech setup, the piece can be performed as either a trio or quartet.
In 2024, I extended the piece with additional repeats, added a few subtle transitions in the beat/bassline, and created a new ending.
Recorded May 2024, University of Delaware, Newark, DE Shared with permission
Ensemble: Haolin Li and Joe Tremper, marimbas Gene Koshinski, bass synth and drum kit
Audio (mixing and editing): Gene Koshinski
Video and Lighting: Ben Hausman
Music and composer’s notes copyright Bruce A. Russell 2024
My composition Sequences (2000) will receive its belated world premiere this Saturday, April 20th, 2024 in a concert that runs from 3-4 pm EST. It will be livestreamed for free.
I’ve been waiting 24 years to hear this piece live! It’s for two marimbas and a light drum beat doubled with a synth bassline. It was revised this year for the University of Delaware Percussion Ensemble led by Dr. Gene Koshinski.
The music is from my Madra period, and is similarly small-scale minimalism, with all of its melodic and rhythmic patterns derived from the West African standard bell pattern and the harmony straight out of four-chord pop. It’s highly structured and finely detailed, and can be enjoyed simply with the body: groove music. It’s where I was stylistically just before I decided to put my aspirations as a working musician on pause (for twenty years…)
I don’t know the running order, so if you have an hour in your Saturday and would like to dedicate it to livestreamed percussion pieces… this is for you!
urfunk etude (1997) is for solo piano with or without electronics. In terms of the sequences of minimalist canonic material and the parallel alignments of pitch, rhythmic structure and register, it is a precursor to my string quartet Madra (1999) and other works. It also builds upon a particular piano technique that worked around my limitations as a self-taught pianist. It can be performed in the just intonation tuning heard here or in equal temperament. I gave the premiere performance in February 1997 at Love Salon, an informal monthly event held at Liminal Laboratory, an artists’ loft in a now demolished and rebuilt part of Toronto.
The piece was performed and recorded on my Korg 01/WFD workstation, technology which dates to 1991. With some minor score tweaks, the present audio is of the original sequence and effects played back to digital in 2022.
Composed and recorded December 1996–January 1997
Image from video by Carsten Knox, Liminal Laboratory, February 1997
Music and composer’s notes copyright Bruce A. Russell 2022
Eccentricities is a six-song, self-released cassette EP which emerged in the fall of 1990. I recall having 100 copies made and being satisfied with that level of dispersion; it was all I could afford in any case. In honour of the 30th anniversary, I present two of the songs here (with a third linked below).
My recordings during this period were all effectively demos. Made with no budget, engineers, producers, retakes, final mixdowns, editing, mastering, label releases or promotion. They were an in the moment document, like the solo piano recordings I turned to focus on in later decades, created with a minimum of tools and preparation and on the raw side. There are many songs and pieces I’ve returned to for revision or reimagining, but the version 1.0s are always done quickly, very rarely seeing a live performance.
Track 1, side B. In its awkward, often corny way, “The Gardener” was about envisioning a sustainable, equitable and peaceful future. Musically, it looked back on the two decades which preceded it terms of tempo, rhythm and melodic style; and even further back in the century with the use of stacked-fifth chords as the main harmonic fabric. All the keyboard parts were performed live. The presence of the TR-808 marked the first time I incorporated a preprogrammed element into my music. I often wish I had seen fit to capture it on its own as a stem as it was so fun to make, and like the song itself, it expressed a unique side of my musical thought at a particular time.
Written and recorded July 1990 half-inch 8-track, unmastered mixdown to DAT Roland S-50, Roland TR-808, Yahama DX-27, Fender bass, voice
Track 3, side B. “One Foot Firmly Planted” is the closing song of the EP, and like “The Gardener” which opens the side, it employs chords of stacked fifths in the organ as the harmonic material, sometimes doubled here by the voices. The intro is clearly modelled upon Steve Reich’s “Tehillim.” It’s a piece which did not “emerge from the ground” as I boast in the liner notes but neverthless formed spontaneously, layer by layer from a bare bones beat of conga, clapping and floor tom; coloured with organ and hailed by some strange, quasi-philosophical, quasi-choral voices. In an unconscious nod to the period of study of electroacoustic composition which I had just concluded, I randomly spliced and recombined the last few seconds of the multitrack tape, where the song disintegrates.
Written and recorded July 1990 half-inch 8-track, unmastered mixdown to DAT percussion, Korg CX-3, voice
EL MAHBOOB 