Suzanne Ciani - Help, Help, The Globolinks! LP

$28.98

As faithful guardians of the Ciani Musica Inc. studio vault, Finders Keepers twist the key and return to their collaborative series of previously unreleased music from one of the most important and influential composers in multi-disciplinary electronic music, Suzanne Ciani. This electronic soundtrack for an operatic, ecological, scholastic, science-fiction theater production for children of all ages not only further reveals Ciani's vibrant and versatile skills as an experimental musician and narrative sound designer, but also highlights her European heritage. Here, she worked to the script of Milanese librettist Gian Carlo Menotti and a cast of forward-thinking fellow Italian-American creatives (including Giorgio Armani and Fiorucci in the wardrobe department). Originally performed in 1968 and gaining worldwide acclaim throughout the 1970s, Menotti would revise his play for the turn of the '80s which called for a new approach to the music and sound effects. All of this would make their world premiere in New York high school theaters in April of 1980.

Suzanne Ciani on the original: "The original production had been in 1968 and I felt that the electronic music component could be more playful and less abrasive than the original production." For Help, Help The Globolinks!, Ciani would give Menotti's well-traveled aliens a brand new voice and with reinvention she communicated with a young audience keen to hear the genuine sounds of the future while retaining melodicism and personality. Ciani managed to evade the obvious typecasting of her music through the medium of shlock sci-fi cinema. Within the realms of opera and education, Ciani found her perfect channel, scratching her cinematic itches with android music in The Stepford Wives and as "the first female composer to score a major Hollywood movie" with The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981). Furnishing a plot of an ecological alien intervention worthy of a Magma youth starter pack and realigning early pioneering electronic operas such as Karl-Birger Blomdahl's Aniara or Remi Gassman's Electronics, this virtually undocumented work by the hardest working woman in VCO business is finally preserved after just a handful of exclusive theatrical airings over 35 years ago.

Ciani's combined roles as an abstract artist and an astute technician are in equal measures here, a rare duplicity which is essential to The Globolinks!