Texas-born composer Maggi Payne has just quietly been busy being a legend over decade after decade. Well known to Mills College (as its Center for Contemporary Music co-director until 2018), if you don’t know her, you should. And this is just the kind of Sunday to gaze at some crystals and listen to her ethereal textures on the then already-vintage Moog modular Series III, in a tip straight from The Bob Moog Foundation.
Speaking of people who quietly shape the musical world, it was a pleasure to run into Michelle Moog-Koussa, the foundation’s fearless Executive Director at Superbooth. Michelle has not only been an asset to her father’s legacy, but has herself given us inspiration into what music can accomplish. At a time when education and science feel fragile, we need that voice.
Someone from the excellent team at the foundation shares this gem — an excerpt of Payne’s 1982 Crystal. The shifting rainbow-hued crystal photography is the composer’s own. As Geeta Dayal writes for the LA Phil, these are “handmade videos of crystals growing under a microscope and data of solar winds provided by one of NASA’s top physicists, the late Fred Scarf.”
Payne’s work connects with exactly that mission, bringing together intellectual curiosity with sonic imagination. Listen to this, and I’ll bet you start imagining what to do with a modular synth near you.
From a Mills student to a Mills professor, a flute player to multimedia electroacoustic composer, Payne was and is a prolific force. Check out these bios, as it’s all just endlessly interesting work, predicting a lot of the scene in experimental electronic sound now internationally.
Maggi Payne: A Nexus For The Next [LA Philharmonic]
Payne shared her full audiovisual 12-minute film System Test (Fire and Ice) from 2001 with The Wire a few years back; see the accompanying story:
There’s the spectacular 2020 composition, Arctic Winds, based on location recordings of “the sounds of dry ice, space transmissions, BART trains, and poor plumbing,” among others. It’s all mixed together in an immersion that blends the microcosmos and macrocosmos, so that one becomes indistinct from the other — a little like a fanciful field recording take on Powers of Ten.
And Crystal was reissued in 2017, too:
on the reissue of maggi payne’s crystal by aguirre [The Hum]
Check out The Bob Moog Foundation, too — they can use support for their projects, including Moogseum and Dr. Bob’s Sound School, now more than ever.