Sanford Ponder’s Etosha – Private Music In The Land Of Dry Water holds distinction for many things. One of them is being the first ever release on Peter Baumann’s, of sometime Tangerine Dream fame, Private Music record label. Another is for being a complete showcase of the sheer emotion (and promise) one can pull out of one of the earliest sampling workstations, the Fairlight CMI. In the eyes, ears, and mind of American musician Sanford Ponder, that bit of technology allowed him to explore the label’s original ethos of giving a place where musicians who weren’t quite New Age, experimental, and set in a specific sphere of influence, some space to create their own “private music”.
Sanford Ponder originally began his career as a Fairlight CMI operator for various production studios and doing session work for artists like Kurtis Blow, Chic, and Lou Rawls, among many others. Nowadays, surprisingly, you can find he’s left behind his musical career to focus on body work, becoming part of the healing community through a practice of rolfing, aquatherapy, and other physical rehabilitation service. However, in between these (seemingly) varied careers, Sanford had a very brief but forward-thinking solo musical career. Although, this early period is somewhat disowned by he, I can’t help but think there’s more to it than Sanford lets on.
Etosha – Private Music In The Land Of Dry Water, found him trying to find some common ground with those earliest of musicians who looked towards emulating our natural world, rather than try emulate other instruments, and in turn use that exploration to create music inspired by and informed by this/our environment. Using either the stock sampling floppy discs included with the Fairlight CMI sampler machine or actually venturing out and recording all sorts of environmental found sound, Sanford began putting together this album completely digitally.
Originally released in 1982 or 1983 (the timeline for Private Music’s discography is a little fuzzy here), Sanford’s debut was used as a showcase of newfound compact disc and digital recording technology. Putting the Fairlight CMI’s sequencer, the infamous Type R, through its paces he eked out all the organics out of it’s 8-voice, 64 kilobytes of memory. Accordingly, Etosha – Private Music In The Land Of Dry Water, was built out of a sample base consisting mostly of re-synthesized version of Sanford’s voice and nature sounds. It managed to find some home in the small swaths of homes that could afford nascent CD technology.
Seemingly untied to the new influential German electronic tradition, or hewing to closely to the American minimalist world much less the doe-eyed New Age movement, Sanford Ponder’s work here appears more like the DX-7-driven techno-ethereal world others like Eno, Yoshimura, and the like were interested in, in this other holistic view of ambient music. What’s interesting to me, is that he was beginning to toy a bit with the idea of “fractal” music — music driven by non-repetitive, organic, synthesized sequences. Although no fractals were used in Etosha – Private Music In The Land Of Dry Water, you can appreciate that some of the ideas that catch onto you here are based on how “organically” the songs unfold.
On songs like “Araguaia” what sounds like a synthesized flute of sort, twists and mutates, as all sorts of digital tremors rumble below its airflow, piece by piece putting forward the song’s canvas, then, its sonic palette, then macroing out a wonderfully meditative atmosphere. What keeps me coming to this album are all the little nuggets of misplaced sound coalescing into that “meditative atmosphere”. There are deeply inspired vocal ideas here that add oodles of quite rare inspiration you won’t find little else.
Jumping around to a track like “Alanna” invites you to rekindle that floating sound heard in the world of Nuno Canavarro, where every sample is rendered in its “halo” form, being reshaped until its part of a bigger idea. You hear on that track another hero in this story, in the form of R&B session man Clyde Criner, who sticks to playing that grand ole instrument (the piano) in a way that is both seamless and (once again) importantly, out of time. The album put this and more of it, all together, to end on its most poignant track “Frontier”.
“Frontier” never fails to impress me. In it I hear all sorts of environmental sound — insects, water, birds, and wolf calls — work their way from obviously synthesized playback into something far grander, as the sonic painter, in this case, Sanford, takes bits and pieces of those sounds and rearranges them into a sonic feeling, both nocturnal and completely organic-sounding. It sounds like nature reconstituting itself into a quiet symphony where every little bit can grow into this other little bit.
As Clyde joins in on piano, he delicately tries to find a space for his bit of melody. Bird song comes in on occasion, certain sounds drop out, only to come back on occasion, rain drops, thunder, and all sorts of other previously unheard of sounds join the lyrical melodies Clyde continuously, gently, drops everywhere and they all quiet down as the album ends on a wolf call. It’s beautiful, in a way that I’ve rarely experienced elsewhere. For a brief moment, technology opens up another tiny view into some inherent promise we can mold through it. Private music, of some sort, exists here.