Word: sonics
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Communist surge-one Tokyo daily calls it a "sonic boom"-is as sudden as it is startling. When Tanaka, supposedly at the peak of his popularity, called an election last fall, he discovered that the chief gainer was not his own Liberal Democratic Party but the Communists, who raised their representation in the Diet's 491-seat lower chamber from 14 to 39 (with another guaranteed vote from a left-wing ally). With a party membership of only 300,000, the Communists had attracted 5,500,000 votes, 10.5% of all ballots cast. Gains in local elections have been...
...Chicago, ex-Cop Eddie Bray, who heads a private detective agency called American Security Agents, Inc., reports that there has been a 100% increase in one lucrative phase of his operations -"debugging," the detection of hidden devices used to eavesdrop. In New York, John Meyner, president of Sonic Devices, Inc., which also peddles "bug"-finding skills, says he cannot drive through downtown Manhattan without picking up a flood of illegal eavesdropping signals on his sensitive detectors. Just four blocks from the White House, an electronics store named the Spy Shop is doing a thriving business selling both eavesdropping and debugging...
...unpleasant Krafft-Ebing revelation concealed behind that coy yellow band. In the denouement there are traces both of Psycho and the Roger Ackroyd device: Are you sure you should trust the narrator? But Ellin conceals his key surprise in a phonetic note written by a distracted Mexican housemaid: Noscool sonic comic loc. Work that out and the solution may fall into place. Since the note appears on page 21, well before the band, Random House is jeopardizing its petty-cash supply. ·Jay Cocks
Walter Carlos: Sonic Seasonings (Columbia, 2 LPs, $6.98). When the Roman philosopher Seneca said, "All art is but imitation of nature," he didn't know the half of it. Today's electronic composer no longer bothers to imitate nature the way Vivaldi did in The Four Seasons. Tape recorder in hand, he simply camps at the seashore or in a rain forest, and lets Mother Nature herself compose an accelerando of breaking waves or a pizzicato polka of storm effects. Then he adds electronic sounds-whirrr, ping, eeeeeee, r-r-r-roar-and voila...
Stravinsky: Petrushka (New York Philharmonic, Pierre Boulez conductor, Columbia, $5.98). Boulez's first recording with his new charges at the Philharmonic, and a sonic dazzler. When Stravinsky conducted this music, he deliberately gave it a kind of squeeze-box accordion sound, as though trying to match the marionette-stage milieu of the puppet hero. Boulez's performance is much broader in both aura and atmosphere, as if his touchstones were the gay, extroverted Shrovetide Fair scenes that open and close the work. The approaches are opposed but, happily, of equal validity...