[CP 285 CD] David Keane; Lyra, Aurora, CAPAC Musical Portrait

April 2023; an anthology of virtually all of composer & author (his 1981 "Tape Music Composition" is a wonderful guide to getting started in "Classical" Electronic Music techniques) David Keane's vinyl-era output, including his 1979 Music Gallery outing "Lyra", the 1985 "Electroacoustic Tone Poems" set "Aurora" & of course Keane's CAPAC "Portrait Musical" single as a bonus.

Although born in the States & starting his journey through Electronic Music at Ohio State University in 1963, it was Keane's appointment as director of Queen's University Electronic Music Studio in Vancouver in 1970 that began his association with Canada, where he became a citizen that year. It's endlessly fascinating to hear a composer working right at the cusp of the Analogue/Digital divide, and in fact the "Lyra" LP (incidentally issued by the storied Toronto space the same year as the Nihilist Spasm Band's "Vol. 2" &  Lubomyr Melnyk's "KMH") largely features instrument-plus-tape pieces composed in the years directly prior, plus a near-side-length tribute/deconstruction of Hugh LeCaine's "Dripsody". Flash forward a few short years & the instantly evident digital-FM & vocoder timbres that dominate the 3 pieces that make up "Aurora" seem to come from a different world entirely, and in fact his whole compositional sensibility seems to have been updated drastically for the 80s. 

This Creel Pone edition comes as two discs housed inside a six-panel full-color booklet comprised of all of the context from the initial issues, with a two-panel insert blowing up the biographical details from the CAPAC single to legibility. Eagle-eared listeners may, in fact, notice the second disc's "Bonus" track 4; I'll leave the lineage there up to speculation...