When we first began our work reissuing Laurie Spiegel's The Expanding Universe in 2008, you could still purchase sealed copies of the original pressing on Joel Chadabe's Electronic Music Foundation (EMF) webstore. A lot can change in a short time. Between that time and 2012 when the release finally made it out, EMF no longer had that webstore. Between 2012 and 2017, when it began time to start repressing the album, it was clear that we should bring more of the tracks from the 2CD collection into the vinyl format. We've managed to fit onto three LPs most of the tracks that on the 2CD collection, except for "Music for Dance" and "Dirge" which remain exclusive to the digital editions, and have all been newly cut for vinyl by Rashad Becker.
On the same date, January 18th, 2019, we are bringing into circulation Laurie Spiegel's second album, Unseen Worlds. created using her own computer program "Music Mouse: An Intelligent Instrument." At the time of its original release in 1991, the issuing record label, Scarlet, turned out to be going out of business, dissolved and disappeared, sending the album immediately into obscurity. Outside of a private CD edition issued by Spiegel on her own Aesthetic Engineering label in 1994, this new edition represents the first proper commercial release of Unseen Worlds.
The album also happens to be a namesake for this releasing label. We empathize wholeheartedly with Laurie Spiegel's reason for selecting the name for her album:
"The title 'Unseen Worlds' was suggested to me by I Ching Hexagram #16, "Enthusiasm", which says "It fell to music to construct a bridge to the world of the unseen" (Bollingen Edition, p. 72). After not having used the I Ching for some years, I thought it might help me put this recording together, and so it did." - Laurie Spiegel, from the Unseen Worlds liner notes
So has music like Laurie's helped us put recordings together and make a number of other difficult connections hiding in plain sight.