*2022 Stock.* In short, some of the most breathtaking, intrepidly advanced electronic music ever recorded. A truly precious survey of a lone, pioneering voice in electronic music. Cardboard slipcase housing a CD jewel with 104-page booklet in German and English. Karlheinz Stockhausen – “Mixtur” (1964) is one of the earliest compositions for orchestra with live electronics, and is amongst the first compositions using live-electronic techniques generally. "Orchestral sounds transform into electronic sounds and then just as fast – blindingly! – move back into the realm of the orchestra, in and out of the faintest, most subtle variations of combinations of electronics and instrumentals – and you realize that this is something completely new… well, at least that is what you thought back in 1964, when Stockhausen composed ”Mixtur”. (No other composer has, however – to my humble knowledge – managed anything in this idiom that even comes close to ”Mixtur”, even given the advantage of the decades that have passed since the year of composition; 1964). This is in fact the very first piece for live electronics, i.e. electronic treatment of sound in real time; in this case the sounds from the instruments of the orchestra (more on this later).

Stockhausen also was the first composer to make a piece out of pure sine waves, which translates into the first electronic music piece; ”Studie I” (1953). Therefor you can justly claim that Stockhausen invented electronic music.  Here he takes the adventure on a huge leap forward, inventing live electronics. Nothing – not even those stupid little commercial jingles of America (”I drink Dr. Pepper and I’m proud; I used to be alone in the crowd”…) – would sound the way they do, hadn’t Stockhausen feverishly worked these new sonic art forms from a nucleus of brilliant thought to a resounding materialization of adventurous longings! He has shaped so much of the sounding space in which we dwell, that you could say that he’s the main architect behind the whole structure, even though few people remember this, or even ever knew it.

However, that’s the way it is! Stockhausen is the man! He gave us electronic music and live electronics, among a multitude of other things. He’s still pouring out his soul in new auditive and philosophical explorations, and he hasn’t pulled the breaks, even though he’s well past 70 now, setting an example also through this for us middle-aged gentlemen of a succeeding generation! However, age is just a succession of years, an account of how long you’ve been around – but it has nothing to do with how old you are! I’ve known people who must have been born old, and then there are others who keep getting younger, like in Bob Dylan’s song “My Back Pages”, where the refrain goes: “Oh, but I was so much older then; I’m younger than that now”.

That is Stockhausen, one of the forever young! Fearless ahead!" (Excerpt from Ingvar Nordin / Sonoloco extensive review)