Electronic Hapiness
This CD set is a much needed collection for all musicians or just audio freaks with an ear for electronic music. The great thing about this set is the DVD that comes with it. If you are into pioneers of electronic music and visuals/video art, then this CD is a must for you. If you listen to electronic pioneers like Morton Subotnic to Joy Electric and visual pioneers like Yoichiro Kawaguchi to Silverlage then Don't delay. Add it to your collection.

The Total Package
I recently purchased Ohm, the early gurus of electronic music, and I am very immpressed. By far the most important criteria for judgment must be the quality of the cleaning up of early recordings. Every track on all three CDs has a low noise floor, which has been achieved without the loss of palpability or dynamic range that is so common with the usual cleaning processes. The other stand out feature is that this is the complete package; 114 page booklet with great art work, 13-16 tracks on each CD and a 20 track DVD. The whole lot is so well put together that I am proud to own it. Only one track each from the 30's and 40's, and heaps from the 50's and 60's. I'm glad I bought this.

An Audio Encyclopedia of Early Electronic Experiments
I enjoyed listening to the CD and watching the videos. Some of the selections, however, were not quite what I would call musical quality, but were interesting sound samples. I was glad that I heard them, but once heard they would not be something I would want to listen to as music or for a background when reading a book. Some tracks had a very good ambient environmental quality that would be good for creating a warm background, meditating or deep listening. Some showed that synths could do classical very well compared to the older instruments. As a collection, they were not categorized so that all the ones that would make ambient listening are grouped together, so I plan to do a mix of my own from this collection. It is PBS special quality as far as the DVD presentation, though some of the selections seemed more about the animation than the music in the background. I was very impressed with the presentation on STRIA and tried to find more on the internet afterwards. The idea of the a new musical scale from the phi ratio seems exciting to me. Clara on the Theremin, both on the DVD and on the CD was impressive and shows how well the Theremin can replace a violin. Having done a lot of healing work, it would be nice for violinists to know this option, because it is easier on their bodies. The neck kinking and tight shoulder throws the body out of balance a lot and sometimes leads to headaches or even migraines. It would be interesting to see a Theremin tweaked slight more to make it even sound more like a violin, but it is close already. All in all, I enjoyed the old collection and can organize the selections on my own from what they have given.

A great collection of important works
This is an excellent collection of pre-1980s electronic music. It probably goes without saying, but just to be clear, the music here is part of the academic/experimental music tradition and more popular forms of electronic music such as Kraftwerk or Jean-Jacques Perry are not represented here.

There is a great selection of composers here from early musique concrete pioneers like Pierre Schaeffer to technical innovators like John Chowning to unclassifiable geniuses like Iannis Xenakis. There are a few curious omissions such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, but the curators explain in the extensive liner notes that they were not able to acquire the rights to many works that they wanted to include.

Ohm is particularly useful for a broad overview of the development of electronic music. I carry it to my Intro to Sound Synthesis class everyday to play examples for my students. It's pretty handy in that way.

My biggest criticism is that many of the selections are excerpts. While it's great to have some 42 works all in one place, it's a shame to modify a composition without the composer's input or consent. It would be difficult to include the entire work in some cases such as "Philomel," which is a little over 20 minutes (if memory serves) and you may not mind having excerpts. It does make extended listen a bit easier. Since not everyone is used to hearing this sort of electronic music, these highlights may actually make the music slightly more accessible.

The DVD has a variety of material. There are quite a few "visualizations" created recently for early works. I'm not exactly sure how I feel about this. I really think, for example, Xenakis should have signed off on the project before they superimposed some visual material on his "Bohor". I can't really see what this adds, as many of these visualizations end up looking similar to the iTunes visualizer.

There are some very interesting interviews with pioneers such as Milton Babbitt and Clara Rockmore. Those are probably the most interesting parts of the DVD. There are also a few live performances. These range from a beautiful performance from Rockmore on her thermin to a bizarre performance piece featuring Alvin Lucier and his amplified brainwaves.

The set includes a nice booklet with some great information. It's perfect for someone unfamiliar with electronic music and will give them a good feeling for what it's all about. You get some historical context, some composer background, and brief descriptions of the work and why it is important.

Overall, I highly recommend this. For the beginner, this is an easily accessible introduction. For the expert, this is a handy summary of early work in the field and one that you can easily recommend to students.

Worth the dough
Yeah, it's costly, yeah, it quickly skims over 40+ years of electronic music, but its an excellent sample of the range of early uses and experimentations with electronics for creation of challenging and rigorous music. With 3 CDs and a DVD, plus a pretty thick (for a CD set) insert, I thought this was certainly a decent value. While certainly not encyclopedic, this set seems like a good starting point for exploring early electronic music.