I was unfamiliar with Allen Ravenstine when this series of four discs showed up in my mailbox, but he was a member of Pere Ubu and is also a commercial pilot. These discs together form the collection "The Tyranny of Fiction." The first of these is called "Electron Music." One would expect based on the cover art that this would be kind of a throwback to the 60s and the height of the nuclear race and you would be correct. Ravenstine has assembled a host of other people to help him with this with synthesizers, theremin, Ondes Martenot (an electronic instrument from the 1920s), prepared guitar, and mellotron.

The disc gets off to a kind of shaky start as it's kind of standard synth-based ambience with a simple melody, but then we move into "Firefly," which starts off with some synthesized strings but then turns into an interesting mix of metal, chimes, and analog synth weirdness. There is a lot of crackling and hiss, which I suspect is intended to evoke the idea of a Geiger Counter. "Going Upriver" is a spacey ambient track with lots and lots of synths and more sawtooth wave than you can shake a stick at. "110 in the Underpass" keeps the spaciness going with a nice mixture of synth washes and analog blips and crackles. The disc gets more experimental as it goes along until we reach "5@28," which is the longest track on the disk at almost 10 minutes and seems to be broken up into two movements. This is what a mad scientist's lab sounds like when he's left for the day and still left his machines running. We have theremin and feedback washes and plenty of analog bleeps and blips that would be right at home in the background of a 1950 sci-fi movie. It maintains the kind of clattering noisy ambience that gives it a retro space-age music feel until halfway through, when it takes a more whimsical turn with the theremin. This is by far the strongest track on the disc. Overall, this is an interesting beginning to the "Tyranny of Fiction" collection and leaves me interested to see what disc number two has in store. This disc weighs in at around 25 minutes.