PROJECT COMSTOCK

[JSngry]

Found this little tidbit while casually researching the career of arranger Frank Comstock:

FP: For Warner Bros., you did an unusual concept album with an outer space approach. You had the regular orchestra augmented with some rather unique electronic effects. Tell us about PROJECT COMSTOCK.

FC: The outer space album was really a ball to do. We had one electric organ and several repeating amps that they were starting to use with woodwinds. For example, a flute player might play a short phrase and it would repeat constantly until he would play the next phrase. It would do the same thing. We employed a few little tricks like that. We didn’t have any synthesizers back then. When I wrote the scores on paper, I’d take the last note and put it first and vice versa. The bottom line there is when somebody played that note, there was no attack and it came out backwards. Think about it. Any note, whether soft or loud, has an attack on it. In this case, the accents were all in the back. We recorded them that way, and played the tape back three or four times faster making the trombones sound like trumpets. The stereo era was just beginning and the labels were trying to come up with crazy sounds to help demonstrate the new left/right effect. We were playing nice songs that everybody knew, but we also threw in some pretty far-out items. I think that Lowell Frank, the engineer, went mad trying to find all of the parts as we cut them apart and pasted them back together again. The album must have sold three copies.

Sounds pretty "Space Age Batchelor Pad"-ish, sure, but I'm cool with that. Comstock is a writer with any number of tricks up his sleeve, from total schlock to pretty damn hip, so I might be interested in checking this one out.

Anybody know this item?