What a fabulous book. Taking as his subject a few vital years in the musical and cultural life of San Francisco, Editor David W. Bernstein, Professor of Music at Mills College, has compiled an oral history unparalleled in scope, depth and insight. With access to all of the primary figures of the San Francisco Tape Music Center (SFTMC), what Bernstein has accomplished leaves no corner unexplored, no aspect – musical, visual, sensory – uncelebrated, no tangent unfollowed. It is that rare thing: a history so comprehensive, so potentially unwieldy, yet so easily and fluidly committed to a scant 282 pages of text as to read like a series of conversations between erudite, engaging and self-effacing friends – which, indeed, is exactly what it is.

Establishing from the outset the placement of the Tape Music Center at the vanguard of electronic music and the local new music ‘scene’, in his Foreword John Rockwell suggests an inverse equation of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, the latter being generally more readily acknowledged in cultural histories of the period: ‘[Many of the works of the SFTMC] created an excitement when they first appeared akin to the broader passions provoked by every new release of Janis Joplin or Bob Dylan or Country Joe or John Fahey or the Beatles. They were cultural moments’ (p. ix). It is important to note the symbiotic relationship between these musical cultures, for in reading the various interviews it becomes clear that the ‘low’ was certainly influenced by the ‘high’ (noted in references to the presence at various performances of members of local bands, and of the friendship between Steve Reich and Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh). San Francisco is a small town, after all, and, in the 1960s, anywhere there was a happening, or a multi-media event, there would be a gathering of like-minded people, and those open to new experiences. That some were in the ‘counterculture’ and some on the fringes of the ‘mainstream’ culture mattered not at all.

The book's historical overview actually begins with the 1966 Trips Festival, a three-day series of concerts promoted as ‘a non-drug re-creation of the psychedelic experience’ (p. 5), which, more importantly, served as a public meeting-point between experimental theatre, music, dance, and light shows. By this point the SFTMC had been active for nearly five years; but by the summer of 1966 the SFTMC had moved across the Bay to its institutional location at Mills College in Oakland, and some of its founding members followed paths elsewhere. This trailing-off of one vibrant local voice at a time when another – psychedelic rock music – was just reaching mainstream ears, might seem tragic, were it not for the enduring artistic legacy of the times in the cultural life of the Bay Area and beyond.

Following this initial historical overview, Bernstein's structure follows a very clear pattern of interviews with key figures, their first-person accounts, and brief explanatory essays on various technical, artistic, and historical aspects of the Center's activities. There is necessarily some degree of overlap – in dealing with a relatively short span of chronological time and a close artistic community, there are bound to be numerous references to the same turning point, or event, or piece, or compositional technique; but the book never becomes leaden by repetition or detail. Rather, the personal accounts written by Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, and Tony Martin, which immediately precede their interviews with Bernstein and Maggi Payne, serve to reinforce the feeling of collective memory, and where the individual memory may appear occasionally speckled, Bernstein and Payne are able to correct or substantiate facts by their own intimate knowledge of the SFTMC's history and archives.

The furthest-reaching interview is perhaps the first in the collection, with Ramon Sender and William Maginnis. Sender was seemingly the only member of the SFTMC who actively pursued a countercultural lifestyle, and his reminiscences are peppered with both technical language and drug references:

By contrast, Pauline Oliveros, one of only two female voices in the book (the other being choreographer Anna Halprin), provides one of the more detailed accounts of the improvisational nature of much of the SFTMC's work which, if contrasted with accounts of contemporary local improvisatory rock music, opens a whole spectrum of experience tangentially related to the psychedelic environment which surrounded the TMC geographically, if not artistically.

Given the nature of much of the music emerging from the SFTMC, there is necessarily a great deal in this book to delight the technogeek. The cutting edge of contemporary technology, mentioned innumerable times, was surely the Buchla 100 series Modular Electronic Music System (the ‘Buchla Box’). The enthusiasm for the Buchla Box permeates almost every page; but oddly, when it's Don Buchla's turn to reminisce, he seems an awkward interviewee. Bernstein and Payne work in paragraphs; Buchla works in fragmented sentences. Still, Buchla straddled that line between artistic insight and countercultural activity, as in his summary of working the sounds at Ken Kesey's Acid Tests: ‘I just showed up at the places with my instruments, took some acid, played some music’ (p. 173).

Concluding mention must be made of the book's accompanying DVD. After reading numerous accounts of the early performances of works such as Sender's Tropical Fish Opera (1962), his haunting Desert Ambulance (1964), and Oliveros' Bye Bye Butterfly (1965), the DVD rewards the reader with live performances of them (and many others) recorded in New York in 2004; Tony Martin's visual compositions illuminate most of the pieces, and, in Silent Light (1967, 2004) stand alone in a spectacular example of his ‘visual music’. It is a rewarding end to a truly satisfying reading experience.