‘Audium V: Rewind’ Revives the Chaotic Electronic Music of the 1960s

When I first learned about the 1960s in elementary school, the peeling textbook pages and grainy documentary footage couldn’t possibly capture the time period’s full, unrestrained creativity. The decade, ripe with social change and revolution, was a booming period of experimentation — where an unfettered desire to rebel against tradition coursed through various rising subcultures. LSD-laced music and sensibilities, maximalistic and unapologetic, grew in popularity. Most of all, the ’60s were loud, as people searched for a new sense of self and way of being. 

In the music world, electronic musicians were also exploring in unprecedented ways. With analog equipment like oscillators, tape recorders, filters and fuzz units, composers tinkered with manmade and environmental noise to create immersive and disorienting soundscapes. The momentum of this electronic innovation soon took over the Bay Area, leading to the founding of the Center for Contemporary Music at now-defunct Mills College, the now-defunct San Francisco Tape Music Center, and the still-standing San Francisco institution known as Audium.

First opened in 1967, Audium is an intimate sound theater nestled between Pacific Heights and Nob Hill, where for over a half-century co-founder and musician Stan Shaff performed compositions that bounced up, down and across the dark space for curious crowds.

Today, electronic music composer David Shaff is both continuing and revamping his father’s legacy at Audium. When I call him, he is cleaning his trumpet as he recounts his initial reluctance in being part of the sound theater. “I was always kind of like, ‘No, Audium — that’s Dad’s thing. It’s not me,’” says Shaff. But after noticing a lack of experimental art spaces geared towards immersive, spatial sound work, he saw the importance of keeping Audium alive, both as a place to archive his father’s work and to create a collaborative environment for new musicians to work on experimental sound projects. 

From now until July 22, Audium is presenting Shaff’s performances of Audium V: Rewind, a reworking of a composition that his father created in 1969. The first in a new series of the senior Shaff’s digitized classic works, Audium V: Rewind began as a puzzle. Stan Shaff’s basement contains various boxes with old tapes, and when David found one labeled “Audium V,” he set out to organize the tapes and play the mix from start to finish. 

“It’s funny because Dad never was trying to preserve these things for posterity or anything like that,” says Shaff, who had to search for missing tapes and figure out an order according to each tape’s time length. It wasn’t a matter of just digging up the tapes to play together — he had to make sense of what they must have sounded like in 1969. When he had finished his work, he played the composition for his father. “He was like, ‘I don’t remember a damn thing,’” says Shaff. 

When his father asked him who was playing on the tapes, David exclaimed: “That’s you, Dad!” Unable to remember how exactly he had composed the piece so many years ago, the senior Shaff encouraged David to make the piece his own — to transform it how he saw fit. Working on Audium V: Rewind, then, became more than just historical preservation: it became an act of love that combined past and future, and a way to experiment with a work that was always meant to be experimented with. 

“We have totally different technology now than when they were doing it back in the day,” says Shaff. “So it’s his work, but it’s also kind of my work as well.” 

When I arrive for a recent Thursday evening show, I enter a dark lobby lit by various sound sculptures made by artist Ava Koohbor. Twenty other people mingle in the room, wandering from object to object, before we’re ushered through a narrow pathway that leads to the main theater. Several chairs are arranged in a large circle, and my eyes struggle to adjust to the absence of light. Then the scattering of dim floor lights fades and we’re plunged into pitch-black darkness.

As for the performance, here are some notes I wrote:

The sound of seagulls, foghorns, it feels like you’re enshrouded in mist at the ocean.

I imagine dark skies, a lighthouse. Whispering dies down, people move in their seats. 

There’s the sound of droplets, a leaky faucet or crack in the ceiling, plop plop plop. 

A machine comes to life, beeping. Whirring voraciously, the plops become violent trickles. The sounds grow louder, echoing across the entire room. 

There were times, especially in the first act, where I was overtaken with anxiety. A sound would begin as a faint murmur before it suddenly erupted in front of me. It could surge from the ground, or fall from above, moving chaotically and unpredictably. In utter darkness, I felt trapped. I even pondered crawling out of the theater just to escape all the noise. 

“Dad talks about how, back in the day, audiences were much less prepared for something like this,” Shaff explained to me afterward. “But even so, I feel like this work in particular is quite overwhelming even by today’s standards.”

Each iteration of Audium V: Rewind is different, and Shaff adjusts his live mix based on the audience’s response. Listening for chatter or silence, Shaff will amplify and experiment with the room’s 176 speakers to jolt and stir something in attendees. The piece is not static, and each performance is just as irreplaceable as it was in 1969: a container of that exact audience’s experiences that will never again be the same. “The energy that was happening at that time in the ’60s is still resonating to this day in the Bay in various ways,” says Shaff.

In other words: It resonates and reverberates, glitching and warping, intertwining itself with a dynamic history that centers individuality, liberation and defying conventions. 

David Shaff’s performances of ‘Audium V: Rewind’ run Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays through July 22 at Audium in San Francisco. Tickets are $30. Details here.