During the late 1950s, longtime CBS Radio musical director
Jim Fassett introduced a Sunday afternoon program titled Strange to Your Ears, essentially a vanity showcase to spotlight the exec's growing fascination with the kind of magnetic tape experiments first explored by musique concrète pioneer
Pierre Schaeffer a decade earlier. Despite his corporate credentials,
Fassett was no dilettante -- the tape pieces collected for this LP don't boast the sheer imagination or engineering wizardry of contemporaries like
Karlheinz Stockhausen or
Tod Dockstader, but the sheer brass necessary to create music this radical and difficult for national radio broadcast is alone sufficient to legitimize
Fassett's dedication to his craft. And while Strange to Your Ears doesn't seem quite so alien decades after the fact, it's nevertheless a bold, anything goes immersion into pure sound, painstakingly woven from tape splices and re-recordings sped up, slowed down, reversed and pureed -- no less fascinating are
Fassett's spoken introductions, delivered in a voice so dignified and authoritative that the music seems that much more audacious by comparison.