Mother Mallards Portable Masterpiece Co. is a live synthesizer band founded by David Borden, that has taken several forms over the decades, beginning in the late 60's.  This two disk collection is an anthology reflecting back upon their various eras.

The first fifteen-minute piece, a recording from 1970 titled "Endocrine Dot Patterns", is a shimmering drone: undulating long tones from the synthesizer, joined at times by trumpets.  The second of the pieces from the 70's, "C-A-G-E I".  This track is something of a melodic arpeggiation, closer to Terry Riley or Phillip Glass territory, particularly with the bright, organ-like tones, shifting through various inversions and variations of its melodic material in a repetitive thirty two minutes.  The chord progression gradually reveals itself to be deep, intelligent and mystic in the thoughtfulness of its smooth unfolding, which is like a movie for the mind's eye.  As it turns out, this was indicative of what would be the primary style of the Mother Mallard ensemble.

The sound quality on these early recordings are shrill and harsh, with an over-abundance of resonance.  The second is smoother than the first, but track also unfortunately begins to amass pain inducing overwhelming high frequencies as it swells.  I find myself turning the music down and down to avoid hurting my ears.  This greatly hampers the immersive, tonally rich qualities of the music, and it really would have only required some decent mastering to tame these frequencies.  However, this criticism only applies to disk 1; disk 2 sounds much better.

The second disk contains eight tracks which together comprise 2/3 of an apparently twelve series titled "The Continuing Story of Counterpoint".  The different parts of this series were separated in time of creation by many years, and the total span of time for the material on this disk is 1976 - 1987.  These continue the Terry Riley-esque arpeggiated style of the earlier piece "C-A-G-E", thankfully with much cleaner recording.

From here the pieces only become more sophisticated in structure and symphonic in scope, becoming some of the most ambitious synth music I have ever heard, and deserving of a 'modern classical' label.  "Part 3" (which is the second of the parts included here, "Part 2" is absent) features an operatic female vocal which hits odd, technical rhythms at times.  The tonal materials in the background seem capable of endless variation, always keeping with a sort of ethereal, luminous arctic tone.

A sweep-heavy, shredding guitar solo accompanies the synth in the next part, and it really accentuates the similarity of some of this melodic writing to progressive rock like ELP or Dream Theater, who often use similar arpeggiated and scalar figures with irregular variations.

These are some very compositionally advanced synthscapes that display years of classical training and musicianship alongside the usual intuitive psychedelic currents and longform structures of classic era synth music.  Fans of Terry Riley and Phillip Glass should track Make Way For Mother Mallard :50 Years of Music down immediately, at least if they can stomach the roughly recorded first disk.  The second half is truly worth the price of admission alone, in any case.