Well, that wasn’t much to go on in pre-internet days, was it? Needless to say, I’d never heard Anode before I started searching t’internet. Turns out Anode, or Anode Productions, is the work of a chap called Robert Carlberg, who was born in Seattle, Washington in 1954. He has been actively creating soundscapes since 1972, releasing his first recording “Early Tapeworm” in 1975. He has recorded musique concréte, minimalism, tape music, phonography, drones, manipulations and other non-keyboard-based electronics. He has also produced recordings for other artists, created soundscapes for film, theatre and musical composition, documented rare environments, provided audio backdrops for trade shows and conventions, and amassed a large library of audio-vérité recordings. On top of that, he founded the Synex newsletter for electronic musicians and wrote a monthly column for Electronic Musician Magazine between 1979 and 1989. Robert became acquainted with many other DIY electronic musicians worldwide, in what eventually became known as “Cassette Culture.”

Robert has released over 50 albums of material, including the “Urban Soundscape” series, which he describes: “My Anode Urban Soundscape Series (AUSS) is a series of CDRs documenting particularly-interesting environments. Unlike other “natural sound” releases which seek to record environments free of mankind – or through editing, create such an environment artificially – my series dismisses the view that all human activity is “noise pollution.” We live, most of us, in human society and the natural sounds around all of us include our fellow pink apes. The sonically-rich environments presented therein will yield to careful attention, but they also can be placed in the background for reading, sleeping, or simply experiencing the ambience of a different time & place. My ultimate hope is to build up a library of such urban soundscapes, allowing one to go “around the world in 80 minutes.” They also explore the idea that we don’t have to travel to exotic locales or witness unusual events to find something worthy of our attention. ”

Robert has a series of recordings on Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/anode-1

This is the only YouTube recording I could find of his work: one side of his “Anode” cassette release from 1979.

Downtime is described as: “An homage to the utility of occasional discontent.”
Recorded and mixed March 1979 at Anode Studios and the Palace of Lights, Seattle.

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