I don't know much about Ruth White. She was a synth pioneer back in the 60s when electronics were just beginning to be exploited by serious composers. She released just two albums, I think: "Flowers of Evil" and "Seven Trumps from the Tarot Cards." Both vinyls are hard to find these days: a copy of "Flowers of Evil" just went for $50 on eBay. But it's not hard to see why connoisseurs and historians of electronica are rediscovering White's work. "Flowers of Evil" is a tour-de-force of late 60s electronics: Baudelaire's poems provide a perfect backdrop for White's experiments. Be warned: these are not the happy-go-lucky synth stylings of Perry and Kingsley, with their assorted space-age whooshes, bleeps, and farting sounds. While there's still a bit of cheese here (at least to the 21st century listener), some of this stuff is genuinely creepy. And of course Baudelaire lends himself beautifully to this kind of thing. Here's "The Clock."(I guess I have a thing for musical interpretations of Baudelaire. During my first year at BYU, a roommate got me into French artist Mylène Farmer's album Ainsi soit je. Here's her version of "L'horloge." Somehow it hasn't aged nearly as well as White's version, which came out nearly 20 years earlier).
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