In the early 1960s, Poet & multimedia artist Gerd Stern & friends Michael Callahan & Steve Durkee founded USCO (an acronym for Us Company or the Company of Us). It became a burgeoning cooperative group of artists, poets, filmmakers, engineers, & composers who worked out of an old church in Garnerville, New York, north of NYC.

It is here that they emerged as probably the first producers of multimedia happenings, of immersive & oozing light shows, ephemeral performances that became all the rage during the height of hippie-LSD times. Part hippie, part beatnik, part Black Mountain, part Eastern mysticism, part fluxus, part political leftist, & part new music, they adhered to collective & inclusive artistic practices & preferred to work under the USCO name rather than as individual artists.

USCO utilized unique new uses for lighting, colors, projections, film, audio, & live performances to create multimedia & environmental art that included installations with slide projections, closed-circuit television, oscilloscopes, strobe lights, amplifiers, early IBM computers, live performances. This culminate most famously in the Expanded Cinema Festival & Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Theater & the first multimedia disco called Murray the K’s World that incorporated immersive technology & ideas, allowing audiences – many of whom may have been tripping – to feel as if they were entering a new, immersive, sensory realm.

They’ve performed or exhibited at many great museums, universities & venues including the van Abbe Museum in Eindhoven, Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum, Tate Liverpool, Pompidou Center, MIT, & RISDI. The USCO Church was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2016.

I first met Gerd in the 20th Century. Born in Germany in 1928, he emigrated with his parents to the US as a refugee in 1936. Gerd & started crossing paths in New York City in the 1960s. We discovered common ground at a Phill Niblock loft concert in the 1990s. He asked me to write music & sound design for his play, “Lost Cabaret” or “Katandogastrophic,” produced for the 2003 New York Fringe Festival. I asked Gerd to create poetry for a 3D sound work Sky High. It is included in this iMMERSE! podcast.

Playlist mix by Wreck This Mess

When Then • USCO SkyHigh • USCO [Gerd Stern Poem, Charlie Morrow Music] Hubbub • USCO Insurrection Oratorio 1 • Charlie Morrow & Bread & Puppet Theatre Insurrection Oratorio 2 • Charlie Morrow & Bread & Puppet Theatre & various auditory intrusions

“I define immersive as the first time I realized that there was a bigger universe than my daily life.”

David First is a many-sided composer-musician having played in Dead Cheese, a hippie guitar band in his youth, performed with Cecil Taylor in Carnegie Hall, produced many records of minimalist drone music some of which were released on Phill Niblockʼs XI label, he’s played in rowdy bar bands, led the no-wavish band the Notekillers, which had a significant influence on Sonic Youth and he has even conducted a Mummerʼs String Band in various Philly parades. The Village Voice once described him as "a bizarre cross between Hendrix and La Monte Young."

He’s performed at most of the avant garde’s hallowed halls including The Kitchen, Bang On A Can, Central Park Summerstage, The Knitting Factory, Tonic, the Deep Listening Institute, CBGBʼs as well as De Ijsbreker in Amsterdam and many festivals throughout Europe. Other projects include working with the sonification of the atmospheric phenomena known as the Schumann Resonances and human brainwaves and other esoteric projects such as The Western Enisphere, a drone and micro-pulse acoustic-electric ensemble.

Samples Playlist Wave Music III - 60 Clarinets & a Boat • Charlie Morrow Tape Letter to Michigan • David First Dead Cheese Twice Daily live @ Cheese Nation 1971 • David First Harmonic Dance • David First The Distant Softening Spirit Wave Pulse Tape Girder Interference Etude • Wreck, First & Morrow Live at AmbientChaos • David First Wave Music V - Conch Chorus and Bagpipe • Charlie Morrow Tell Tale • David First Etude 15 • David First Distant Signals • Charlie Morrow Pulse Piece • David First Blossom Dearie Snippet of her Air • Wreck Mix Spirit Voices • Charlie Morrow

Subjects touched upon: drones, bar bands, rock & roll bands, Lamonte Young, Dave’s Waves, Sunview Luncheonette Greenpoint, psychedelic revolution, poet Jerome Rothenberg, bending notes, Douglas Kahn, minimalist tendencies, free jazz, world music, Meteor Crater AZ, the heavens, the Kitchen, Phill Niblock, guitar, oscillators, signal generators, Muddy Waters, electronic music, Dennis Sandole, Hermann von Helmholtz, ancient voltaic cells, Harry Partch, Charles Ives, the minor third, blues, Gert Stern, new age, pseudo-science, Schumann resonances, improv, Discman, electrical engineer father, heterodyning, pursuit of magic, Canal Street ...

Robin Sip as a Dutch writer-producer-director and CEO of Mirage3DRobin is best known for productions like Mars 1001, Dinosaurs at Dusk, Origins of Life, Natural Selection & Dawn of the Space Age, which was the world’s first 3D fulldome film. Sip is also an award-winning pioneer of special venue 3D cinema & his Mirage3D is a leading fulldome-VR producer, having produced some 20 fulldome shows.

He began his professional life as a computer engineer, moved on to become a 3D modeler, & eventually, a writer-director. More recently, he has focused His is on the improvement of live action capture for domes, with the design of new camera rigs for films & fulldome-VR productions.

I met Robin over a decade ago in Denver, Colorado when his work was featured by Dan Neefus in the Gates Planetarium at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. Since then, we’ve collaborated on the creation of the Planetarium version of the feature documentary Moonwalk One on the anniversary of Apollo 11. It has my music & Sound by Robin.

Topics discussed: love of space flight, astronauts, Apollo 11 & 12, immersive practice & work flow, studied electro-computer engineering, Omniversum, tilted dome, digital projectors, space flight narratives, immersive educational films, fulldome cinema, planetariums, research, Darwin, soundtracks, dinosaurs...