Composer, artist, and co-Director of the San Francisco Tape Music Center from 1962 to 1966, Ramón Sender Barayón portrays the tenor of the times in the music and art world of San Francisco in the mid-1960s. A mixture of fact and fiction, history and imagination, he invents the Multi-Media Space-Time Lab as a center in which a group of musicians and a filmmaker explore new freedoms in music and film and try out new ideas. Real people, among them John Cage, Stu Dempster, Ken Kesey, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and David Tudor, pass fleetingly through the Lab as, in fact, they passed through the San Francisco Tape Music Center. They add credence to the historical setting. But the group of artists who inhabit the Lab are imaginary amalgams of the San Francisco art scene at the time. They are cheerful, zany, creative, charming, and touching. They do wonderful things. Most important, they are serious about their work. They present models that, from today’s perspective, opened up new ways to think about music. As one of the characters says towards the end of the book, I don’t think any of us yet realize what a special thing the Lab has been.” And that’s the reality in the book. As Ramón Sender Barayón points out, That’s what this book is about. It’s a about a special thing.
