By almost any measure, electronic music composer/improviser Bob Ostertag is an extreme radical. His raw material is the world. He digs his trowel into the wet cement of everyday life, where nothing is really permanently set, anyway, and plasters it in impressionistic smears and pointillistic dabs across the walls of our perception. His strategies range somewhere between those of John Cage, academic computer musicians, brutally expressive free improvisers, and Che Guevara.

With entrance into Ostertag’s world comes a severe attitude adjustment. You have to curb your brain, dump your ‘common sense’ judgments, and peel away the calluses that have built up over the vulnerable core of your senses. Listening becomes cultural time travel at warp speed. Time, however, jumps off its linear tracks. You have to accept both the simultaneity of your feelings and your hapless inability to control them. Scary stuff.

Listening to Ostertag can be like looking at an aged oak. It’s as if the same force that turns gnarly bark, twisted trunk, and random crooked branch patterns into a perfect, beautiful tree is transforming these coarse and ostensibly unrelated sounds into music. The ‘music-ness’ of Ostertag’s work is no less than the ‘tree-ness’ of the oak; we’re just not trained to hear it.

— San Francisco Bay Guardian

​

The New York Times:
Bob Ostertag’s improvisations on various non-keyboard synthesizers are about as far removed from the electronic music clichés of the past as can be imagined.

​

Die Zeit:
Sampling technology is used in a significant way for the first time. The music encircles reality, decomposes it into music and recomposes it until reality is no longer able to escape. Great music, that has something to do with life again.

​

Music and Sound Output:
Perhaps the oddest music I have ever heard, it’s also more the sound of lives lived, and lives lost, than any music I have ever heard.

​

Keyboard Magazine:
A gleeful savagery, with the droll wit of Satie’s piano pieces, the breathless silences of Japanese music, the collaged clutter of Stockhausen’s short-wave radio suites, and the political bite of Brecht/Weill songs.