Jon Appleton has been a central figure in electroacoustic music for close to 3 decades now. Contes de la mémoire is sort of like his “Greatest Hits” compilation — a collection of ten electronic pieces from throughout his career. The earliest of these pieces is Georganna’s Fancy (1966), which is an abstract piece based on timbre manipulation that seems to draw its inspiration from the phoneme-happy Darmstadt boys of the 1950’s (i.e. Stockhausen and Co.). Other early pieces include the 1967 Appleton theme song Chef d’œuvre, which samples a jingle for Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee pizza by the Andrews Sisters, and the gloriously hip 1969 Newark Airport Rock which combines recordings of average people responding to the question, “What do you think of the new electronic music?” set to a cut ’n’ paste accompaniment of rock ’n’ roll samples. The most recent pieces (like Dima Dobralsa Domoy (1993) and San Francisco Airport Rock (1996)) are pretty mellow (perhaps too mellow) — they lack the bite that the 60’s-era pieces have. For anyone with an interest in American electronic music, Contes de la mémoire offers a valuable artistic history of one of its chief perpetrators.