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VA – KlangSpektrum vol. 2

by Various artists

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released March 12, 2020

Various artists – KlangSpektrum vol. 2
Archaische Elektronik und Sprachexperimente
[Early electronics and vocal experiments]

A collection of rare and obscure tracks from the 2nd half of the 20th century, KlangSpektrum volume #2 includes a variety of experiments with field recording, hörspiel (radio play), tape music or electronic sounds, with a general emphasis on the spoken word. What these artists have in common is an independent spirit and few were ever associated with state funded projects. They often self-released their music or build their own electronic music studio. Some fused various art forms in unusual ways or created their own language. They were selected on this compilation for their individuality and unique way to spurn categorization, as well as the unavailability of their music circa 2020.

Researched, curated and with liner notes by L. Fairon, March 2020.

KlangSpektrum vol. 1 is here:
laurentfairon.bandcamp.com/album/klangspektrum-vol-1-klangexperimenten-unser-zeitgenossen



Tracklist:

01. James Cunningham – Electronic Effect #3 (1972)
US electronic musician James Cunningham joined Ovation Records Inc. in 1972 to publish library music LPs in the 4-channel matrix Quadraphonic system favored by label founder Dick Schory, formerly of RCA Records where he had worked on the Dynagroove process. This quirky, heavily filtered electronic loop is an excerpt from Cunningham's first LP, titled Sounds Of Today And Tomorrow (1972), produced by Dick Schory and published by Ovation Records.

02. Peter Handke – Hörspiel (1968)
A highly idiosyncratic radio play, 'Hörspiel' was the first of Austrian writer Peter Handke's 4 radio plays from 1968–69. These plays belong to the German radio drama revolution called Das Neue Hörspiel [The New Radio Play] in 1968, including innovative plays by Ernst Jandl, Franz Mon, Ludwig Harig or Gerhard Rühm, with radical sound experiments compared to the well established, post-WWII literary hörspiel. Peter Handke's Hörspiel took the form of a nonsensical questioning between 5 unnamed interrogators and a main character whose answers are either absurd, out of synch or plain ridiculous. The situation is further confused by the addition of innumerable extraneous noises (water, whistle, broken glass, trumpet, violin, birds) chosen by producer Heinz von Cramer, a specialist of the post-1968 experimental Hörspiel.

03. Klaus Röder – Meditation über ein Gebet (2000)
German classically-trained composer Klaus Röder (b1948) started experimenting with electronic sounds and tape recorders in Düsseldorf in the 1970s, eventually establishing his own electronic studio in 1975, like other independent German composers (eg: Josef Otto Mundigl). In this splendid piece for female recitation and electronics, the Lord's Prayer in German is rendered as a poignant lament for uncertain times. The title translates as Meditation on a Prayer.

04. Hugo Benioff – Earthquakes Around the World (1953)
These groundbreaking (no pun intended) earthquake recordings appeared on a 45rpm single issued by Road Recordings, a division of US ethnic and field recordings label Cook. Professor Hugo Benioff (1899–1968) –a seismologist at Caltech since the 1930s– had developped special, innovative apparatus (seismographs and seismometers) to conduct teleseismic recordings of earthquakes located thousands of miles away from California. On the A side of this disc, he introduces a variety of earthquakes from different parts of the world, all in speeded-up playback to render them audible to the human ear. As if pressing earthquake sounds on the A-side of a 7-inch single was not enough for a challenge, the flip features ionospheric recordings by Dr M. G. Morgan – another opportunity to gauge your ca1953 hi-fi system!

05. Karlheinz Essl – Carambol (1986)
Austrian composer Karlheinz Essl (b1960) studied composition, electroacoustic music and double-bass in Vienna in the 1980s, worked at Paris' IRCAM in 1992-93, and has been an educator in algorithmic and electroacoustic music in Austria since then. Carambol is an early musique concrète piece composed in Vienna in 1986. A study in tape splicing based on the sounds of snooker balls bouncing together, the result sounds like minimal techno, thanks to heavy filtering and equalizing.

06. Bill Brand – Moment (1972)
New York film director Bill Brand has been producing experimental films and organizing film festivals since the 1970s, and today works as educator in film preservation in NYU and Amherst, Massachusetts. Moment is a b&w experimental film showing a gas station filmed through the shades of a multi-paneled tire ad display, alternatively opening and closing, thus intermitently blocking the view of the gas station outdoor. The entire 23mn film only uses a few seconds of film reel, endlessly repeated in a specific, reverse order. Suppose you have 1s of film stock. If you cut it in 4 parts you have 4 sections: I, II, III and IV, each a quarter of a second long. Now if you put section IV first, then III, II and I, the action seems to go backward, though the actual pictures shown don't. It's the system used in Bill Brand's Moment. Accordingly, the soundtrack is a cut-up of musique concrète sounds (conversations and mecanical noises) in synch with the system used for the pictures.

07. Fabijan Šovagovic – Opomena (1975)
Fabijan Šovagovic (1932–2001) was a Croatian actor famous in all former-Yugoslavia and abroad thanks to his innumerable roles in Yugoslavian films, but also his appearance in Peter Brook's Meetings with Remarkable Men in 1979. This excerpt is from a 1975 Jugoton LP were he reads a selection of Croatian poets, sometimes, as is the case here, with synthesizer parts. Opomena (Warning) is a poem by Antun Branko Šimić (1898–1925), Croatia's most important poet in the 20th century. "Be careful not to go, small as thou are, under the stars, man" (Opomena).

08. Emmett Frisbee – Sound Paintings (1980)
Pittsburgh saxophonist Emmett Frisbee self-published his Sound Paintings LP in 1980 to the general indifference of the music world generally, locally or elsewhere. It is said he occasionally performed in the Pittsburgh area, jamming with like-minded jazz musicians. The Sound Paintings LP is a highly unusual album, with weird cover artwork, subtitle and track titles. It features 2 side-long suites encompassing a variety of music styles, from prog to field recording to cosmic synth to jazz. This is an excerpt from the more electronic section of the LP, including sounds lifted from commercial music and typewriter noises. Frisbee performs all other instruments himself apparently (piano, synth, sax, found sounds), though the LP aslo features guest musicians Larry McGee & Kenny Blake.

09. George Anderson – Soleil Ô (1970)
The music to a 1970 film by Mauritanian director Med Hondo titled Soleil Ô (Oh, Sun) about the lives of African expatriates in France during the 1960s, combining traditional African songs, satire, anti-racism and anti-colonialism. The film was restored and shown in Italy in 2018. Soundtrack by George Anderson (bass), Jean-Pierre Drouet (percussion) and Med Hondo (voice).

10. Josef Otto Mundigl – Quartett, quasi una fantasia (1981)
Joseph Otto Mundigl (1942–1999) was a German composer, musicologist and educator from the Lower Bavaria region of Germany around Regensburg and Nürnberg. He established his own, independent electronic music studio in the 1970s, in addition to using Regensburg University's own studio and instruments, especially the EMS Synthi-E, for which he wrote the first German guide in 1975. He started composing electronic music on the instrument in the early 1970s, eventually self releasing his unique LP 'Elektronische Musik' in 1981. In 1983, he released a cassette also titled 'Elektronische Musik' with more EMS Synthi-E explorations. This is an excerpt from Quartett, Quasi Una Fantasia, another fine EMS Synthi-E, 20min epic.

11. Mathias Spahlinger – Wie man wünsche beim schwanz packt (1980)
German composer, teacher and musicologist Mathias Spahlinger (born 1944) hold teaching positions in Stuttgart, Berlin and Karlsruhe between 1968 and 2009. Since 1969, he composed contemporary music for solo instrument, small ensemble or orchestra, as well as sound art and hörspiel, as is the case with 'Wie man wünsche beim schwanz packt ', a radio play produced by SDR (Süddeutscher Rundfunk: South German Radio) Stuttgart in 1980. The hörspiel is based on Paul Celan's German translation of Pablo Picasso's farcical theater play "Le désir attrapé par la queue (Desire caught by the tail)" from 1941. The highly Surrealist spirit of the original play is mirrored in the dramaturgy and sound design, full of percussion and dissonant noises.

12. Alexander Hutchinson – Mr Scales (1973)
Scottish poet Alexander Hutchison (1943–2015) had a carreer as English and Literature teacher in USA and Canada universities between 1966 and 1984, before returning to Scotland and pursuing an academic carreer there. In this sound excerpt, Hutchinson reads passages from his recently published chapbook Mr Scales at the Auction (Soft Press, Canada, 1972), with much sound effects and guitar parts. The abuse of effect pedals on the voice was obviously suggested by publisher Lawrence Russel who commissioned Hutchinson to contribute a track to his D.N.A. Tapes project, a poetry magazine on cassette. Says Russel: 'We were after the experimental, the migration into electronic sound-text narrative, where noise is just as important as language'. [Russell, 2015]

13. Jakobois – Nuestra Señora de Paris (1982)
French multi-disciplinary artist Jakobois (real name Jacques Hautbois) was born in 1950. He started practising painting and sculpture at the beginning of the 1970s, then discovered experimental cinema and turned to directing and acting in the mid-1970s. In 1982 Jakobois joined a small group of like-minded artists including Téo Hernandez, Michel Nedjar and Gaël Badaud to collaborate on experimental film projects. In the 1980s, Jakobois directed films like "Grappe d'yeux" (1983) and "Bruits d'images aux fenêtres d'osmin" (1984). Nuestra Señora de Paris is an experimental super 8 film in color by Mexican-born film maker Teo Hernandez (1939-1992), shot near or inside Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. The chaotic construction and flickering, quasi-epileptic montage of the film is perfectly complemented by the musique concrète and cut-up soundtrack created by Jakobois from Gregorian chants and environmental sounds recorded inside the church.

14. Sonja Mutsaerts – Stonehenge (1987)
Dutch classically-trained sound artist Sonja Mutsaerts was born in 1948 in Tilburg. She taught harmony, analysis and counterpoint at The Hague Royal Conservatory from 1976 to 1980. In 1983, she relocated to Paris to study at IRCAM and GRM until 1991, composing for tape, electronic sounds and live samples. Stonehenge, for percussion (Mutsaerts) and speaker (Bruno Montels), is the soundtrack to an art installation for the old chapel at Pitié Salpetrière hospital in Paris. It is based on a radical stereo separation of instruments. Returning to The Netherlands in 1991, she has since then regularly composed for keyboard sampler and other digital projects.

15. Herman Damen – Monologue Machine (1972)
Dutch concrete and sound poet Herman Damen (1945–2016) created the Verbosonieën, or Verbosonic form of sound poetry, also called Verbaal-plasticisme, a variant of Raoul Hausmann's sound poetry. During the 1970s, he edited the “AH! Magazine” visual and experimental poetry journal. Included in a 45rpm single released as the inaugural issue of AH! in 1972, the track Monologue Machine features the voice of speaker Hans Veerman clearly enunciating Dutch words and short sentences, subverted by extraneous onomatopea and glottal noises by Damen.

16. Antoni Mleczko – Maszyna Trurla (1975)
Polish composer Antoni Mleczko is known for film soundtracks, stage music and children music, but mostly for founding and directing various puppet theaters in Poland, including the Krakow Puppet Theater, and today the PARAWAN puppet theater, also in Krakow. In 1975, he composed the electronic soundtrack to a science fiction short animation film titled Maszyna Trurla, or Engineer Trurl's Thinking Machine, inspired by Stanislav Lem's Cyberiad short stories collection of 1965. The sound excerpt here is a highly psychedelic affair, with free rock guitar, solid bass and synthesizer, but most of all a generous dose of sound effects (delay and reverb) to suit the science fiction theme of the film.

17. Reynold Weidenaar – The Tinsel Chicken Coop (1976)
US composer, film maker and educator Reynold Weidenaar, born in Michigan in 1945, founded and edited Electronic Music Review in 1967 and worked as a recording engineer in Cleveland for the rest of the 1960s. In the late 1970s he started to create video works, receiving many international awards. His films often include specific, avantgarde music sound tracks written for live instruments, sound collage and synthesizer. During the 1980s until 1993, he taught electronic music and film sound design at New York University, and later at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Composed in Cleveland in 1971 and revised in 1976, The Tinsel Chicken Coop is a sound collage of environmental sounds from library music recordings, as well as jingles and other commercial music, found sounds and powerful, cosmic synthesizer interjections. The piece stands out thanks to its clever use of studio sound effects and Surrealist sound collage technique.

18. Harald Bode – Phase 4-2 Arpeggio (1964)
German electronic engineer Harald Bode (1909–1987) moved to the US in 1954 to work on the creation of new electronic keyboards. Throughout his life, Bode invented dozens of electronic organs that paved the way to modern synthesizers, starting with the Warbo Formant Organ in 1937 in Germany, the Melochord in 1949, or the 1961 Audio System Synthesiser that is said to have inspired the Moog organ. He also, crucially, developed numerous sound processing effects like VCO, ring modulator, frequency shifter or the Vocoder. Though Bode wasn't a composer as such, he created many lovely short tracks demonstrating his instruments' capacities. The track titled Phase 4-2 Arpeggio, from 1964, features a superb arpeggiated and heavily filtered electronic sequence. And ambient techno was born...

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Laurent Fairon Nantes, France

French musician.

Former blogger at Continuo's Weblog and Continuo's Documents
(2007–16).

DJ mixes for:
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(2008-2021)
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