Early ElectroMIX is a series to document the history of experimental Electronic music from the 50s to the 80s, composers making use of electronic instruments, test equipment, generators of synthetic signals and sounds… to analog synthesizers…While our sessions document those who make it today my desire is to transmit some pioneering works which paved the way to what we try to create today.
Realizing that most of those seminal recordings were not available I decided to archive them in a contemporary way, DJing-mixing them and while most of the time running several sources together or in medleys I made sure to respect the original intent of each composers as I want to transmit their message rather than mine.
The only one I would dare deliver being that they should not be forgotten…
Philippe Petit / April 2021.
Recorded (on March 18/2021) for our series broadcasted on Modular-Station
https://modular-station.com
Tracklist:
Daphné Oram – Electronic Sound Patterns (1962) 00:00 > 02:39
Georges Teperino – Hi Tronics N° 6 (1970) 02:24 > 04:08
Attilio Mineo – Science of Tomorrow / Soaring Science (1962) 04:08 > 09:12
Delia Derbyshire (The BBC Radiophonic Workshop ) – Pot-au-feu (1969) 08:52 > 12:03
Daphné Oram – Episode Metallic (1964) 11:58 > 17:20
László Dubrovay – A2 / Oscillations 1 (1979) 16:52 > 36:36
Nicolas Schöffer – Hommage À Bartók / Chronosonor 5 (1979) 31:52 > 43:10
Ralph Lundsten & Leo Nilson – Kalejdoskop (1966) 41:55 > 58:35
Todd Dockstader – Holiday Meltdown (1979) 58:29 > 59:53
Daphné Oram – Electronic Sound Patterns (1962 / His Master’s Voice)
Intended for children to enjoy and lead them into movement of dance-like character, or involve them in imaginative situations. Using audio generators, many tape recorders, filters, ring modulators and other electronic devices these sound patterns were created by Daphne Oram at her Electronic Studio in Kent.
Georges Teperino – Hi Tronics N° 6 (1970 / TVMusic)
Georges Teperino also recorded under the name Nino Nardini.
At the very beginning of the Sixties he entered the world of Music Library in collaboration with his old childhood friend Roger Roger (Cécil Leuter) and they build up the Studio Ganaro, a personal recording space where they started to work together on composing many kind of music and then heavily experimenting on the moog synthesizer and other analogue electronic systems.
Attilio Mineo – Science of Tomorrow / Soaring Science (1962 / Modern Harmonic)
Space-age pop composer and arranger Attilio Mineo record this musical accompaniment for a Seattle World’s Fair attraction dubbed the Bubbelator, a transparent and spherical elevator housing up to 150 passengers who would be exposed to his beautifully textured space sounds, alien sound effects and spoken-word introductions.
Delia Derbyshire (The BBC Radiophonic Workshop ) – Pot-au-feu (1969 / BBC Radio Enterprises)
Daphné Oram – Episode Metallic (1964 / Young Americans)
Following are 2 heroines of British Electronic music, both essentials to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop they had originated in 1958… Delia Derbyshire created music and sound for almost 200 radio and television programmes whose most famous was the theme music to the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who.
Pioneer of musique concrète Daphné Oram was the creator of the Oramics technique for creating electronic sounds using drawn sound. Besides being a musical innovator, she was the first woman to independently direct and set up a personal electronic music studio, and the first woman to design and construct an electronic musical instrument.
László Dubrovay – A2 / Oscillations 1 (1979 / Hungaroton)
László Dubrovay came from Hungary and was composing Classical music for piano, cello, cymbalom, organ, percussion which he decided to marry to the Synthi AKS from EMS and recorded this cult album in 1979.
Nicolas Schöffer – Hommage À Bartók / Chronosonor 5 (1979 / Hungaroton)
Nicolas Schöffer was a Hungarian-born French cybernetic artist who built his artworks on cybernetic theories of feedback interactivity primarily based on the ideas of Norbert Wiener. His kinetic art sculpture “CYSP 1” from 1956, that made use of electronic computations developed by the Philips Company, is considered the first cybernetic sculpture in art history. The sculpture is set on a base mounted on four rollers, which contains the mechanism and the electronic brain. The plates are operated by small motors located under their axis. Photo-electric cells and a microphone built into the sculpture catch all the variations in the fields of color, light intensity and sound intensity.
Ralph Lundsten & Leo Nilson – Kalejdoskop (1966 / Sveriges Radio)
2 famous synthesizer players and composers of electronic music working at the Elektronmusikstudion and being documented by the National Swedish Radio.
Ralph Lundsten is a composer of electronic music, as well as a film director, artist and author who back in 1950 built his own electronic musical instruments and was one of the first pioneers in this field. Since 1959 he has lived an independent life, creating his own personal musical language, and preparing original films and exhibitions. His song Out in the Wide World served as the interval signal for Radio Sweden International’s shortwave broadcasts, while a modified stanza from his 1970 song Nattmara was used by Sveriges Utbildningsradio during long breaks between its educational television programming on Sveriges Television (SVT) in the late-1970s.
Leo Nilsson trained at the Stockholm Academy of Music 1958-1962 & then studied abroad, including at the French radio’s electronic music studio, GRM. He has been active at Elektronmusikstudion and Fylkingen. During the 1960s, he ran the studio Andromeda together with Ralph Lundsten.
One of the pioneers of electronic music in Sweden. He has worked with pure electronic music but also with music, integrated in exhibitions in Paris, Milan, New York and Tokyo. In addition, he has worked with music for film, slide shows, theater, dance and television + has been a teacher at the Stockholm Academy of Music in the subjects music acoustics, music psychology and composition. Member of the Association of Swedish Composers FST.
Todd Dockstader – Holiday Meltdown (1979 / Boosey & Hawkes)
Born in 1932, Dockstader was part of the first generation of electronic musicians, dabbling with whatever hardware he could get his hands on from sine wave generators, reel-to-reels and homemade circuits. Vibrations emanate out from Dockstader’s dark slab of apocalyptic sound, shards of glass and free-spirited nocturnal composition. Working at Gotham Studio in New York he had access to their equipment and composed quite a lot of music in a relatively short time. He almost lived in that studio for six, seven years, engineering by day and doing my music in down-time, nights, and weekends there.
Todd stopped composing around 1966 because after he had left Gotham (to work on the Air Canada Pavilion at Montreal’s Expo ’67), he lost access to Gotham’s equipment and couldn’t find alternative facilities. Being an outsider without academic credentials, he was denied grants and access to the major electronic music centers; he received rejection letters from both Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center !!!
Thus he formed a company that made award-winning educational films for classroom use, notably a series on American history for the American Heritage series. Todd wrote, directed, and created sound for these films. “Holiday Meltdown” is an example of his synth-based library music.
Years later stereophiles placed him alongside Varèse, Stockhausen, and Subotnick in the electronic music pantheon and he felt lucky to have lived long enough to see his music come back:
These new reviews were “better by far than anything the music ever got in its day, when it was made… I was stunned; I never thought it would happen.
