If you happen to have 213 minutes to spare please listen to some synthedelic bits, blips and swooshes I carried to Bern and played in a row one night in January 2017 at Cinema Rex for their Rextone series. They were playing surrealist films that month, hence the motto of this mix.
Download Part 1Part 2
"To Outer Space, to Cyberspace. The online life of obsolete media." I had the pleasure to curate a small online exhibition with a big title for the Museum of Post Digital Cultures. Featuring among many other things two very different golden records, the photo archive from one of the earliest computer animation labs (previously featured here), the NASA etc., and the whole is sort of dedicated to Laurie Spiegel and Lillian Schwartz. I might add one or two things, and there will be a stream performance on March 4th featuring Synkie, the open source reinvention of an analog modular video synthesizer. Click here: http://www.postdigitalcultures.ch/current
Another beauty from the graphic design studios at Geigy pharmaceuticals, Basel, Switzerland, ca. 1960s. This is from a series of records accompanying films made by the company. It contains recordings of heartbeats with various defects.
Previous posts with Geigy pharma records: here and here.
Swiss pharma company Geigy promoted their sleeping pills Medomin with this series of lullaby records called "Fremde Wiegenlieder" (foreign lullabies), recorded for this occasion. These are thin 7" records (somehow between a flexi and a regular 7") in thin booklet type sleeves that are a little bigger than regular 7" sleeves.
Geigy was famous for their good Swiss Style typography, with masters like Karl Gerstner and Armin Hoffmann working for them. The designer of this series remains uncredited. There's a nice book on Geigy's design.
Medomin however is banned nowadays, it was barbiturate based and thus highly addictive. Considering this fact, the slogan "sleep like a child with Medomin" paired with the images of sleeping children seems rather awkward.
Records seem to have been a favored promotional gift of the pharmaceutical industry. Over the years, I have acquired a little collection from different companies (I also happen to live in a city that is the home of big pharma companies). Here's a first selection, the picture 7" records from the Vifor company.
From "This is Orient" by Hassan Abou Seoud (حسن أبو السعود) from Egypt, playing accordeon, organ and synth (my guess: a Roland SH-2000), recorded in Beirut in 1974.
1. Franco Potenza - Keola
2. Georges Auric - O Willow Waly
3. G. Ferroni - Altri Tempi
4. Savia Andina - Incallacta
5. Roberto Lanieri - Two Views of the Amazon
6. Mariza Koch - Δώδεκα Μήνες Στο Στρατό
7. Gerhard Trede - Montage No. 22
8. Ahmed Malek - Silence des Cendres
9. Walter Lietha - Märli
10. Bernard Szajner - Superficial Music 3
11. The Poppy Family - You Took My Moonlight
12. E. Allen, F.Reidy - Bygones
13. Marie Laforet - l'arbre qui pleure
14. Jean-Pierre Mirouz - Tandoori Dance
Rolf Liebermann composed this piece for the Swiss Expo (National exhibition) 1964. It was displayed as an installation in the pavillion for banking, trade, insurance, office-organisation etc. They wanted to "make the offices talk for themselves", as an "orchestra conducted by an electronic control unit". It included 16 typewriters, 18 calculator machines, 10 cash registers, 12 punching card machines, 8 telexes, 16 telephones, 1 fork lift and many other machines that were new at the time and are now obsolete.
It was Liebermann's only electronic (or mechanic) composition. He worked for months with engineers. Dr. Fritz von Ballmoos engineered the control units, Hansjörg Pauli translated Liebermann's score into computer language, Hans Harder was the sound engineer.
It was also released on 7" (cover see above), including a jazz version on the b side, played by Daniel Humair (dr), Pierre Favre (dr) and George Gruntz (prepared piano).
The piece was also an important inspiration for the Swiss pioneer of electronic Jazz/Pop/Advertising music, Bruno Spoerri. He told me it was a motivation to seriously engage in electronic music.
This text is based on an old post of mine on the same subject from 2010. I found more material on Liebermann's sound installation that I'd like to share with you - my little holiday treat.
The images are from the magazine Werk, 9/1964 (except the first one).
The first video below is an excerpt from a film about Expo 64, produced by Paillard. Watch the full movie here. The second video is an excerpt from an UFA-Wochenschau (weekly cinema newsreel) from Germany, found here on the German Federal Archive's homepage. The footage is from a concert premiere made before Expo 64, but it contains a memorable quote from Liebermann: "About the musical value, he says: It has a musical form and through that it became a piece of music. Form, rhythm and color are there, but what's missing to become music is melody and harmony. So we cannot really call it music, but only a formed piece made from machines." Do not miss this other video about Les Echanges from Swiss TV, with great footage and a sweet anecdote from the composer: "When the federal council [Swiss heads of state] came to visit, nothing worked. We found the reason: rats from the nearby lake shore had nibbled on the isolation of the cables causing all sorts of short circuits." Problems Liebermann didn't have at his day job as the artistic director of the Hamburg State Opera...
Gertrud Meyer-Denkmann (*1918) is a German composer, educator, musician, musicologist. She was among many other things a friend of John Cage and an early advocate of his work in Europe.
Her book "Klangexperimente und Gestaltungsversuche im Kindesalter", published in 1970, was a success for the contemporary/experimental music education series "rote reihe" (previously featured here) and an influential publication of its field. It got translated into english as "experiments in sound". The concept of the book is to lead the children to make their own music, through their inventive intelligence by experimenting, listening, interacting. "To offer him only an educational experience which is labeled 'suitable for children' underestimates his aptitude. (...) There is little room for a child to exercise his imagination or initiative when he is confronted by a well-worn song, a piece to practise, or a prepared set of ostinati or percussion rhythms."
Here's a piece from the record that accompanies the "Klangexperimente..." book.
"Geräusch und Ton" (sound and tone)
"Five children age 4 and 5 produce sound and tone with their voices and order sound and tone instruments in accordance with this. (...)"
"sound groups with different tone colours"
"a chain of sounds as a relation of duration, action and tone colour"
Meyer-Denkmann and John Cage at her home in Oldenburg in 1963
