HAPPY BIRTHDAY STELLAR_DUST!

[melannen]

Now that my laptop is mostly working and I have free hard drive space, I can do things like digitize more 33 RPMs again! hooray.

So I have digitized some 33 RPMs. :D This post is a birthday present for my sister, who has said I should do some of these, but the rest of you are welcome to share them too.

Man On The Moon/CBS Enterprises/Narrated by Walter Cronkite
This is a very small 33 RPM record issued by CBS News/Enterprises; I can't find a date on it. It comes to about 15 minutes total. Also in the record jacket, when I bought the record at a used book sale, I also found a copy of "Sounds of the Space Age", narrated by Col. Frank Borman, one of those bendy records that they used to sometimes put in books, which seems to have come in the December 1969 edition of National Geographic. It's about ten minutes. So I've folded them into one album together:

Man on the Moon Side 1
Man on the Moon Side 2
Sounds of the Space Age Side 1
Sounds of the Space Age Side 2


The In Sound from Way Out: Electronic Pop Music of the Future created by Perrey-Kingsley

I picked this up this weekend (same sale as the previous, different year) because someone had a stash of Moog records they'd donated (also PDQ Bach - which I was good and didn't buy - and some records that did things to baroque music that even PDQ Bach wouldn't dare, which I did buy.) I have a fondness for Moog-dominated records that I got from my dad, who purchases two of the earliest Moog records shortly after he got his first apartment. The story (as I got it) goes that he rigged up a timer on his record player so that one of them would start playing every morning as an alarm clock, and then he would let it play through as he got ready for work in the morning. This lasted over a month before he was presented with an ultimatum by the rest of the apartment building: either he bought some more records, or he went.

Anyway. I picked this up think it was another Moog album, but it's not. In fact, it is supposed to be the first ever pop-styled electronic music album, and in 1966, it pre-dates the commercial debut of the Moog synthesizer by about a year. Apparently all the synthesizer-like sounds on it were made by manually splicing tape. With scissors. Here's the jacket text:

Here are a dozen electronic pop tunes. They are the electrifying good-time music of the coming age, the switched-on dance music that will soon be it. This is the lively answer to the question that puzsles -- and who knows, even frightens -- people who have heard the serious electronic compositions of recent years and wonder, is this the music of the future? As for the avant-garde wing, we say more power to it. But there are other things in the future, such as pleasure. And so presented here is the electronic "Au Go Go" that might be heard soon from the juke boxes at the interplanetary way stations where space ships make their rest stops. The idiom is strange and yet familiar; here a touch of rock, there a touch of bosa nova, a whiff of the blues in one piece and a whiff of Tchaikovsky in another. But these atoms of pop music are exploded into fresh patterns. They outline a strange new sound world, yet one in which we can feel at home. The future is upon us, they say, and the future is fun.

The perpetrators of this riot of new sounds are Jean Jacques Perry and Gershon Kingsley.

Jean Jacques Perrey, who set out to master the machines that threatened to be the masters of men, was born in 1929 in the North of France. From his early childhood he showed a strong passion for science and music. He was to be a doctor, but music had the greater gravitational pull, and he finally devoted himself to electronic music. Then during a trip to the United States in 1965, he met Gershon Kingsley. The two felt an immediate magnetic attraction, rising out of their common interest in how music and electronics could add to the joy of life.

Gershon Kingsley has many musical trades and is a master of all of them. Having studied at the Los Angeles Conservatory, Columbia University, and the Juilliard School of Music, he is a man of wide culture and a gifted composer of classical music. He is also a respected figure on Broadway, as arranger and conductor of La Plume de mon tante, Fly Blackbird, and The Cradle Will Rock revival. He has done the arrangements for many notable Vanguard albums, ranging from Netania Davrath's New Songs of the Auvergne and Jan Peerce's Neapolitan Serenade to the hilarious, swinging Mozart After Hours.

Kingsley and Perrey decided to pool their talents to produce a record of electronic musical joy and wit. Kinsley had long had the idea of bringing electronic music to the public". Perrey wanted to "take the mystery out of the legend that says electronic music is an art that is esoteric, exclusively reserved for a few initiates, an elite of avant-garde intellectuals and artists." He adds, "I think that for some years electronic music has been going up a one-way street." Both he and Kingsley agree that "it deserves to be raised to the level of a popular music, a music designed for fun and relaxation." And so Vanguard Records set up a laboratory in new York for the Perrey-Kingsley experimental researches.

In this laboratory, a new process was created which Perrey calls Electrontic Sono-Syntheses." To produce these syntheses they use not only musical instruments from electronic sources (Jenny Ondioline, Martenot Waves, etc.) but also sounds of natural origin (i.e. musique concrete). These sounds were modified, transmuted, transformed, to the point of changing their harmonic structures, making out of them new, unprecedented original sonorities. Each sound thus created was then pre-recorded on tape, classified, catalogued by frequency, timbre, and "tendency". At the time of composing the "musical phrase", each sond was "isolated" and selected according to its nature. the sonorities were then painstakingly assembled by splicing each bit of tape together manually with micrometric precision to form the "melodic line" and/or the rhythmic structure of the piece chosen.

The synthetic rhytmic-melodic tape track thus created was then carefully synchronized with music played by live musicians on both electronic and natural instruments as well as with electronic sounds produced by oscillators, tone generators, and feedback loops. Finally, through a complicated process of intricate overdubbing, the likes of which we believe have never before been done to this extent on records, a multi-channel tape master was produced embodying a synthesis of all electronic and natural elements.

A lot of patience was required, for what is heard on this record represents the intricately condensed and selected product of 275 hours of work in the laboratory, and the use of several miles of magnetic tape. As for the tools used in this delicate operation, they were several tape recorders turning at exactly the same speed, an 18 channel mixer, the prerecorded tapes, splicing tape, and -- we hate to say this after the preceding highly technical buildup -- a plain, ordinary pair of scissors. But it must also be admitted that the most important tool was one that has been operating in human affairs even before the scissors, and will continue to operate when we are far out in th space age; namely, the imagination.

..er. And all that aside, the songs on this record? Actually are fun. I don't know about being far-out, experimental, and super-futuristic, but they are bouncy and happy and catchy and tuneful and kind of made of the spirit of 'yay! \o/' The closest comparison I can come up with is that they are in the spirit of some of the better original tracks from the Muppet Show. Think of it as music from the juke boxes on the interplanetary way stations in the Koozebane system, and you're almost there.


Unidentified Flying Object
The Little Man From Mars
Cosmic Ballad
Swan's Splashdown
Countdown at 6
Barnyard in Orbit
Spooks in Space
Girl from Venus
Electronic Can-Can
Jungle Blues from Jupiter
Computer In Love
Visa to the Stars

...and finally, this isn't a 33 RPM rip, it's a .zip file that contains both of Nichelle Nichols' vocal albums. Because stellar_dust once gave me a giant mp3 torrent/archive that had "all the albums ever put out by Star Trek people", and it didn't include these, which was a crime on several levels. And so I found them, and have been meaning to share them more widely for some time.

The .zip includes Down to Earth, produced in 1967, which is a collection of Ms. Nichols singing '60s lounge/pop/standards, and is unsurprisingly really very good if you like lounge/pop/standards (which I do. Why didn't they have *her* be the TNG holodeck crooner?) It also includes Out of This World, a later album of original songs themed around space and Star Trek, and is (perhaps surprisingly?) really bad. I mean, worse that Shatner's albums. Her voice is still excellent, but the songs they gave her to sing are cringingly bad; the music direction somehow even managed to screw up her vocal cover of the TOS theme.

Uhura.zip

(...also there will be cakes later. Under lock.)