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Historic electronic music release

🔗Manuel Op de Coul <manuel.op.de.coul@eon-benelux.com>

8/17/2004 3:29:03 AM

Finally! A real treasure has been released: the 4-CD box
"Popular Electronics" with the first popular electronic music
ever made, at the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven
from 1956 to 1963.
I have pleaded record companies years ago to bring out this
music of Tom Dissevelt and Kid Baltan. One told me they were
working on it, but the preparations took many years as the
old master tapes had to be restored and digitized. They contain
thousands of splices and were luckily still in good condition.
Searching on the internet I quickly learned that the original
vinyl discs are very rare and do hefty prices.
I had Dissevelt's master piece "Fantasy in Orbit" on tape,
recorded from the radio in the 80s. At the time when I was in
middle school I used to hear it at friend's homes whose
fathers worked for Philips.
Kid Baltan's "Song of the Second Moon" is considered worldwide
to be the first electronic pop-piece.

Listen to "Whirling" by Tom Dissevelt (US title: Sonik Re-Entry)
and "Mechanical Motions" by Kid Baltan (Dick Raaijmakers)
(US title: The Ray Makers) on http://www.bastamusic.com/

The box also contains electronic ballet music of Henk Badings.
The first composition to be made at the Philips NatLab was
Badings' "Kaïn en Abel" (1956) which begins with a repeated
7-note phrase in just intonation. (so it's not off-topic! :-)
There's a lot of interesting documentation inside too.

Manuel