Hollow Sun has announced plans for a new virtual instrument based on the rare and amazing Hammond Novachord – a polyphonic analog synthesizer released in 1939!

The Novachord is sort of the B3 of synthesizers – a huge, unwieldy beast that sounds like nothing else.

Unlike the B3, though, the Hammond Novachord has largely been forgotten. They were expensive, few were made, and few have survived because of their complexity.

The Novachord features divide-down oscillators and individual envelopes and LFO for each note. Yeah – this thing could do 72-voice polyphony in 1939!

Here’s an example of what this 70 year-old monster synth can sound like:

Imagine if this technology had taken off!

The Hammond Novachord Sample Library

Hollow Sun is working with Novachord owner Dan Wilson of Hideaway Studios in Bath, England, to capture the sound of this beast in all its epic glory.

Here’s what they have to say about this project:

Work has begun on this and tentative sampling sessions are beginning to reveal what lies ahead of us – textures that would not be out of place on a modern synth 70 years on in 2009 but with a strangely ‘earthy’ and ‘organic’ quality quite unlike I’ve heard before, full of flawed nuances and subtelty. The Novachord doesn’t generate sounds … it breathes them in gasps and grunts and squeals and whispers!

It’s early days. As time allows, I shall be bringing news of progress on a (hopefully) regular basis … so bookmark this Blog to watch us through our laboratory’s musty window. Dan and I aren’t quite ponsing about in white coats here (I favour a good tweed and a robust brogue!) but it feels a bit like it as Dan probes and regulates the 70 year old valves and massive capacitors with voltmeters and oscilloscopes and I work the resulting samples into an accurate representation of this incredible instrument.

No release date or pricing has been set.

John Cage is the subject of a new museum exhibition in Barcelona. The exhibit looks at Cage’s works in various media and his impact on all forms of contemporary art.

The New Yorker’s Alex Ross shares his thoughts on the highlights of the exhibit – but also raises this conundrum:

The great oddity of twentieth-century art history is that while Rauschenberg, Jackson Pollock, and other radical postwar painters are almost universally hailed as masters, their works drawing huge crowds in museums, Cage is still often treated as a freak or a charlatan.

The distinction makes no intellectual sense, but there it is.

It is striking that someone as influential as Cage – as a composer, author, electronic music pioneer and artist – hasn’t found an audience that reflects his influence.

Ross is right. Many people that might appreciate Rauschenberg or Pollock would cringe at the idea of sitting through a concert of Cage’s works.

Maybe the answer to Ross’s conundrum is as simple as this: you can’t close your ears.

If you see a painting that’s confrontational, ugly or incomprehensible, you can close your eyes or walk away. You are in control of the experience.

At a concert of music by an artist like Cage, you can’t close your ears or move on to the next thing. You aren’t in control of your experience – you can just react to it.

This seems to be a fundamental challenge of electronic music (and to a certain degree, music in general); when anything is possible, how do you create music that is original, yet still has the power to seduce someone’s ear?

via disquiet; Image: fallwithme

What The Future Sounded Like is a documentary about the the people of EMS (Electronic Music Studios) a radical group of avant-garde electronic musicians who utilized technology and experimentation to compose a futuristic electronic sound-scape for the New Britain.

Comprising of pioneering electronic musicians Peter Zinovieff and Tristram Cary (famed for his work on the Dr Who series) and genius engineer David Cockerell, EMS studio was one of the most advanced computer-music facilities in the world.

EMS’s great legacy is the VCS3, Britain’s first synthesizer and rival of the American Moog. The VCS3 changed the sounds of some of the most popular artists of this period including Brian Eno, Hawkwind and Pink Floyd.

via bananimalistic:

Inventor, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil appeared on I’ve Got a Secret in 1965, when he was 17 years old, demonstrating his music-composing computer.

This excellent documentary looks at how a radical generation of musicians created a new German musical identity out of the cultural ruins of war.

Featured musicians include Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, Klaus Schulze and Faust.

You can view the first part above. See the rest on YouTube – while you can.

Description:

Between 1968 and 1977 bands like Neu!, Can, Faust and Kraftwerk would look beyond western rock and roll to create some of the most original and uncompromising music ever heard. They shared one common goal – a forward-looking desire to transcend Germany’s gruesome past – but that didn’t stop the music press in war-obsessed Britain from calling them Krautrock.

Synth Britannia is a BBC documentary about synth music in the UK.

VideodromeDisco posted this to YouTube – so you might want to watch it right now.

Ever wondered what it was like making electronic music in the late 1950s?

Now you can find out – without having to learn tape-splicing.

Gleetchplug has announced Berna – a “vintage electronic studio simulation.”

It’s got reel-to-reel recorders, oscillators, tape delay – what more do you need to make electronic music?

Release date: Monday November 2nd 2009. Price 10.69€

I can say no more at this time – but you may want to look for a lab coat.

This is a demo of a vintage Maplin 5600s analog synthesizer.

In the early 70’s, the Australian magazine Electronics Today International published Tervor Marshall’s designs for two partly digital, mostly analog, Electronic Music Synthesisers. the ETI 3600 and ETI 4600.

Both were made available as kits of components. Barry Wilkinson at ETI was responsible for the final packaging and kitting coordination. Maplin Electronics Ltd.(in the UK) subsequently picked up the designs, which they marketed as as the Maplin models 3800 and 5600s Electronic Music Synthesizers.

Video Details:

This sequence is based on his two transient trapezoid envelopes. It’s a very nice matrix synthesizer with many parameters …much more than an EMS VCS3. His Matrix has 30 x 30 contact points (900 in total) for complex I/O and control voltages. It has a built in spring reverb and an amazing cv controlled phaser. The “kick” come out from a RSF Kobol driven by the Maplin 5600 trigger.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Kid Baltan (Dick Raaijmakers) and Tom Dissevelt at Philips “Nat. Lab” in 1959, explaining how electronic tape music is made.

Broadcast by VARA television (Netherlands) on January 17, 1959

via schreu26

The ANS synthesizer (named after Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin) is a photoelectronic musical instrument created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin between 1937 to 1957.

The synthesizers uses cinematography, which makes it possible to “photograph” a sound wave, as well as synthesizing a sound from a drawn sound wave.

The introduction is in Russian, but about 4:15 into the video, the ANS synthesizer is demonstrated.

Here’s a Googlish translation of the text that accompanies the video:

Synthesizer [ANS] photoelectronic musical tool is designed by Russian inventor by Eugene [Murzinym] in 1958. With the aid of [ANSa] the composer can create music of any colorings in the directly reverberating form, without the musicians of executors, he writes sounds on the glass, necessary to it, covered with the opaque nondrying paint, removing by cutters paint in the specific places. This glass- is the unique musical score of tool, working on the musical score of synthesizer, composer it becomes similar to artist, who records the picture: it tints, it retouches, it erases and new code figures are brought, achieving auditory control of the obtained result.

The freedom of work in this musical score conceals the inexhaustible possibilities.

Invention was named by the designer “OF [ANS]” in the honor of composer Alexander Nikolayevich [Skryabina]. The large part of the music to the films Andrey Tarkovsky [Eduard] [Artemev] wrote with the aid of [ANS].

Video demonstrates experiment; [ANS] reproduces the figure of the artist of Svetlana [Bogatyr] ” Unknown Of [miry]“. On October 21, 2009 [GTSMMK] [im]. OF [M].[I]. Of [glinki] concert [posvyashchennyy] to 95- anniversary from the birthday of Eugene Alexandrovich [Murzina].

If you can summarize the commentary from the video, leave a comment below!

Stanislav Kreichi explains the significance of this rare synthesizer:

“The ANS remains a unique apparatus available to only a limited circle of musicians: the single experimental model of the device in existence currently belongs to Moscow State University, where a general lack of space and technical support have prevented a widening of the circle of ANS users. Although the ANS has not achieved widespread fame, the idea of directly transforming graphic structures into sound structures has not lost its relevance and can now be used successfully in computer music.”

via Octopusvision

Synth music pioneer Klaus Schulze discusses and demonstrates his first synth, an EMS Synthi A analog synthesizer.

via Synthasy2000:

Klaus talks about, and demonstrates, his first synth.

The BBC again proves just how mighty mighty it is, putting together this hot and tasty documentary, Synth Britannia, about synth music in the UK, broadcasting starting October 16th.

It looks like must-see TV – if you’re in the UK. No word yet on when it will be available online or outside the UK.

The Guardian has this to say about Synth Britannia:

A curious thing that comes through watching Synth Britannia is how the futuristic-ness of this music is largely irrecoverable to us, precisely because we live in the future that the synth-pop era helped to bring about. Electronic tonalities are omnipresent to the point of banality, thanks to 90s techno rave and noughties R&B, videogames and ringtones. “Electro” in the early-90s meant cutting-edge, the future-now; nowadays “electro” refers to the kind of sounds that lit up hipster bars in east London through this past decade and then went mainstream this year with La Roux and Lady Gaga, which is to say synthetic pop that doesn’t use the full capacity of the latest digital technology, and is therefore almost as quaint as if it were made using a harpsichord.

Das Modell is one of their most popular tracks – and it’s also one of their most frequently covered tracks.

Kraftwerk plays it today remarkably similar to how they did it thirty years ago. Here are some version from the last 30 years that aren’t so faithful to the original.

Give them a look – and let me know your favorite cover in the comments!

Das Modell, Mit Ukulele, Melodica Und Akustischer Gitarre

Click here to view the embedded video.

Rammstein’s Das Model

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Cardigans’ Das Model

Click here to view the embedded video.

Triology’s String Quartet Version Of Das Modell

Click here to view the embedded video.

David Byrne and the Balanescu Quartet – The Model

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nullsleep’s 8-bit Cover

Click here to view the embedded video.

Folky Cover with Banjolele

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Model, On Ukulele

Click here to view the embedded video.

Big Black

Click here to view the embedded video.

Generator’s Techno Version

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ska-esque Version

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then take the time to listen to The Story Of Kraftwerk, an audio documentary that looks at the electronic music pioneers and their influence on musicians over thirty+ years.

If you don’t have time now, bookmark this page and give the documentary a listen later or download the MP3 and listen to it at your leisure.

It’s that good.

The Story Of Kraftwerk includes forty years of music, interviews with Kraftwerk and some of the musicians influenced by them from Bowie to Hot Chip.

via jaypee112233, M:Cast

After posting the vintage footage of Kraftwerk performing Das Modell, Keep Werking’s John Shilcock sent me a link to this equally interesting historic performance in Russia of The Robots.

via rmfigue:

Originally Broadcasted by USSR TV at 1980

This is some fantastic vintage footage of a young Kraftwerk, in 1980, performing Das Modell on German TV. Make sure you check out the crowd shots!

Amazingly, their current performances are amazingly faithful, both sonicly and visually, to what’s captured here.

Can you imagine how this would have blown people’s minds thirty years ago?

via goodtolove235abc

This is a trailer for The Italian Moog.

RE_production is producing a documentary movie on Moog instruments in Italian music, directed by Ernesto Romano.

Description:

The movie shows all the most significant Moog experiences of the Italian music history, from the Progressive Rock to the nowadays electronic experimentation, through the voice and the notes of the main musicians.

All of them, from the milestones to the youngest artists, express an endless passion for all the Moog inventions, since they have been introduced in Italy during the Seventies, until the last products.

Finally, all the musicians express an extraordinary love for Bob Moog, as everybody say, the father of synthesizers.

Short review, via Craig Thom:

This documentary attempts to cover the rise of German electronic and experimental music from the 1960s, centered on Kraftwerk. There are perhaps two documentaries here: one an overview of the career of Kraftwerk, and the other the development of native German music. I found the latter more interesting, but I enjoyed it all.

If your interest is just in Kraftwerk, you may not get enough out of this to justify the time. If you are mostly unfamiliar with German music from the ’60s, picking it up, as I did, with Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream and Neu! in the ’70s, then you may find the first hour as interesting as I did.

You can preview Kraftwerk And The Electronic Revolution below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

via vanelektrik

Despite its popularity, though, the music of C64 games has rarely been analysed in academic articles.
Karen Collins’ Loops And Bloops: Music of the Commodore 64 Games discusses the technical constraints of C64’s SID soundchip and how this shaped the musical aesthetic of music on the Commodore 64:

Technological constraints are nothing new to musical composition, although most discussions arising about the subject have centered on twentieth century concerns.

Mark Katz discusses how the 78 RPM record led to a standard time limit for pop songs, and how Stravinsky famously tailor-made Sérénade en LA for the length of an LP; although he points out, however, that Stravinsky may have been shaped by “his penchant for self-imposed limitations” (Katz, 2004: 3-5).

Critiques of “hard” technological determinism as it relates to musical technologies have dominated the discussion (e.g. Taylor, 1993: 27; Théberge, 1997: 160; Katz, 2004), in favour of a softer approach in which the relationship is more of a negotiation. As with other recent approaches to music technology, I would argue that the relationship between technology and aesthetics is one of symbiosis rather than dominance, what Barry Salt (1985: 37) refers to as a “loose pressure on what is done, rather than a rigid constraint.”

Micromusicians tend to agree, and embrace the constraints as an important part of the creative process, as Teamtendo intimates: “Working with this limited harmonic vocabulary forces you to be creative, and there are some very pleasant discoveries along the way,” or, says Goto80, “it’s fun working with such hardcore limits, forcing you to realize your ideas in other ways.”

In order to explore the constraints of the C64 on composition, I first discuss the limitations of the sound chip, showing the conventional ways in which the chip was used. I follow this with a comparison of well-known, pre-composed songs which were covered on the C64 in various games. I then explore approaches to interactivity and looping in Commodore games music, drawing comparisons between the C64 and its contemporaries.

Full article here.

Mickey Dolenz of The Monkees talks about using the Moog modular synthesizer on Daily Nightly, above, the first pop recording to use the synthesizer:

“Ahh, my little Moog synthesizer,” said Dolenz. “It was actually a pretty difficult thing to use,” he said, recalling how those first-generation synthesizers had to be physically rewired for every different sound the musician might want to use.

“I threw a party for John Lennon one night, and he sat there at the Moog for four hours making flying saucer sounds. It was great for flying saucer sounds.”

“I sold it to Bobby Sherman,” adds Dolenz. “I think he still has it.”

via The LA Times Music Blog