New Music From Bruce Haack – ‘Preservation Tapes’

New music from Bruce Haack, ‘Preservation Tapes’

Toronto-based record label Telephone Explosion has announced a new album of previously unreleased music from electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack.

Haack (1931-1988) was an inventor and composer whose work ranged from classical compositions to electronic pop. He also helped bring electronic music to a wider audience, with television appearances on Mr Rogers and The Tonight Show.

The new album, Preservation Tapes features music that has previously only been heard by a handful of people. It showcases a relatively unknown period in Haack’s musical career, when He was recording for Sparrow Records (who billed themselves as “America’s best Christian music record label.”) Haack’s signature Farad vocoder continues to feature prominently, but the lyrical content is decidedly more religious.

Here’s what TE has to say about the origin of the new album:

Haack with Fred Rogers

In 2016, after having reissued two Bruce Haack albums, Haackula and Electric Lucifer Book II, Telephone Explosion began speaking with Ted Pandel (Bruce’s lifelong friend and business partner) about working on the 1970 masterpiece The Electric Lucifer. It turned out there was another matter that he wanted to discuss: finding a final resting place for the Bruce Haack archive.

We were shown test-pressings of The Electric Lucifer board mixes from his Columbia studio sessions, countless pieces of written music, a large number of personal photos, an invitation from Raymond Scott inviting Bruce to play his newly created Electronium instrument (now owned by Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh,) poems, press clippings, and, most importantly, a shelf containing 213 reel-to-reel tapes.

The Bruce Haack archive is now in the Provincial Archives of Alberta, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.

Preservation Tapes will be available on August 10th on LP with 12-page booklet and on all digital platforms. You can preview a track, When Mothers Of Salem, below:

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