Sad news has arrived via Scott Looney:

I have the sad news to report that STEIM’s founder Michel Waisvisz died peacefully in his home last night "after fighting the mean cells in his body for eight months" - which i assume is a reference to the cancer he had been battling. Michel developed one of the very first alternative controllers in the 1970’s called the Hands and subsequently the Krakdoos - aka the Cracklebox. He subsequently founded STEIM and served as its head for 27 years, and inspired many musicians and improvisers around the globe.

Obituary at STEIM:

Michel Waisvisz

I imagine STEIM will accept gifts in his honor, but haven’t yet seen details. Our condolences to the friends and family of a brilliant visionary.

It’s been a rough week for electronic music — having lost Bebe Barron, we’ve now lost one of the other great early pioneers of electronic music, South Australian Tristram Cary.

Tristram is credited by some as the father of tape music, originating tape music techniques in World War II. He’s notorious to the general public and sci fi fans as the composer of the music for the Daleks in Doctor Who (along with other music) — like an evil counterpart to Delia Derbyshire, who built the studio Cary would later use. But he was also a pivotal composer of music for film, electronics, voice, and instrument alike, a well-known Australian music critic, a leading figure in studios and academies, and, oh, yeah, he did the visual design (product design, really) for the legendary portable VCS3 "Putney" synth from EMS, the synth maker of which he was a founding Director.

It’s safe to say that, out of this web of contributions to electronic sound, Tristram Cary is another of those people who charted the course for what music technology is today. From the technology to his extensive music to his work in popularizing musique concrete in England, his impact is felt even by those who don’t know his name.

Christian Haines writes to let us know of Tristram passing, evidently following a long illness.

If you don’t know his work, there’s no time like the present to discover what he’s given us.

Official Tristram Cary Site

Wikipedia article, with lots of references and an extensive composition list

Resources at the Australian Music Centre

EMS, the "Moog Music of England", lives on (apologies to our UK readers, but Americans are just discovering EMS); see also the Synthi blog

And for a little Tristram Cary listening:

Trios LP by Tristram Cary (EMS) is a trio of EMS synth plus turntables; full tracks on the Synthi blog courtesy the composer. Really brilliant sounds:

And, you know, looking at all of this I’m reminded of why things like the Dalek connection are important. For whatever reason, mysterious science fiction worlds have been the entry point for listeners around the world into the sometimes alien and frightening new timbres of electronic music. We’re all lucky enough to have grown up in a time in which we’re challenged to create music that evokes other parts of the universe, real and imaginary.

Christian sends along a complete obituary provided by the Director of the Elder Conservatorium, David Lockett:

There are pioneers and artists — and then there are people whose impact is great enough that they become inseparable with the history of a medium. Bebe Barron, along with husband Louis Barron, was far enough ahead of her time that her ideas remain futuristic today. The Barrons didn’t just produce the first full-length electronic film score with Forbidden Planet; they created an ambient sonic world between music and special effects, and tied it to cybernetic theories. That score stands in contrast to films still dominated by Alfred Newman-style, post-Wagnerian theatrics. Today, artists are only just re-discovering the possibilities of electronic sound without the use of synths and samplers, built from scratch as the Barrons did.

Bebe Barron’s work went well beyond Forbidden Planet, however. She went on to produce music for film, tape, and technology well into her later life. She was an early leader of the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music, and continued — with her husband, and as a solo composer following his death — to lead the way in finding new compositional purposes for electronic sound. (And apparently even seduction through witchcraft! Viva electronics!)

We’ve seen a lot of obituaries in the three and a half years of this site; there’s no question that a generation of composers is passing into history. Bebe died of natural causes at age 82. I was struck by a quote from Barry Schrader, who called her "the last of the pioneering composers of classical studio electronic music." That may be, but listening to Bebe’s sounds and ideas, I wonder what the next generations might still be capable of pioneering, and who will take up the radical element from 1950s and 60s sound and bring it into the coming decades.

The best insight I’ve heard into the Barron’s work comes from a 2005 interview with Bebe on NPR’s Morning Edition:

The Barrons: Forgotten Pioneers of Electronic Music

Matrixsynth has an enormous obituary with lots of background information — a must-read:

RIP Bebe Barron

And here’s Bebe’s last interview, from the beginning of this year, speaking about Anais Nin. That’s poignant to me — my great aunt and uncle were part of the New York circle that ran with Anais Nin and crowd. It’s a reminder to value your crazy and radical creative friends, to keep supporting what they’re doing to enjoy the short time we all have to make art.

Anais Nin has the best quote — she described the Barrons’ music as sounding like "a molecule that has stubbed its toes."

Few names inspire love from digital musicians quite like Elektron, makers of the Monomachine, Machinedrum, and SIDstation drum machines. So when Elektron’s founder Daniel Hansson passed away in an auto accident last summer, it came as a shock to the tightly-knit, passionate musical community who loved his work and lost him too young. (It didn’t help that it came within weeks of the loss of Argu, the ingenious discoDSP and Image-Line software developer, also in a car accident.)

Tragedies like this are doubly sad, because in that loss we miss the opportunity to celebrate people whose work we love. So I’m pleased to be able to talk about a celebration of Daniel Hansson today.

The artist community who use Elektron’s stuff have put together a really epic compilation of music in tribute to Daniel. It’s all user-driven — Elektron didn’t do the organizing; the musicians did. The lineup has some of our favorite people contributing, famed and obscure alike:

Autechre, Beautiful Planet Earth, Boom Bip, dDamage, Daedelus, Dntel, Erase, Emnine, Future Image, Honey Claws, How Dragons Disappear, John Starlight, Jon Martensson, John Tejada, Kero, Landstrumm, Material Object, Micronaut, Music International, Orsan Kart, Pelektor, Proxy, scutopus, TS3K, and The Brown Moth, Tiga, The Sea and Cake, TreD Grp, Van Basten, AEVSVS, Wanker’s United

Many of these (The Sea and Cake, Boom Bip, Tiga, Proxy, John Starlight and others) are exclusive tracks.

You get 30 songs for US$5, donated to Daniel’s favorite charity, the World Wildlife Fund. (Additional WWF donations are welcome.) You’re even entered to win a SIDstation. (Yeah, I know — some of you are still smarting from not having won a Tenori-On, just as I am from having had to give it away. At least here, you can lose for a good cause, which is what I intend to do.)

45tribute

Another 25 songs are available free — really free, licensed Creative Commons.

(25 + 30 does not add up to 45, it’s true — 45 was Daniel’s favorite number and was in the name of his C64 group, Zone 45.)

Help Spread the Word

The organizers don’t have a PR budget for this, so we’re their PR — and, hey, I’ll bet we can do a better job, anyway. So do spread the word around.

Thanks to Ryan Faubion, the project manager and curator, for putting this together and letting us know about it, and to forum member / compilation contributor Wendell Edwards aka scutopus for the heads-up.

Musician, composer, and musique concrete artist Henri Chopin has died, writes Seth:

he has been and remains a figure whose sound work is very important to me, so i thought i’d share it with you all.

he was a sound poet who used reel-to-reel tape as his paper, performance instrument, and collaborator.

Chopin is lesser-known than some artists even in the concrete world, so if you don’t know his work, there’s no time like the present to discover it — quite a lot is available online.

Videos and comments at WFMU Beware of the Blog

Lots and Lots of Sound Files at UbuWeb

His work spanned more than just experiments with audio tape, as a graphic and visual artist and even a typographer. His poems took striking shape as visual art, like the dagger formed with a typewriter, at right (via the dbqp blog, below). As a magazine publisher, he brought together works by characters from William S. Burroughs to the Fluxus gang. I have to admit, much as I love some of the power of the blog world, I don’t think we have anything approaching the insane avant-garde magazines of the 20th Century. (But, then, maybe we’re just waiting for the 21st Century’s Erik Satie. Or maybe we need to spend more time learning from the likes of Chopin — Henri Chopin, that is.)

So far, I see these obituaries; please feel free as always to add other comments, memories, reflections, or links. Via Harriet, we learn that Chopin died peacefully at home with his family in England at age 85:

Henri Chopin (1922-2008) [obituary by Kenneth Goldsmith, Harriet blog (Poetry Foundation)]

Tribute to Henri Chopin [Soul Sphincter]

When Sound Ends, Vision Endures [words, images, and more following his death, from dbqp: visualizing poetics]

And you think you can do strange things on a mic? Watch this:

Some time in the last few days, browser-based music tool Yottamusic went kaput. For those of you who never saw it, the site was brilliant. Like the Rhapsody music service, Yottamusic featured all-you-can-listen music for a subscription fee, all playable in a cross-platform browser. (Yes, even Firefox for Linux worked just fine, thanks to a Firefox extension.) Unlike Rhapsody, Yottamusic had an interface that was actually attractive and usable, and synced plays to the music community Last.fm. Social features let you easily discover music via what other Yottamusic listeners liked — not a new idea, but powerful when integrated with a subscription music service. At least Yottamusic died a graceful death: playlists created on the site can be exported as XML and even uploaded to Rhapsody.com. A lot of websites may not go as gently into that good night, or, um, whatever.

Now, some of this makes some sense. Yottamusic itself was a creation of Rhapsody. In fact, the logical next step would be to ditch Rhapsody’s clunky, obnoxious interface with animated album covers and whatnot, and learn from Yottamusic’s cooler social features and sleeker interface. Let’s see, did th– nope. Why kill bad ideas and maintain the good ones when you can do the reverse?

It’s hard not to feel like subscription-based music in general is not long for this world.

A massive pioneer in thought about composition and electronic music in particular, an inspiration to rock and pop figures as well as academics, and sometimes a lightning rod for controversy, Karlheinz Stockhausen died this week. (Thank you to everyone who wrote in to let us know.)

Stockhausen’s thinking about sound in all his work has had a deep impact on electronic music, particularly in his influential early works for tape and, by the 1960s, live electronics mixed with instruments. And, of course, aside from earning bonus points for showing up on the Sgt. Pepper album cover (the Beatles were big fans), you have to admire a composer who puts a string quartet in helicopters in order to combine the sound of the machinery with choreographed flybys and live video feeds. If that doesn’t make him a hero of ours, nothing will.

Stockhausen also represents the generation of experimental art that was able to escape the grip of the Nazis — an experience that claimed his mother as a victim and haunted his life. He’s part of the legacy of experimentation that Hitler once tried to silence.

I expect that Stockhausen’s death will mean his quote following September 11 will be trotted out again. Press seized upon the phrase “greatest work of art” to describe those events; Stockhausen for his part says he called them Lucifer’s greatest work of art — an enormous difference, coming from someone who survived Nazi Germany. In the years that have past since that quote, however, I personally feel, as a New Yorker there at the time, a growing sense of a day that transformed how many of us feel about art making.

But I’ll stick with Stockhausen’s one fantasy: dreams of flying. And I hope more people compose for helicopter.

Obituary: Karlheinz Stockhausen “Both a rationalist and a mystic, the composer’s influence stretched from Boulez to the Beatles” [The Guardian]

German composer Stockhausen dies “the composer rejected the idea that he was making the music of the future, writing in 1966: “What is modern today will be tradition tomorrow.” [BBC News]

You can read a strangely bitter obituary from The Times, but I prefer a more thoughtful and historically-informed obituary from Paul Griffiths at The New York Times:
Karlheinz Stockhausen, Influential Composer and Avant-Garde Guru, Dies at 79. I think it balances some of his artistic idiosyncrasies with his importance in history. (Griffiths is a fairly reliable voice when it comes to the history of new music; I may not always agree — but then, new music isn’t about agreement, is it?) He sums things up neatly:

Mr. Stockhausen had secured his place in music history by the time he was 30. He had taken a leading part in the development of electronic music, and his early instrumental compositions similarly struck out in new directions, in terms of their formal abstraction, rhythmic complexity and startling sound.

Karlheinz Stockhausen Official Site, Memorial Booklet (PDF)

Those with thoughts or memories to share, we’d love to hear them. And, as always, our condolences to his surviving family, friends, and colleagues.

There are synthesists, and then there are people like Phil Dodds. He’s perhaps best-known as the man who wrangled the (real) ARP 2500 synthesizer in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind so that it could perform an elaborate jam session for (fictional) aliens. But he left an extensive legacy of achievements that helped make music technology more than science fiction.

Our friend Yann Seznec (aka The Amazing Rolo) writes:

You’ve mentioned Phil Dodds on your site before, the guy who played the ARP 2500 in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He was VP of Engineering at ARP, he wrote all of their service manuals and schematics and helped design and build many ARP synths, from the 2600 to the Chroma. He then went on to work for Kurzweil, developing digital piano systems. He was even involved in the creation of the MIDI standard. He also happened to be my uncle. I thought you might be interested to know that he died last weekend.

Our condolences to Yann and all of Phil’s friends and colleagues. There’s some really moving commentary at the Aviation Industry CBT Committee blog (really, because after all of his work in synthesis, he also was a driving force behind a distributed online learning initiative for the Department of Defense):

“What are we saying to each other?”

That was a single line, spoken by the sound engineer at the end of Close Encounters of a Third Kind, as he played chords and a friendly alien spaceship played music back.

The Passing of Philip V.W. Dodds

… and more on Wikipedia:

Phil Dodds

We talk a lot about tools, of course, but that question of “what are we saying to each other” couldn’t have deeper resonance for what we do. And if aliens do show up, thanks to Phil Dodds, I think we might put on a great show.

I’m sad to report that Daniel Hansson, CEO and one of the founders of Elektron, passed away in a car accident August 19. He was best known to the world as the creator of unique and ingeniously-designed instruments like the boutique drum machine / pattern synth Machinedrum, the Monomachine tabletop synth, and the SIDStation (powered by the beloved synth engine in the Commodore 64).

More at Music thing, Die Monster, and an ongoing thread at Elektron Users. From that forum, here are some thoughtful words from member Toni:

Sad and shocking news indeed. The only comfort I can think of is that Daniel got to see his dream come alive while he was still living. Elektron made the music machines that emit the feeling of unconditional love for the true musical instruments, rather than be just a passing products for consumer markets. In this sense, SidStation, MD and MnM, were completed and continue to inspire musicians through out the world.

Indeed, condolences to Daniel’s family and friends, and the Elektron team and community.

Information on where to send notes and donations (the World Wildlife Foundation is suggested) at the Elektron site:
Elektron.se

Photos of Daniel

Daniel is someone who many in the music community did get to know face to face; I’m sorry I didn’t get that chance. Many more knew him through the instruments he created. Roger Linn sends along a couple of photos of his own (my apologies for incorrectly linking a different Daniel at Elektron via Flickr). Roger writes:

Daniel was a great guy, friendly and fun to talk to, passionate about getting the details right in a product, and a true lover of ideas. It’s a tragic loss to creative musicians everywhere.

Following the tragic loss of its creator, software developer/publisher Image Line is dedicating Deckadance to its creator, Juan Antonio Arguelles (”Argu”). Deckadance, a DJ application with the ability host plug-ins and operate in a host mode, as well as support a variety of vinyl timecode systems, was the project on which Argu was focused at his untimely death; he had also worked on projects like FL Studio 7 and plug-ins by discoDSP.

Image-Line has also announced a new developer is taking on Deckadance in Argu’s absence:

Image-Line is pleased to hand the baton for Deckadance development to the capable hands of Luis Serrano Cavero. Luis is an experienced developer of DJ tools, including his own DJ midi controller, and brings further inspiration and enthusiasm to the Deckadance project. “We are very proud, and fortunate, to have Luis on the team” said [Jean-Marie Cannie, Managing Director of Image Line Software].

The announcement comes with the release of 1.13, with various bugfixes and improvements, deck sync and monitoring enhancements, and Behringer BCD3000 console support.

As we again offer our condolences, it’s nice to see this developer’s work memorialized and recognized; I hope we get to know more of the faces behind the tools we care about.

Deckadance homepage