wave your hand....
In a lost age, long before Post Modernism (they had yet to perfect Modernism!).....a dream arose...a dream of electronic waves producing a sublime musical experience...... Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman was among the driving forces behind the rise of the Theremin, helping popularise the bewitching electronic instrument on stage, on record and film.
As a medical student in New York City, he had caused a sensation in his moonlighting job providing music for the city's plushest nightclubs....moving to California, he hoped to augment his successful practice with the odd bit of music and so joined the Los Angeles Musician's Union...as the only Theremin player listed, he ended up collaborating with composer Miklos Rozsa on the score to Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound".
Hoffman went on to lend his talents to many other films, including The Lost Weekend, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Delicate Delinquent and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T; More to the point for our purposes, he also recorded a series of LPs: 1947's Music Out of the Moon, 1948's Perfumes Set to Music and 1949's Music for Peace of Mind....here we re-present these early, almost forgotten masterpieces of early electronica....the eerie tones of the Theremin accompanied by the sweeping exotic orchestrations of Les Baxter and Billy May....playing the out-of-this-world themes of expat Brit film composer Harry Revel...with titles that sound like a lost Felt album, this chill-out music of another age has been seemingly lost back in the ether it came from..without these albums, without Les Baxter's love of the weird, without Samuel J. Hoffman, it's unlikely that a 1920's experimental curiosity of an instrument would turn up in modern music from "Good Vibrations" to Portishead....Before there were synthesizers, before there were any electronic instruments, there was the Theremin...long may it reign!
Waves in the Ether: The Magical World of the Theremin
strgzr
με τις θερεμίνες !
thnx a bunch !
thanks!