Tom McGee's Blog

The Times had a respect­ful if dis­tant obit­u­ary this morn­ing. They wrote about how he’d become dis­tant and iso­lated in his later years, nar­row­ing down his cir­cle to his cho­sen set of musi­cians — who were by and large also fam­ily mem­bers. He’d been out there for a while though. Back in the ‘70s I read an inter­view in which he claimed to be from Sir­ius and that “he was put on earth to give voice to a cos­mic music that will change the world.”

Yes, well then. He was of course tremen­dously influ­en­tial, being one of the inven­tors of elec­tronic music. And his pic­ture was one of those nota­bles on the cover of Sgt. Pep­per. Here are a cou­ple of ripped MP3s for fur­ther study. First, an excerpt from “Zodiac,” a piece he com­posed for spe­cially con­structed music boxes. This one is the cur­rently rel­e­vant one, Sagittarius.

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Prob­a­bly more rep­re­sen­ta­tive of what made him famous, part of Klavier­stück IX.

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I’ve got more, but it’s on vinyl. When I was in high school I picked up a copy of Mikro­phonie I and Mikro­phonie II, with which I fright­ened the lit­tle girls across the street. Mikro­phonie I is for tam-tam, two micro­phones, two fil­ters and poten­tiome­ters. It’s basi­cally six­teen min­utes of mak­ing var­i­ous sounds by excit­ing a tam-tam with var­i­ous objects, mov­ing the micro­phones around while alter­ing the sound with elec­tron­ics. Mikro­phonie II has the sound of a choir and a ham­mond organ inter­act­ing in real time with their own elec­tron­i­cally mod­i­fied sounds com­ing out of four loud­speak­ers on stage.