Traditional Beauties

Ryuichi Sakamoto - Forbidden Colours

Forbidden Colours appears on the official soundtrack of "Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence", a picture from 1983 with Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto and David Bowie. It takes place in a Japanese prison camp during Second World War where Bowie plays an English soldier and Sakamoto a young Japanese Captain who has a homo-erotic attraction towards him: wouldn't that have been a genius couple? However, the soundtrack was produced only by Sakamoto which made him known to a broader public. Forbidden Colours consists basically of this song plus David Sylvian's vocals.


Holger Czukay - Persian Love

As the title Persian Love already reveals, Can-member Holger Czukay ventured to the empire of thousand and one nights where the mufti sings his morning prayer. It's taken from his solo work Movies from 1979. We were lately discussing if you could play it at a Saturday night, what do you think?


Akiko Yano - Rose Garden

Rose Garden appears on a British sampler called Tokyo Mobile Music, a project to support Eastern "talent, as much as possible". It was published in 1982, the year when Yano married Ryuichi Sakamoto (they divorced in 2006). Like this driving tune and the Japanese typical chant.

White Noise

If you're an attentive reader of kosmonautenschule, you probably downloaded our Settings For The Control Of The Sun. Track number 3 is called "My Game Of Loving" - a psychedelic blackly song with synthesizers, bongos, drum solos, various voices/languages and striking orgy groanings. In my opinion this is a masterpiece as it is the whole debut album, since we could have dropped any song from An Electric Storm without quality decreasement.

White Noise was formed by the American David Vorhaus in London 1969. At that time he was a student of physics and elecronic engineering there which explains White Noise's sophistication in using electronic devices for their sound. His musical know-how came from his classical bass-player education. Initially he was joined by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, both BBC Radiophonic Workshop composers and former members of an electronic music project called Unit Delta Plus.

On the album An Electric Storm that was published in 1969 on Island Records Vorhaus made use of the first British Synthesizer ever (remember: it was 1969): a EMS Synthi VCS3. He played with tape manipulating techniques and used a lot of voices to create this hardly comparable sound which was at that time totally new: "I use voices a lot too, but not as conventional vocals. I always use a lot of voices, and if somebody having an orgasm in the background is used as part of one of the waveforms, it makes the sound more interesting, without the listener actually knowing what they're hearing". He actually organized the orgies and joined them by the way.
Although An Electric Storm didn't sell good when it came out, it's nowadays seen as a milestone in electronic music's history and Vorhaus ranks among it's pioneers.

White Noise - An Electric Storm