Kosmonautenschule

Warm Beats For Warm People

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

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

1 comment:

Captain Clark said...

The Harmonies in "Your Hidden Dreams" are always KILLING ME! nice chimney fire going on there, cevin. hehe. so homey!
great, great record. i mean it's from 19-fuckin-68. i wonder why it doesn't get the attention it deserves. everybody keeps on talking about the velvet underground as the groundbreaking alternative band, "far ahead of their time" and stuff (which is obviously right), but white noise is rarely mentioned. and i think this stuff's even more forward-looking with all the experimental sound-things going on than VU!
...sorry, had to get rid of that.

El Capitano