Soothing Sounds for Baby (1962) is a three-volume set of ambient electronic music by American composer, musician, and inventor Raymond Scott. Scott originally intended to lull infants to sleep with the music, but later generations have found value in the music for its minimalist aspects, often comparing it to the works of Brian Eno, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream despite having predated such artists by more than a decade.
Originally released in collaboration with the Gesell Institute of Human Development,[1] the volumes are split up into three age groups: Volume 1 is 1 to 6 months; Volume 2 is 6 to 12 months; and Volume 3 is 12 to 18 months. The music gets more complex with each volume. Scott created much of the music on the albums with instruments he created, such as the Electronium and the Clavivox. "Particularly on Soothing Sounds for Baby, Scott proved to be one of the first composers to merge the Brave New World of electronic sounds with a rhythmic pop sensibility."[2] Basta Music of Holland reissued the albums as 3 individual CDs and as a 3-LP box set in 1997.[2]
In 2017, Music On Vinyl in cooperation with Basta Music pressed a limited edition of 1,000 copies on silver-coloured vinyl.[3]
Juan García Esquivel, often known mononymously as Esquivel!, was a Mexican band leader, pianist, and composer for television and films. He is recognized today as one of the foremost exponents of a sophisticated style of largely instrumental music that combines elements of lounge music and jazz with Latin flavors. Esquivel is sometimes called "The King of Space Age Pop" and "The Busby Berkeley of Cocktail Music", and is considered one of the foremost exponents of a style of late 1950s-early 1960s quirky instrumental pop that became known as "Space Age Bachelor Pad Music".
Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. It may lack net composition, beat, or structured melody. It uses textural layers of sound that can reward both passive and active listening and encourage a sense of calm or contemplation. The genre is said to evoke an "atmospheric", "visual", or "unobtrusive" quality. Nature soundscapes may be included, and the sounds of acoustic instruments such as the piano, strings and flute may be emulated through a synthesizer.
Raymond Scott was an American composer, band leader, pianist, record producer, and inventor of electronic instruments.
Glitch is a genre of electronic music that emerged in the 1990s. It is distinguished by the deliberate use of glitch-based audio media and other sonic artifacts.
Dive is a Belgian electronic body music project formed in 1990 by Dirk Ivens. Dive's "audio trademark" is the experimental sound of abused drum machines, pulsating through crackling distortion on almost every song.
Irwin Chusid is a journalist, music historian, radio personality, record producer, and self-described "landmark preservationist". His stated mission has been to "find things on the scrapheap of history that I know don't belong there and salvage them." Those "things" have included such previously overlooked but now-celebrated icons as composer/bandleader/electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, Space Age Pop avatar Esquivel, illustrator/fine artist Jim Flora, various outsider musicians, and The Langley Schools Music Project. Chusid calls himself "a connoisseur of marginalia," while admitting he's "a terrible barometer of popular taste."
The Langley Schools Music Project is a collection of recordings of children's choruses singing pop hits by the likes of the Beach Boys, Paul McCartney, and David Bowie. Originally recorded in 1976–77, they were found and rereleased only 25 years later and became a cult hit and a successful example of outsider music. It was rereleased on vinyl March 9, 2018, by Bar/None Records.
Chris Carter is an English musician, best known for being a member of Throbbing Gristle and the duo Chris & Cosey, both with his longtime partner Cosey Fanni Tutti.
James Flora, best known for his distinctive and idiosyncratic album cover art for RCA Victor and Columbia Records during the 1940s and 1950s, was also a prolific commercial illustrator from the 1940s to the 1970s and the author/illustrator of 17 popular children's books. He was a fine artist as well, who created hundreds of paintings, drawings, etchings and sketches over his 84-year life.
"Powerhouse" (1937) is an instrumental musical composition by Raymond Scott, perhaps best known today as the "assembly line" music in animated cartoons released by Warner Bros.
Space age pop is a subgenre of pop and easy listening music associated with Mexican and American composers and songwriters in the Space Age of the 1950s and 1960s. Also known as bachelor pad music or lounge music, it was inspired by the spirit of those times, an optimism based on the strong post-war economy and technology boom, and excitement about humanity's early forays into space. Although there is no exact album, date, or year when the genre was born, producer Irwin Chusid identifies its heyday as "roughly 1954 to 1963—from the dawn of high-fidelity (hi-fi) to the arrival of the Beatles."
Brian Carpenter is an American musician, songwriter, composer, and arranger. He is the lead singer and songwriter for the Boston, Massachusetts band Beat Circus. In 2011, he formed Brian Carpenter & The Confessions and released its debut album in 2015. He is also a founder and lead arranger of Ghost Train Orchestra in Brooklyn.
Manhattan Research, Inc. is a two-CD compilation of electronic music created by the musician, composer and inventor, Raymond Scott and his company, "Manhattan Research Inc." Posthumously released in 2000 by Basta Music of the Netherlands, the album contains selected samples of Scott's work from the 1950s and 1960s for film soundtracks, commercials, and for his own technical and musical experiments. The synthesizers, sequencers, and drum-machines used were designed and constructed by Raymond Scott.
Songs in the Key of Z is a book and two compilation albums written and compiled by Irwin Chusid. The book and albums explore the field of what Chusid coined as "outsider music". Chusid defines outsider music as; "crackpot and visionary music, where all trails lead essentially one place: over the edge." Chusid's work has brought the music of several leading performers in the outsider genre to wider attention. These include Daniel Johnston, Joe Meek, Jandek and Wesley Willis. In addition, his CDs feature some recordings by artists who produced very little work but placed their recordings firmly in the outsider area. Notable amongst these are nursing home resident Jack Mudurian who sings snatches of several dozen songs in a garbled collection known as Downloading the Repertoire and the obscure and extreme scat singer Shooby Taylor AKA 'The Human Horn.'
"Suspicion" is a 1962 song originally recorded by Elvis Presley written by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman which became a major hit in 1964 in a recording by Elvis Presley sound-alike Terry Stafford.
Dick Raaijmakers, also known as Dick Raaymakers or Kid Baltan, was a Dutch composer, theater maker and theorist. He is considered a pioneer in the field of electronic music and tape music, but has also produced numerous musical theater pieces and theoretical publications.
The Beau Hunks are a Dutch revivalist music ensemble who have performed and recorded the vintage works of composers Leroy Shield, Marvin Hatley, Raymond Scott, Edward MacDowell, Ferde Grofé, and others. They have been referred to as a "documentary orchestra", because they perform note-perfect renditions of music which is obscure and often commercially unavailable. For some projects for which no sheet music was known to exist, they had to reconstruct charts from original recordings extracted from films.
The Electronium, created by Raymond Scott, is an early combined electronic synthesizer and algorithmic composition / generative music machine.
Daniel Rosenfeld, better known by his stage/online name C418, is a German musician, producer and sound engineer, best known as the composer and sound designer for the sandbox video game Minecraft. He has also written and produced the theme for Beyond Stranger Things and the soundtrack for the Steam release of Cookie Clicker. He has also DJed for American rock band Anamanaguchi.
"Where's the Revolution" is a song by English electronic band Depeche Mode from their fourteenth studio album Spirit. It was released as the album's first single on 3 February 2017, on the 20th anniversary of "Barrel of a Gun". The cover art was designed by Anton Corbijn. The single was premiered on the Polish radio Trójka - Polskie Radio Program III at midnight on 3 February. This single is notable for being the first Depeche Mode lead single to not chart on the UK Singles Chart, a trend that would continue with Spirit's following singles.
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