Perrey and Kingsley

The musical duo Perrey and Kingsley (Jean-Jacques Perrey, b. 1929 and Gershon Kingsley, b. 1925), were pioneers in the field of electronic music. Prior to their collaboration in 1964, electronic music was considered to be purely avant-garde. The notion of electronic music for the masses was nearly unthinkable.

Their first meeting

Perrey and Kingsley came together during Kingsley's stint as a staff arranger at Vanguard Records, an independent label in New York City that specialized not in avant-garde music, but in folk music. At that time, Perrey was experimenting with tape loops in the style of French avant-garde musician Pierre Schaffer. Each loop was a laboriously hand-spliced collection of filtered sounds, pitch-manipulated sounds and even animal calls. The end result of their first collabrative effort in 1966 combined Perrey's tape loops, and his inventive melodies with Kingsley's complimentary arrangements and instrumentation and was filled with tunes that sounded like an animated cartoon gone berserk. Their first LP was titled In Sound From Way Out! and was released on Vanguard that same year. Since this was decades before the advent of widespread digital technology, each cut took weeks of painstaking editing and splicing to produce.

Related Topics:
Vanguard Records - Folk music - Tape loop - Pierre Schaffer

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The twelve rather whimsical tracks bore names like "Unidentified Flying Object" and "The Little Man From Mars" in an attempt to make electronic music more accessible. The offbeat titles and happy, upbeat melodies added a genuine sense of humor to popular music years before another notable musician, Frank Zappa, would do likewise. In fact, "Unidentified Flying Object" and another of the album's cuts, "Electronic Can-Can" became theme music for "Wonderama," a Metromedia Television children's program of the early 1970s. Though most of the melodies were original, two borrowed from the classics. "Swan's Splashdown" was based on Pyotr Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" while "Countdown At 6" borrowed from Amilcare Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours," much as Allan Sherman did in 1963 with his hit recording, "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh." The final cut on the album, "Visa To The Stars" is co-credited to "Andy Badale," who would go on to fame as Angelo Badalamenti, arranger of the music in many of David Lynch's movies. In contrast to the rest of the album, "Visa To The Stars" is a more serious gesture and lacks the unusual sound effects of the other eleven cuts. It is highly reminiscent of the style of Joe Meek and his hit, "Telstar" by The Tornados. Perrey's Ondioline carries the melody throughout.

Related Topics:
Frank Zappa - Wonderama - Metromedia - Pyotr Tchaikovsky - Swan Lake - Amilcare Ponchielli - Dance of the Hours - Allan Sherman - Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh - Angelo Badalamenti - David Lynch - Joe Meek - Telstar - The Tornados

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