Watch the creation of electronic music in 1960s Germany
Dive into the intricate and labour-intensive process of electronic music production in the mid-to-late 1960s through a rare documentary on Germany's Siemens Studio
Take a glimpse into the arduous and elaborate process of producing electronic music during the mid-to-late 1960s, as showcased in this scarce documentary on the German Siemens Studio (now preserved at the Deutsches Museum in Munich).
There isn't much information available about this 1967 film uploaded to the YouTube channel named freeartslab, but it's fascinating, and some of our readers might have more insights.
The film is credited to feature composer Josef Anton Riedl, with a YouTube note indicating it was shot in 1967 (though it's more likely to be from 1966, the final year of the studio's operation). Riedl served as the lab's director and founded the renowned Neue Musik München / Klang-Aktionen, while also being a prominent figure in German concrete music.
This captivating and detailed documentary thoroughly examines each stage of the composition process. It showcases the hand-drawn notes, the dial-and-numbers interface for creating scores from ticker tape, meticulous manipulation of test tone oscillators and generators, and some impressive vocoder work.
The documentary is in German, but YouTube's standard auto-translation tools can be utilised.
