In the late 1960s, armed with a homemade synthesiser and pioneering zeal, Coxe made hypnotic sounds that sparked a rock revolution
In the late 1960s, before Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra became the post-hippy stoner’s soundtrack of choice, before Kraftwerk’s Autobahn instilled the idea that pop could be made entirely using electronics in a generation of musicians’ minds, the synthesiser was still an instrument largely associated with novelty albums and classical music: serialist composers including Milton Babbitt were fond of them; the big electronic hit album of the era was Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach, featuring the Brandenburg Concerto and Air On a G String rendered on a Moog.
In the world of rock music, they existed largely as something to embellish the albums of top-flight bands, decorating a couple of tracks on the Beatles’ Abbey Road and Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends. The rock artists who jumped in feet-first were a peculiar bunch: there was Lothar and the Hand People, a scrappy folk-rock band intent on using a theremin wherever they could; there was the White Noise, refugees from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop whose 1969 album An Electric Storm blended psychedelic whimsy and punishing experimentalism; there was the United States of America, communists who saw their music as a means of politically radicalising an entire country.
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Continue reading...by Alexis Petridis via Electronic music | The Guardian
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