Chrome Dreams – CDCD5033 917.19MB FLAC
Forbidden Planets does not present electronic music as a genre that appeared fully formed when synthesizers entered record shops. It documents a much stranger prehistory, assembled from railway recordings, theremins, oscillators, laboratory equipment, cut tape, filtered noise, radio experiments, film scores and sounds whose makers were not always certain whether they had composed music or engineered a new species of acoustic event. Across two discs, the collection moves from 1945 to the closing years of the 1950s, when electricity was steadily changing from an invisible aid to musical performance into an audible creative material. The future heard here was not sleek. It was spliced with scissors, threaded through machines, measured in laboratories and occasionally discovered by accident.
The compilation begins with Miklós Rózsa’s prelude from Spellbound, an apparently conservative opening for an anthology of electronic pioneers. Most of the music remains orchestral, but the theremin enters as an unstable psychological presence, its gliding voice associated with amnesia, anxiety and the hidden activity of the mind. This establishes one of the collection’s central histories: electronic sound first reached many listeners not through an avant-garde concert, but through cinema. It arrived attached to hypnosis, madness, outer space and forces invisible to ordinary perception. The electronic tone was valuable because it seemed to come from nowhere recognizable. It had no bow, breath or struck surface clearly explaining its existence.
Pierre Schaeffer’s “Étude aux chemins de fer” immediately overturns the orchestral frame. Trains become percussion, rhythm, phrasing and architecture. Whistles, couplings, engines and wheels are removed from their practical setting and reorganized through recording. This was the foundational insight of musique concrète: sound did not need to begin as a written note or obedient instrumental performance. A recorded object could be cut from the world, repeated, reversed and placed beside another object until both acquired new identities. Schaeffer does not imitate the railway. He discovers music already concealed inside its machinery and then rearranges its behavior.
Bernard Herrmann’s selections from The Day the Earth Stood Still return the listener to science-fiction cinema, but his electronic instruments are woven into an extraordinary hybrid ensemble. Theremins, organs, electric strings and unusual percussion create an atmosphere in which alien technology feels both majestic and physically threatening. Herrmann understood that an unfamiliar sound could alter the emotional meaning of an entire orchestra. The theremin does not merely announce that something comes from outer space. Its continuous, ungrounded pitch seems to weaken the normal laws governing the room around it. Even listeners who have never seen the film will recognize a vocabulary that became inseparable from flying saucers, radar screens and approaching machines.
From there the first disc travels deeper into the European electronic studios. Herbert Eimert and Robert Beyer’s “Klang im unbegrenzten Raum” and “Klangstudie II” abandon most of the visible world. Their tones seem suspended in an unlimited space, appearing and disappearing without the physical gestures associated with instrumental music. Early elektronische Musik often sought to create sound from electronically generated material rather than recorded everyday objects. This distinction from musique concrète could become almost ideological, yet heard decades later, the border is less important than the shared sense of discovery. Both schools were learning that tape could make time and timbre compositional materials rather than passive containers.
John Cage’s “Imaginary Landscape” introduces another route through the new technology. Cage treated recorded sound, chance procedures and electronic media as ways of loosening the composer’s control rather than perfecting it. A machine did not need to obey an ideal design. It could introduce unpredictable relationships and allow existing sounds to meet without being forced into traditional hierarchy. This attitude remains crucial to everything from tape collage and turntablism to experimental radio, sampling and noise. The electronic studio could be a laboratory of precision, but it could also become a place where precision was deliberately interrupted.
Karlheinz Stockhausen’s “Studie I” sounds severe even within this company. The piece is built from electronically generated sine tones, organized with almost architectural concentration. There is little attempt to comfort the listener through recognizable references. Yet its austerity has a strange purity. Each tone seems placed beneath intense light, stripped of instrumental personality and examined according to frequency, duration and relationship. Paul Gredinger and Henri Pousseur continue this investigation, creating structures that can sound like signals exchanged by machines that have developed an unfamiliar syntax.
The first disc culminates with Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Jünglinge,” one of the anthology’s most profound works. A boy’s voice is separated into syllables, tones and particles, then distributed among electronic sounds until human and synthetic material begin crossing into one another. At some moments the voice remains clearly devotional; elsewhere it is fragmented into sparks of phonetic energy. The piece does not simply place singing over electronics. It asks where a human voice ends once it has been recorded, filtered, cut and spatially rearranged. The sacred text passes through technological transformation without entirely losing its spiritual charge. Instead, the studio becomes a vast imaginary cathedral built from tape.
The second disc opens with Louis and Bebe Barron’s music for Forbidden Planet, the work that supplies the compilation’s title and central image. Their “electronic tonalities” do not behave like conventional background scoring. The circuits squeal, pulse, shudder and appear to possess temperaments of their own. The Barrons built circuits influenced by ideas from cybernetics, recorded their responses and manipulated the results through tape. These sounds make the fictional technology of the Krell civilization convincing because they do not merely decorate the screen. They suggest autonomous systems communicating, malfunctioning and perhaps dreaming beyond human comprehension.
The anthology then becomes a rapid tour through several international laboratories. Hermann Heiss works with pure electronic form; Henri Pousseur’s “Scambi” transforms filtered noise into modular sections capable of being assembled in multiple orders; Iannis Xenakis makes “Diamorphoses” feel like weather, machinery and geological force compressed into magnetic tape. Xenakis’s recorded engines and environmental sounds do not retain the playful recognizability of Schaeffer’s trains. They become masses with gravitational weight, suggesting that concrete sound could be treated almost as architecture.
The Dutch pieces by Kid Baltan and Tom Dissevelt provide an important change of emotional temperature. “Song of the Second Moon,” “Syncopation” and “Whirling” are playful, rhythmic and startlingly accessible. Their bouncing tones, miniature percussion and sharply edited movements anticipate space-age pop, library music, early sequencer patterns and entire branches of later electronic entertainment. This is where the laboratory begins smiling. The equipment is no longer only producing abstraction, anxiety or cosmic awe. It can swing, joke and create imaginary dance music for planets that do not exist.
The short BBC Radiophonic Workshop selection demonstrates another practical route into electronic invention. Daphne Oram, Desmond Briscoe and their colleagues used tape manipulation to create sounds for radio and television when synthesizers as we now understand them were not available. Natural sounds could be recorded, slowed, accelerated, reversed, looped and layered until their sources became unrecognizable. This work occupied a peculiar cultural position. It was experimental music created inside a broadcasting institution, often designed to serve a few seconds of drama, comedy or science fiction. Millions of people consequently encountered radical tape techniques without being told they were listening to the avant-garde.
Edgard Varèse’s “Poème électronique” enlarges the studio into physical architecture. Originally created for the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, it was intended to move through a building equipped with hundreds of loudspeakers while images and light surrounded the audience. On an ordinary stereo recording, only part of that spatial design survives, but the piece still feels immense. Bells, voices, machinery, percussion and electronic tones appear as fragments of civilization drifting through a technological cavern. Varèse had long imagined music as “organized sound,” and here recording technology finally allowed him to compose beyond the physical limitations of an orchestra.
György Ligeti’s “Artikulation” follows with something lighter, quicker and almost conversational. Electronic bursts interrupt one another like invented phonemes spoken by tiny creatures. Questions, responses, whispers, arguments and jokes seem to occur without any actual language. Ligeti turns the studio into a theater of artificial speech. Henk Badings’s extended ballet music then shows how electronic sound could support movement and dramatic form rather than existing only as an isolated experiment, while Tom Dissevelt’s brief “Whirling” returns with another flash of Dutch rhythmic invention.
Cage’s “Fontana Mix” closes the compilation not with a conclusion but with an opening. Its shifting tape materials and chance-derived organization leave the listener inside a field of possibilities rather than at the end of a historical lesson. That is appropriate because Forbidden Planets is not a clean evolutionary chart leading inevitably toward modern synthesizers, techno or digital production. The tracks represent competing ideas about what electronic music could be. Some composers sought total control over sound. Others welcomed accident. Some built tones electronically, while others recorded trains, voices or environmental debris. Some worked in state radio studios, some in corporate laboratories, and some entered popular consciousness through film.
The set’s greatest strength is precisely this looseness. It places orchestral theremin music beside musique concrète, pure electronic composition, soundtrack work, radiophonic effects and experimental tape collage. Strict definitions blur, but the listener gains a broader sense of electricity entering twentieth-century imagination from several directions at once. The anthology is a gateway rather than a final scholarly map, and its occasional misspellings and simplified chronology reinforce that status. It invites exploration, giving each name enough space to become a door into a much larger body of work.
The cover captures this approach perfectly. A clean waveform travels across a black scientific grid, while the opposite panel forms a collage of laboratories, tape machines, film imagery, robots, engineers and early electronic apparatus. One side offers the abstract signal; the other reveals the crowded human and mechanical world that produced it. The waveform appears simple only because the labor has been hidden behind the graph.
Listening now, many of these sounds feel strangely familiar. Their descendants inhabit horror films, video games, industrial music, ambient records, hip-hop samples, techno, noise, science documentaries and the notification sounds of ordinary devices. Yet the original recordings retain their alien character because the equipment did not offer easy presets or familiar templates. Each sound had to be generated, captured, edited and physically assembled. The pioneers were not choosing from an established electronic vocabulary. They were discovering that such a vocabulary might exist.
Forbidden Planets preserves the moment when recorded sound stopped functioning only as a copy of musical performance and became raw material with its own creative life. Trains could become rhythm. Voices could dissolve into particles. White noise could be sculpted. Circuits could behave like animals. A building could become part of a composition. The two discs are filled with worlds that later technology made easier to visit, but ease has not diminished their mystery. These pioneers were not merely predicting the future. Armed with tape, filters, oscillators and immense patience, they were manufacturing pieces of it by hand.
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