A day isn't considered a success here in this pile of bricks up on a hill that I call home unless I fall down at least one musical rabbit hole. Today was a success, and the rabbit hole was German composer Eberhard Schoener. The rabbit hole started, as so many do, with the Balinese Monkey Chant.
I first heard the Monkey Chant, sometimes referred to as The Ramayana Chant and as Kecak, on a 1982 world-music compilation LP titled Music and Rhythm, a benefit album for the World of Music Arts and Dance (WOMAD) Festival. The version on the album was a field recording attributed to "unknown artist" and recorded by Vic Coppersmith-Heaven. It was a startling track, a standout on the LP, and the chant also appeared in the 1992 movie Baraka and can even by heard briefly in the Mr. Bungle song Goodbye Sober Day from the 1999 LP, California.
Today, the algorithm threw Schoener's 1976 Ketjak at me.
Ketjak overlays Schoener's Moog and mellotron on top of the Monkey Chant as performed by the Gamelan Orchestra Of Saba And Pinda and recorded at the Bali Beach Hotel in Indonesia. Peter York provides layers of additional percussion that almost previsions the electronic drum-and-bass sound of 1990s electronic dance music.
Ketjak is but one track from Schoener's 1976 album, Bali-Agúng, all of which feature different strategies for mixing the Indonesian recordings with his electronics. Some are trancelike (Nadi, the 10+ minute track that closes Side One), and others tracks are fittingly subtitled for The Sun, The World, and The Demon King. Ketjak is subtitled Rock, presumably for the genre and not for stone.
Schoener's playing on this album sounds more influenced by his classical background and Edgar Froese and Tangerine Dream than by Florian Schneider and Kraftwerk. However, some of his later albums contained more New Wave elements. His 1978 album, Flashback, is essentially the first Police album. Schoener's synths on the album are accompanied by Sting, Summers, and Copeland, and the album was recorded between October 1977 and February 1978, before the November '78 release of The Police's debut, Outlandos D'Amour (Roxanne, etc.). A second album, Video Magic, also by Schoener, Copeland, Summers, and Sting, came out the same year and Harvest Records released an assortment of the material from the two albums in 1981 under the name Video Magic.
Side One of Flashback (and the U.S. version of Video Magic) consists of six relatively short rock tracks that sound like what The Police might have been if they had decided to be a krautrock band instead on a post-punk New Wave act. If released as an EP, the six tracks could have been The Police's first recording. but as a quartet rather than trio. Unfortunately, Schoener's compositions weren't written with Sting's limited vocal range in mind, and the album's not nearly as good as one might imagine. The most successful track is probably Why Don't You Answer, the second cut on the album.
Side Two contains three longer cuts of about eight minutes each and sound more like the Tangerine Dream-New Age psychedelic ambience of Schoener's other albums, with Summers and Copeland backing up Schoener's synths and Sting only providing short vocal passages.
And so down the rabbit hole we go. Schoener's discography contains classical music, both traditional and avant-garde, some longform ambient drone albums, and psychedelic electronic music. According to his Wikipedia page, Schoener was originally a classical violinist and conductor of chamber music and opera, and was one of the early adopters and popularizers of the Moog in Europe. He has composed film scores, videos, music for television, and an opera to be broadcast via the Internet, and has collaborated with Tangerine Dream for a live performance on German TV.
His 90th birthday was on May 13 and it wasn't until today that I discovered him.
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