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 seemingly anticipates 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 the 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. In 1977, he composed a soundtrack for the film Und die Bibel hat doch recht (And the Bible is Right, After All) along with Andy Summers, later of The Police. The next year, he released two albums, Flashback and Video Magic, with Summers, Stewart Copeland and Sting both of which were released before the The Police's debut, Outlandos D'Amour (Roxanne, etc.). Flashback is available on Spotify, while Video Magic can be found on YouTube.
Side One of Flashback consists of six relatively short tracks that sound like what The Police might have been if they had decided to be a prog/krautrock band instead on a post-punk New Wave act. If released as an EP, the six tracks would probably be considered The Police's first recording, but as a quartet with a German keyboardist rather than as a 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 of Flashback contains three longer cuts of about eight minutes each and sounds 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 occasional, short vocal passages.
Video Magic leans more toward the prog-rock side, with Sting's vocals consisting mostly of high-range arias and choruses and sounding more like an additional instrument in the mix than a traditional rock front man. Overall, the album sounds less like potential Police tracks than does Side One of Flashback.
In 1981, Harvest Records released an assortment of the material from the two albums in the U.S. under the name Video Magic.
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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