Hilo Kudos
By:
January 2, 2010
… to Erik Davis, a regular contributor to HiLobrow.com, whose essay “Kosmiche: Krautrock and the Sublime” in the newly published book Krautrock (Black Dog, ed. Nikos Kotsopoulos), is great stuff. Excerpt:
In the nineteenth century, the technological capture of electricity and electro-magnetic effects went hand-in-hand with the conceptual revolution introduced by the recognition of the electromagnetic spectrum, a literally universal field of invisible vibrating reality that, inevitably, created a scientific if no longer strictly materialist basis for the occult consciousness of higher spiritual dimensions. The fundamentally cosmic dimension of electronic sound notably asserts itself in the peculiar fate of theremin, one of the first electronic instruments, and certainly — with its spectral tone and incorporeal interface — one of the spookiest. Though Clara Rockmore used the instrument to perform the classics at Carnegie Hall, the device had performed a classic high-brow/low-brow flip-flop by the 1950s, when film composers started milking the thing for eerie and often extraterrestrial exotica in the soundtracks for flicks like Spellbound, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and The Thing. Cosmic sounds can be sublime, even alienating, but they are also pop.
… and also to Peggy Nelson, whose Artist-in-Residence posts for this site have been received enthusiastically here, here, and here, for example.
Thanks, finally, to Erik for introducing us to Peggy!