Thursday 27 March 2014

Krell Music & the Buchla

What's Krell Music ?

Is it ambient, improvisational or sci-fi?
It's been described as organic & free flowing, ....self-generating?
Maybe it's a combination of all of the above.

The term appears to have connections with the movie "Forbidden Planet" (1956) directed by Fred M. Wilcox, starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, and Leslie Nielsen.



The Krell are a species of highly advanced aliens that once populated the Forbidden Planet.

This is a groundbreaking movie on many levels. The film though loosely based on Shakespeare's "Tempest" is set entirely on another world in interstellar space. And the humans travel on a spaceship far from the earth.

However the most interesting aspect of the film for me is the music score.
This was composed by Louis and Bebe Barron before the invention of modular synthesizers.
They used custom built circuits which they "drove till they exploded". The sounds created where recorded on a early tape recorder (which must have been rare in the 1950s) and the results cut & spliced together to "compose" the sound track.

Below is a Krell inspired patch made on a Buchla Music Easel:

....

And the pic :


Below is a rare German promo poster of Robbie the Robot for the Forbidden Planet.
It measures about 33' x 25''. This type of poster had very limited runs. They were released on behalf of the cinema companies for promotion only.


Below is an earlier Krell piece made using a vintage Buchla 100 and 259 oscillator

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