Oskar Sala, Harald Genzmer

Amazing Early Electronic / Experimental Instrument / Tape-Manipulation work from these two Composer / Performers, with Sala perhaps the better known of the two due to his innumerable contributions to film-sound design - he did all of the bird-sounds in Hitchcock’s “The Birds” via the “Trautonium,” Dr. Friedrich Trautwein’s 1929 electronic instrument and Sala’s “axe” - Sala == Trautonium / Clara Rockmore == Theremin. Several facets of the Trautonium’s design lend to an otherworldly timbral pallette; equal / Pythagorean temperaments can be disabled, allowing the performer to experiment with sliding scales and modified overtone series - plus the envelope of each individual note can be altered quite drastically in a method not even comparable to contemporary synthesizer design. The five-part piece on the A-side is composed by Sala; all sounds come via the Trautonium whereas the B-side pieces feature some aggressive Cathy Berberian-style vocal-aktion and orchestration - luckily these are offset by confounding blasts of super-intricate White Noise Percussion and some of Sala’s most timbrally dense playing. An amazing record, one of the best examples of the Trautonium’s myriad possibilities & a showcase for Sala's virtuosic tendencies.