condition (record/cover): EX / EX | An extraordinary document from the Wergo vaults: the sole vinyl release dedicated to Chilean-German composer Juan Allende-Blin's visionary sound installation for organ hydraulique - a water-powered organ conceived as a floating sculptural instrument.
Born in Santiago de Chile in 1928, Allende-Blin came from a remarkable musical lineage - his uncle was the pioneering Chilean nationalist composer Pedro Humberto Allende, and his earliest formal training was with Fre Focke, a direct pupil of Anton Webern. After studies at the University of Santiago and encounters with Olivier Messiaen at the legendary Darmstadt summer courses, he settled permanently in Germany in the late 1950s, where he would share his life and artistic practice for over six decades with the organist and composer Gerd Zacher.
Allende-Blin's music is rooted in the tradition of the Second Viennese School yet charged with a deeply personal poetics of silence, fragmentation, and memory. His output spans chamber music, stage works, chansons, tape compositions, and a distinctive body of "radiophonic sound collages" - alongside a lifelong commitment to rediscovering the work of musicians persecuted and exiled under Nazism.
Open Air & Water Music occupies a singular place in his catalogue. The piece was conceived for an "Orgel-Insel" (organ island) - a floating sculptural installation designed in collaboration with artist Hermann Markard and placed in the Kurparkweiher lake at Wilhelmsbad, near Hanau. The installation was publicly exhibited from April 30 to June 9, 1973. Drawing on the ancient principle of the hydraulis - the water organ of Greco-Roman antiquity - Allende-Blin reimagined the relationship between water, air, and sound as a site-specific event where music literally emerged from the landscape itself. The organ pipes, activated by the movement of water, produced tones that shifted and breathed with the natural environment - an open-air sonic sculpture dissolving the boundaries between instrument, architecture, and nature.
