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When in 1968 Wendy Carlos released the album "Switched-On Bach" as Walter Carlos, he later had sex reassignment surgery and became a woman, the whole world was surprised by the strangeness of the new electronic music. Despite the fact that synthesizers were used formerly to create sound effects in movies, mainly in the horror genre, synthesizers were unknown to the broad masses. The strange, nevertheless pleasing sounds of the Moog Modular synthesizer, playing the familiar music by Johann Sebastian Bach, created more of a sensation within the music world, taking home three Grammy awards in 1970, and opening the doors for other musicians to experiment and integrate this new instrument in their music. The first mainstream movie to employ the synthesizer was a James Bond movie, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service", a year later in 1969. In his early movies, John Carpenter, the director of the "Escape From New York" fame, had the great Ennio Morricone compose the music for "The Thing" entirely on synthesizers. Less known fact is that he also used the same approach for previous movies, like "Dark Star" and "Assault on Precinct 13" and actually culminated in 1978 with "Halloween". "The Fog" and "Escape From New
York" followed in 1980 and 1981, respectively, all made with a synthesizer soundtrack. This trend in music production enticed musicians to integrate synthesizers in their music, most notably Genesis, Emerson Lake and Palmer and Pink Floyd. But it was bands like Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, and later Ultravox and Peter Gabriel who paved the way towards the electronic music movement that boomed in the 1980s. Gary Numan introduced the movement in 1979 with the Tubeway Army and the single "Are 'Friends' Electric?", which was followed by Duran Duran and the commercially very successful Synthpop New Wave genre, whereby the influences of Roxy Music and the synthesizer virtuoso Brian Eno, but also David Bowie, were most prominent. Bands emerged already in 1981 that paved the synthpop sound of the eighties, like Depeche Mode, Ultravox, Japan, OMD - Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, and the short-lived band Visage. Soft Cell and Eurythmics followed. The electronic music is still very active to this very day, besides the remaining popularity of the old songs, some of the "classic" artists are still producing and releasing albums. When Kraftwerk released the "Tour de France Soundtracks" album in 2003, after a 17 year long hiatus, it created a frenzy within the electronic world, leading to their albums being sold out in several stores. The modular synthesizer towers of the past were completely replaced by virtual analog setups in laptop computers. |
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