Evolutions, Contrasts & Electronic Music

Aurora Rising present a reissue of Henk Badings and Dick Raaijmakers’s Evolutions, Contrasts & Electronic Music, originally released in 1958 under the title Electronic Music and released again in 1968 as Evolution & Contrasts. The 1968 release Evolution & Contrasts contains the same recordings as the 1958 Electronic Music album. Henk Badings and Dick Raaijmakers were composers, arrangers, conductors, and pioneers in the field of electronic music. They created electronic soundscapes with a rather creepy atmosphere. This stuff is different to the ’50s avant-garde classics and the more pop-oriented electronic albums of the same period. Badings’s “Capriccio For Violin And Two Sound Tracks” can be seen as a strange dialogue with sloping melodies between the violin and unidentifiable electronic devices that gives you goosebumps
It has a rather picturesque approach and could be used for early horror flicks as accompanying music for the horrifying scenes. The amazing fact is that this music still sounds fresh and exciting even nearly six decades after its initial release. “Genese”, on the other hand, is a lengthy composition of chirping, bubbling, and droning sounds, swelling and ebbing away in regular intervals. Cosmic music of the highest order. Some sections also feel like an intergalactic information transfer signal of unknown origin. All-in-all a very spooky and haunting affair. It’s interesting how electronic music already went back in the late ’50s while most people consider the late ’60s and early ’70s as the heydays for electronic experiments and cosmic sounds
Well, this reissue allows listeners to experience the pioneers of this genre, and they really do it well. Raaijmakers even had a hand in writing groovy dance compositions when collaborating with Tom Dissevelt. He used the pseudonym Kid Baltan on these occasions. Anyway, this is quite a different thing. This is dark and utterly strange. “Contrasts” by Raaijmakers is a mixture between funny swirling sounds that make you think of a quick tempered discussion between little androids and menacing drones in the back that soon gets interrupted by single blows and hisses with frightening howls far in the back. This is definitely an album for true enthusiasts of strange electronic sounds who even consider early Tangerine Dream as fluffy pop music. Includes five bonus tracks