including a piece by Luigi’s brother, Antonio Russolo. The start of the '30s saw Laurens Hammond establish an electronic instrument manufacturing company which produced the Hammond Organ, while Germany’s AEG company developed the first modern tape recorder. Tape introduced a vast range of possibilities. Having the plasticity of film, it could be slowed down, sped up or played backwards, often with dramatic effect. It could also form 'loops' that repeated patterns and could be used to create delays and echoes, an effect that would re-emerge decades later as a staple of disco DJs.


MUSIQUE CONCReTE The tape recorder was adopted by a group of composers in Paris, who used it to make a new form of music — dubbed ‘musique concrète’. The first concrète pieces were assembled by Pierre Schaeffer, who debuted his new music on radio in 1948. Not long after, he hooked up with Pierre Henry and in 1950 performed the first live musique concrète concert — using turntables and mixers. Amongst the musicians orbiting Schaeffer was Karlheinz Stockhausen, who worked briefly for


Martyn Ware


Schaeffer in 1952 before leaving to join the WDR Cologne Studio for Electronic Music — where his work directly influenced acts such as Can and Kraftwerk. The late '50s saw significant progress in synthesiser technology, not least in the introduction of the Clavivox Synthesiser — which had been sub-assembled by a young engineer called Robert Moog. Driven by a love of jazz and electronics, Moog had developed components of the synthesizer alongside composer Herbert Deutsch, while at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. As the '60s dawned, electronic music was still a high art phenomena, divorced from the burgeoning teenage pop scene. Luckily, a Frenchman called Jean Jacques Perrey was about to change that. Perrey had originally been working with electronic music in France. But his experience in America, producing music for adverts, started a course towards more accessible forms of electronic music. Perrey began looping tape to create pop music and, after returning to Paris, released the chart hit ‘EVA’, introducing electronic music to 1960s pop. Simultaneously, the wider public was being acclimatized to electronics through different channels.


The BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop had been set up in 1958 and had started accustoming the nation’s ears to electronic sounds. Its co-founder, Delia Derbyshire, became renowned for her 1963 version of Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme.


MAINSTREAM By 1966, Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Martin introduced concrète techniques, such as reverse playback, to The Beatles’ palette, bringing electronics into mainstream music. “I didn’t know it was electronic music then,” Karl Bartos explains. “But I was listening to electronic music with 'Sgt Pepper', 'Revolver' and 'Tomorrow Never Knows'.” Psychedelia became a springboard for the next phase in electronic music’s evolution, as synthesizers and the use of tape manipulation transferred to rock musicians looking for new sources of inspiration. In the period following The Beatles, synthesizers became portable. The mini Moog was released in 1970 and became one of the first widely available synthesizers, with Herbie Hancock pioneering it as a touring instrument. By 1974, the WDR studio had begun producing the EMS Synthi 100, while Korg produced the MS-10, winning over acts such as Silver Apples, Pink Floyd, Yes, Hawkwind, Brian Eno and Sparks. Perhaps the purest development of new electronic music took place in West Germany, where Krautrock band Can formed a direct link between the electronic music of the conservatoire and rock music. Keyboardist Irmin Schmidt had studied under Stockhausen. Karl Bartos was also working as a classical musician, playing Cage and Stockhausen’s concerts, when Kraftwerk approached him to play. “They called my professor and said they needed a classically-trained student for a US tour,' he tells DJ Mag. “Soon they found I also knew about pop music, and that I was a composer. We fitted together perfectly.” Bartos went on to co-write some of Kraftwerk’s most iconic electronic material.


DISCO Meanwhile, Giorgio Moroder brought synthesiser sounds into disco after a chance meeting with a conservatoire composer. The composer had access to a large studio-based synth and invited Moroder to visit. Moroder listened politely, but, shortly after, snuck back to the studio and asked the engineer to show him what the machine could really do. Soon basslines were bubbling out of the synthesiser and into Donna Summer’s ‘I Feel Love’. Even as disco was throbbing to a new electronic pulse, the aftermath of punk was ushering in new attitudes. In New York this mutated into a rough-edged synthesis of punk and disco, currently epitomized by Warp band !!!. “I never went for all that analog shit that everyone else was into,” says !!!’s Nic Offer. “I just got the latest mid-priced synth and twisted the presets until they sounded good to me. This always made my bandmates cringe.” In Sheffield, this form of electronic music followed Kraftwerk in seeking a totally electronic music form. “When 'Autobahn' went to No.3 in the US charts, it was seen as a comedy record,” explains Bartos. “Only a few people could see that this was a new, completely electronic soundscape. We wanted a new electronic pop music.” Human League and Heaven 17 founder Martyn Ware says this idea was present at the start of the Sheffield scene: “Our vision, even at the very early stage, was to create a new music purely using electronics,” Martyn, who has a new B.E.F album out now, tells DJ Mag. “I never had formal music training, but growing up in Sheffield I was surrounded by musique concrete — it was part of the everyday environment,” he adds. “A lot of tool-making shops and finishing shops were in the city centre and the big stuff, the drop forges at the steelworks, were booming in the distance.” Ware had grown-up submerged in a Russolian


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