★Fantome Phonographique
Dreams
* Limited clear vinyl * Delia Derbyshire is one of the most innovative electronic musicians of the 20th century. She is best known for her pioneering work for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and for composing the classic theme song for the original Doctor Who, believed to be the earliest "electronic" theme song in television history. A brilliant composer and one of the few women operating in the early era of electronic music. In the early '60s, she collaborated with the British artist and playwrig…
Theremin (LP)
** 500 Hand Numbered copies only** Lithuanian-born violin prodigy Clara Rockmore became the best-known master of the electronic theremin after emigrating to the USA, her uncommon approach enabling its integration in the classical milieu even as she refined its construction. This landmark debut surfaced in 1977, when she was already 66; produced by synthesizer pioneer Bob Moog and featuring her sister Nadia on accompanying piano, Theremin (aka The Art Of The Theremin) showed all the majesty and g…
Voices Of Haiti
**2020 repress** Fantome Phonographique present a reissue of Maya Deren's Voices Of Haiti, originally released as a 10" record in 1954. Maya Deren (1917-1961) was a Russian-American filmmaker and one of the most important voices in avant-garde cinema of the mid-20th century. She was a muse and inspiration to such up-and-coming avant-garde filmmakers as Curtis Harrington, Stan Brakhage, and Kenneth Anger, who emulated her independent, entrepreneurial spirit. Throughout the 1940s and '50s, Deren a…
Evolutions, Contrasts & Electronic Music
"One of the most prolific composers of contemporary music in The Netherlands, Henk Badings was born in Indonesia in 1907, the son of an East Indies Company army officer, and orphaned at an early age. Back in Holland, Badings worked as a mining engineer and paleontologist, but abandoned this career to devote his life to music, making an impact in 1930 with the performance of his first cello concerto. The composer of various symphonies that made use of unusual music scales and uncommon harmonic st…
La Ya Habiby
"Fantôme Phonographique present a reissue of Om Kalsoum's La Ya Habiby, originally released in 1963. A titan of middle eastern music, the contralto singer Om Kalsoum (or, Umm Kulthum) was hailed as "The Voice of Egypt" or "Egypt's Fourth Pyramid," and as she reportedly sold over 80 million records worldwide during her lifetime, she is one of the most popular singers of all time. Born in a small village in the Nile Delta, either in the late 1890s or the early 1900s, she joined her father's family…
Jungle Echoes
"Fantôme Phonographique present a reissue of Chaino And His African Percussion Safari's Jungle Echoes, originally released in 1959. The African American bongo player known as Chaino released a series of sublime exotica albums during the 1950s, based around themes of "savage Africa," supposed tribal mating rituals, voodoo practices, and other concepts of exotica excess. Born Leon Johnson in Philadelphia in 1929, he was raised on the south side of Chicago and began making a name for himself as a b…
Rembétissa
"Roza Eskenazi was a giant of rembetika, the urban Greek music of Ottoman origin associated with the poor underclass. Eskenazi's life was extraordinary: born Sarah Spinazi to a poor Sephardic Jewish family in Constantinople, probably in the mid-1890s, after an itinerant childhood, she began dancing at the Grand Hotel Theatre in Thessaloniki. She eloped with the wealthy Yiannis Zardinidis around 1913, with whom she bore a son, but after his untimely death in 1917, she placed the son in the care o…
Listen Move & Dance
**Edition of 500. 180 gram vinyl** Fantôme Phonographique present a reissue of Daphne Oram and Vera Gray's Listen Move & Dance,
originally released in 1962. The British composer, musician, and audio
engineer Daphne Oram was a pioneering figure in the use of electronic
music. Coming to prominence through her work with the BBC Radiophonic
Workshop, which she co-founded, Oram was one of the first British
composers to feature electronic instruments in her work and has been
rightly hailed as he…
Speech After The Removal Of The Larynx
**Edition of 500. 180 gram vinyl, includes insert; hand-numbered** Fantôme Phonographique present a reissue of Speech After The Removal Of The Larynx, originally released by Smithsonian Folkways in 1964. The larynx or voice box is a small organ located towards the top of the neck in humans and some other animals. Constructed largely of cartilage, it houses the vocal folds that allow for the manipulation of pitch and volume, which are essential for the phonation of spoken speech. It is also invol…
Serenata I/Sonatine/Canteyodjaya/Zeitmasze
**Edition of 500. 180 gram vinyl** Fantôme Phonographique present a reissue of Serenata I/Sonatine/Canteyodjaya/Zeitmasze, originally released in 1958. The avant-garde composer and conductor Pierre Boulez was a titan of post-war experimental classical music. Born in the small cheesemaking town of Montrbrison in central France in 1925, Boulez studied at the Paris Conservatoire with the composer and organist Charles Messiaen and received private tuition from pianist Andrée Vaurabourg; after moving…
Saint-Exupery
Fantôme Phonographique present a reissue of Luc Estang and Pierre Henry's Saint-Exupéry, originally released as a 10" in 1959. During his long and illustrious career, the French composer and musique concrète pioneer Pierre Henry created a large amount of incidental music to accompany literary texts, both on record and for the stage, from Jules Verne to Victor Hugo, from Lautréamont to Antonin Artaud. This incredibly rare LP from 1959 is a radio play about the life of French pilot and writer Anto…
The Twinkling Star
Fantôme Phonographique present a reissue of Umm Kulthum's (Oum Kalthoum) The Twinkling Star,
originally released in 1961. Kalthoum is a legendary Egyptian vocalist
and one of the biggest celebrities of the 20th century Arab world. She
was dubbed "the voice of Egypt" and "Egypt's fourth pyramid", and is
considered a national treasure. This 1961 album originally released on
Parlophone is one of the finest examples of her vocal ability and a
beautiful example of mid-20th century Egyptian popu…
Music On The Desert Road
The late Deben Bhattacharya was a noted Bengali record producer, ethnomusicologist, poet, documentarian, radio producer, and all around renaissance man. Having moved from Northern India to London as a young man, Bhattacharya began working for the BBC as a radio producer. In 1955, having worked all possible angles to securing funding Bhattacharya traveled to India to record musicians. The success of this trip allowed him to travel again soon after to the countries of the Middle East. With recordi…
Singing The Traditional Songs of her Kentucky Mountain Family LP
In the world of American folk music, Jean Ritchie was a truly unique presence. Most of the younger artists of the folk revival of the '50s and '60s were middle class urbanites and liberal arts college students who helped "rediscover" the older traditional artists of the South. Though these two groups intermingled at concerts and the younger artists idolized the "true" folk artists, Jean Ritchie was an anomaly in that she fit equally in each crowd. Born in Viper, Kentucky in 1922, Jean was born i…
The Last Castrato
Alessandro Moreschi (1858-1922) was the last known castrato, and the only one to have ever made recordings. He was born into a Catholic family in one of the so-called Roman Castles, where he was castrated either for health reasons, or because of his singing talents, the history is unclear. But either way he was discovered soon after for his talents and by a very young age was known as “l'Angelo di Roma” and quickly became the First Soprano of the Sistine Chapel choir, a position he held for more…
Death Of The Moon & Other Early Works
Rune Lindblad was born in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1923 and began composing music in 1953. This was a time when composers in Germany and France were feuding over the merits of electronic music made by pure wave oscillators versus musique concrete, which used the tape recorder as its main instrument. Rune Lindblad however did not see these genres as mutually exclusive. In fact, Lindblad extended his work to incorporate other mediums along with his approach to music. Deeply involved with woodcuts and…
Hör!-Spiel / Nekrologlog 1961 / Fantasmata 1960
The Greek avant-garde composer Anestis Logothetis was noted for his pioneering tape techniques as well as developing his own notation system for composition that incorporated visual symbols meant to be interpreted by the performers. "Hör!-spiel" / Nekrologlog 1961 / Fantasmata 1960"collects 3 of his most famous works, realized in Vienna where he spent much of the 1940s-1960s. After completing studies at the music academy there, in the 1950s Logothetis became enamored of 20th century composers li…
Early Experimental Electronic Music 1954-1961
Henri Pousseur was a Belgian composer, teacher, and music theorist active from the the 1950s on. Influenced by Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luciano Berio, Pousseur may be lesser known than those contemporaries but his composition and technique is regarded by many as equaling if not surpassing much of the work of those more famous names. Realized in the same Cologne radio studio as much of Karlheinz Stockhausen's most famous work, this collection brings together some of Pousseur's gr…
Music Of Indonesia
Originally released on Folkways Records, in 1959. Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 13,000 islands including Java, the world's most populous island, and Bali, is as diverse as it is large. Having been a crucial stop on international trade routes since as early as the 7th century the influences on Indonesian musical traditions are deep and wide. Music Of Indonesia, recorded in 1950, is one of the earliest western documents of this rich tradition. Featuring sounds ranging from beautiful Bali…
Eden's Island: The Music Of An Enchanted Isle
Though he was originally from Brooklyn and raised by adoptive parents in rural Kansas, George Alexander Aberle aka eden ahbez, is about as California as they come. He was discovered in the 1940s while working in one of Los Angeles' earliest raw vegetarian restaurants and was known throughout the 50s and 60s for being spotted on the streets of LA in full white robe, sandals, and beard, and legendarily camping underneath the first L in the Hollywood sign. After writing numerous hits for jazz and p…