condition (record/book): M / EX (dust-jacket has minimal wear)

7" in picture-sleeve attached inside an 8"x8" 132-page hand-numbered (133/1500)and signed softbound book with dust-jacket and pasted-on b/w and color illustrations inside. 

Among the most peculiar and unexpected artifacts in the entire canon of early German electronic music - a book-object unlike anything else. Günter Maas was a German painter and sculptor based in Cologne, and Bilder und Klangbilder is precisely what its title declares: images and sound-images, issued in 1965 by Verlag Die Junge Galerie in Cologne as a 21cm square linen-laminated volume containing art prints, a text by Wolf Schön, and a 7" 33rpm record - released in a numbered edition of 1500 signed copies.

The record itself documents Maas's singular approach to sound: electronic compositions created on a Siemens synthesizer using an experimental photo-electric coupler of his own devising that converted his paintings into control voltage - the visual work directly generating the sonic one. The result sits somewhere between the electronic formalism of Oskar Sala and something more instinctive and painterly: sheets of detuned electronic sound organized not by serial procedure but by the internal logic of visual composition. Komposition XI, Etude XIIa, and Etude XIIIa constitute the record's content - brief, concentrated, and still startling.

A genuinely rare object, operating at the intersection of visual art and early electronic music with a confidence that needed no institutional scaffolding to sustain it. Verlag Die Junge Galerie, Köln, 1965.