Kid Baltan

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Kid Baltan is the pseudonym of Dick Raaijmakers, a Dutch composer, theatre maker and theorist, born in 1930 in Maastricht and died in 2013 in The Hague. The name is Dik NatLab backwards, a reference to his nickname and to the Philips Natuurkundig Laboratorium (Physics Laboratory). He studied piano at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague and from 1954 to 1960 worked at Philips in Eindhoven on electro-acoustic research.

Music and breakthrough

At Philips he formed the duo Electrosoniks with Tom Dissevelt. Together they made some of the first electronic pop music. Their most important album is The Fascinating World of Electronic Music, which appeared in the Netherlands in 1959. With electronic means he also made three experiments with popular music, which were later collected under the title Popular Electronics, with early Dutch electronic music from the Philips laboratories. Song of the Second Moon (1968) contains other work under his name.

Influence

After his time at Philips he worked at Utrecht University from 1960 to 1962. From 1963 to 1966 he had his own electronic music studio in The Hague with Jan Boerman. He was a co-founder of STEIM, the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music. In 1966 he founded the electronic music studio at the Royal Conservatoire and taught there until 1995. He was regarded as a pioneer of electronic music and tape music, and also made a great deal of music theatre and theoretical publications. His archive is preserved at the Nederlands Muziek Instituut.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 1959The Fascinating World of Electronic Music
• 1968Song of the Second Moon