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Tom Dissevelt & Kid Baltan
From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist
Tom Dissevelt & Kid Baltan · Tom Dissevelt was a Dutch composer, arranger and musician, born in 1921 and died in 1989. He was regarded as a pioneer in bringing electronic music and jazz together. Between 1939 and 1944 he studied at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague, first trombone, then clarinet, music theory and piano, and later double bass. After the war he worked in Indonesia and made a long tour taking in Spain and North Africa, among other places. In 1955 the orchestra of the Skymasters hired him as bassist and arranger. He became interested in twelve-tone music and listened to Karlheinz Stockhausen and Anton Webern.
Music and breakthrough
On the advice of Philips he was invited to work in the electronic studio of the laboratory in Eindhoven, the NatLab. There he worked with Dick Raaijmakers, who made records under the pseudonym Kid Baltan. They composed and recorded with test oscillators, tone generators, tape recorders, filters and reverberation chambers, and cut and spliced tape. This produced pieces in which rhythms from jazz meet laboratory electronics. Their experiments are regarded as one of the first European attempts to combine electronic sound with pop music in a fixed form. Their work has been collected on Popular Electronics, from 2004.
Influence
In this way Dissevelt and Baltan wrote a chapter in the history of electronic pop music, long before the synthesizer became commonplace. Song of the Second Moon is an example of that early sound.
Listening
Song of the Second Moon · Tom Dissevelt & Kid Baltan, 1957Apple Music ↗