24 May 2012 — Henning Lahmann
Thanks to
RVNG Intl and others, last year saw a widespread recollection and reappraisal of the German pioneers and founding fathers of synthesized music, whose massive influence still echoes through countless works of the contemporary electronic vanguard all across the globe. So much has been said about the
Berlin and
Düsseldorf schools, but who would've guessed that across the pond in Canada, one man named Jean Piché almost simultaneously accomplished groundbreaking work in this field as well. Between 1977 and 1980, while being at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, BC, Piché recorded music that subsequently became
Heliograms, a four-track piece spread across 45 minutes, remarkably one of the first albums to feature music produced almost entirely with digital synthesizers. The record was originally released in 1982 by a small Canadian imprint that unfortunately went into bankruptcy after it was put out, so the work sadly never really got off the ground.
Until today, that is. Seminal Oklahoma-based label Digitalis Recordings, which last year
sent waves of excitement through the left-field music community after "rediscovering"
Science of the Sea, the blissful synth explorations by an previously unknown German oceanographer named Jürgen Müller, is re-issuing
Heliograms to give it "the place that it deserves in electronic music history". The album has been remastered from the original tapes by James Plotkin and put on vinyl at the prestigious
D+M in Berlin.
Today, we're happy and proud to host the internet debut of a brand new video work of Piché himself, an epic 18-minute piece that visualizes two tracks from
Heliograms, "Rouge" and "Ange", and that premiered earlier this month at Montréal's
Elektra Festival.
Heliograms is out today on
Digitalis. Get it via the label or on
Boomkat (order links should be up soon).
Stream excerpts from all four tracks below. You may also listen to "La Mer à l'Aube", the first of the four to be recorded and thus one of the first digital synthesis pieces ever produced in Canada, in its entirety
here.
