RIP Dick Raaymakers aka Kid Baltan

Update: new link and video below.

Gearjunkies wrote in to let us know Dick Raaymakers passed away this week on Wednesday Sept 4, 2013. He was a pioneer of electronic music,  primarily working with tape producing musique concrete.  Below is a video of one of his compositions with Tom Dissevelt posted here on MATRIXSYNTH back in 2009.  Be sure to see the Gearjunkies post as well for another video.

via Wikipedia: "From 1954 to 1960 he worked in the field of electro-acoustic research at Royal Philips Electronics Ltd. in Eindhoven. There, using the alias Kid Baltan, he and Tom Dissevelt, under the name Electrosoniks produced works of popular music by electronic means (which turned out to be the first attempts of their kind in the world).[1] From 1960 to 1962 he then worked at the University of Utrecht as a scientific staff member. From 1963 to 1966, together with Jan Boerman, he worked in his own studio for electronic music in the Hague. Then, from 1966 until his retirement in 1995, he worked as a teacher of Electronic and Contemporary Music at the Royal Conservatoire (The Hague) and since 1991 also as a teacher of Music Theatre at the Image and Sound Interfaculty, at the same conservatory..."

Kid Baltan and Tom Dissevelt 1959

Uploaded on Nov 29, 2008 schreu26·39 videos (originally posted here)


Update via Pierre Serné on The MATRIXSYNTH Lounge:

"More about Dutch electronic and tape music Pioneer Dick Raaijmakers, who passed away last Wednesday at the age of 83:
http://patchpierre.blogspot.nl/2013/09/rip-dick-raaijmakers.html
- The interview is in Dutch but has English subtitles

Also worth watching: "Intona",a music-theater piece conceived by Dick Raaymakers.
It was performed amongst others on October 17, 1992 at V2_ in 's Hertogenbosch."


Dick Raaijmakers - Intona (Full Version) (1992)
Uploaded on Dec 23, 2010 V2unstable·275 videos

"More info: http://www.v2.nl/archive/works/intona

"Intona" is a music-theater piece conceived by Dick Raaymakers. It was performed amongst others on October 17, 1992 at V2_ in 's Hertogenbosch.

Intona is the counterpart of the work Three Ideophones. If in Three Ideophones the loudspeaker has the stage, in Intona, it is the microphone that is given a chance to express itself. In music, microphones are normally used for reproductive ends, i.e., to record music as faithfully as possible. But there is also an alternative use, a more subversive one, stemming from the 1960s, when musicians ripped the stable, fixed microphone from its stand and mobilized it. Pop musicians did this during concerts, but so did composers like Karlheinz Stockhausen, who made a number of microphones move like jet planes according to preset, plotted routes across the surface of a gigantic tom-tom. His intention was to create a new, "open" kind of music by submitting the movements of the microphones to compositional laws, thereby making them part of the whole compositional plan, not as a special effect but as musical instruments. The "microphonist" became an "instrumentalist." If there were a kind of Beaufort scale for measuring a microphone's degree of mobility and expressing it in values 1 to 10, 1 would stand for perfect immobility and stability, and 10 for extreme mobility or even total incorporeality. Numbers 1 and 2 on this scale would be reserved for recording the classical repertoire in all its splendor and glory. Above chamber music ensembles and symphony orchestras, the most sensitive microphones hang like so many motionless leaves on a tree. From this position, they can pick up the slightest sound made by an ensemble and save it for posterity. The mobility of these microphones should ideally tend towards zero. Modern composers like David Tudor, Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage would score a 5, 6 or 7. Pop musicians, with their mobile electric guitars and microphones, despite their roughness, stall at just 4. The challenge Intona takes up is to bring the remaining numbers 8, 9 and 10 into the picture. One must realize that at a mobility factor of 10, a microphone will dissolve entirely and disappear into the void. This occurs in Intona, not only as a result of brute implosive or explosive violence -- there's no art in that -- but in the intention of playing the microphone as expertly as possible."