Staying with Oskar Sala [#1] - Studio Berlin Heerstrasse - 1997

Note: For German subtitles utilize “CC“/“Turn on Captions“ (possibly with machine translation into your target language [unfortunately, this is utterly bumpy]). A visit to German musician, composer, physicist and electronics engineer Oskar Sala (*18 July 1910 † 26 February 2002) on 28 January 1997. The creator of the famous “Mixtur-Trautonium“ works and composes in his studio for electronic music in Berlin, Heerstrasse. Among aged tape recorders, lots of effects units and customized audio-equipment, Sala adresses himself to the newly constructed Semiconductor Mixture-Trautonium (1988), which has been built after his construction ideas by a team of professors and students of the former “Fachhochschule der Deutschen Bundespost Berlin“ [see also: ] Here you can witness a matured and relaxed artist wallowing in electronic music and presenting some of his newly created compositions for Trautonium, which are released later in the year on the CD “Oskar Sala - Subharmonische Mixturen“ (Erdenklang 1997 - 70962). See Sala being pleased about an almost impossible but felicitous Theremin-“imitation“ he did and being almost childishly delighted by the change from a minor to a major chord at the end of a piece (his “trick“: utilizing a harmonizer). The musical excerpts Sala presents on his Telefunken M5c tape machine are: • Trio-Caprice (three tone system [use of harmonizer for ascendingdiminished fifths]) • “Hommage to Theremin - polyphone“ from: Caprice with Variations • “Variations with frequency transposition - change from minor to major in a gliding chord (end)“ from: Caprice with Variations Remark: The squeaking noise of Salas aged tape machine in this video is annoying? Watch the squeak-free (filtered) version here:
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