Introduction to Radio Schwingungen

Hello. This is Adam Eleven from Orpheus Music: The Electronic Music Time Machine where I present vintage, commercially neglected electronic music from Pierre Henry to Roland Kayn.

In this side project, I will revive the nostalgic days when "Schwingungen" was still on the air, and when your Thursday evenings/nights were dedicated to electronic musings.

"Schwingungen" was quite a popular radio show on the West German Radio (WDR=Westdeutscher Rundfunk), moderated by Winfrid Trenkler. It ran between 1984 and 1995 and focussed on "popular/mainstream" electronic music - something in between new age & melodic stuff (J.M. Jarre, Tangerine Dream, Vangelis), but with occassional outings to more abstract and "experimental" stuff like Conrad Schnitzler and the early Ralph Lundsten. At this time, Schwingungen was more or less the only source of this type of electronic music (or even any electronics) on the Radio (outside the U.S.). But it wasn't just an conventional outlet of electronic music; Winfrid left no stone unturned to produce exclusive background content on the "scene": for instance, he visited Vangelis for an extended interview in his Hotel studio in Paris & Ralph Lundsten on his penninsula just outside Stockholm; Klaus Schulze & Tangerine Dream were regular visitors in Winfrid's Cologne studio; and there were even exclusive radio concerts with Ashra, Klaus Schulze and a bunch of others.

To make a long story short, this whole thing got me into electronic music. Although I'm not into the rather cheesy & plain Schwingungen stuff any longer (I nowadays prefer Xenakis' UPIC noise, Kayn's cybernetic madness, Pousseur's idosyncratic oscillations & Henry's sonic savageness) - I still enjoy a nostalgic dose of melody from time to time, and thought it would be high time to pay tribute to the once leading electronic show in Europe.

We'll I stop waffling in a minute. The purpose of this blog is to bring you some music from this era, plus some background info (interviews with Winfrid Trenkler and so on). The plan is like this: In the course of the next few months or so I'm going to post most of the top-twenty entries of the ten annual plus one "all-time" polls.

I don't have a definite release schedule so far, but this is likely to get rolling in November - so subscribe to my RSS and stay tuned to Radio Schwingungen.

Adam Eleven