Thursday October 30, 2008 at 14:03
thisismyfavoritesong:“Cindy Electronium” by Raymond Scott (1959).
After a few years as the leader of his own jazz big band (which he called The Raymond Scott Quintette despite it’s six members because “calling it a ‘sextet’ might get your mind off music”), Raymond Scott turned to electronic music. In 1946, he created Manhattan Research Inc., a massive studio of machines and electronic instruments that he created, and basically just fucked around turning knobs and pushing buttons all day.
He wrote this song on his Electronium, the first self-composing electronic device. It generates original music through random sequences of tones, rhythms and timbres. It falls right in line with Scott’s motto, used in one of his IBM commercials: “Machines should work, people should think.”
