News & Updates — techno

Another one gone way, way too young, Suba was already one of Brazil's top producers when he died from a studio fire in 1999 at just 38. Serbian-born, he started playing accordion as a child. Later on he was playing keyboards in punk bands in Yugoslavia and was producing new wave, electronic and experimental ambient music before heading to Brazil in the late '80s to study and work with Afro-Brazilian music. He permanently relocated to São Paulo in the early '90s. His career in Brazil saw him working on jingles and for fashion shows and dance & theater companies, while...

The influential ambient/electronic/new age composer Edgar Froese, the figurehead for experimental krautrock band Tangerine Dream, was born on this day (D-Day in '44). He lost his father to the Nazis, but his mother and he ended up in West Berlin after the war. When Froese started Tangerine Dream in '67, he was interested in surrealism, dada, old poetry and free-form rock. Over the course of several decades (and line-up changes) the band would help to define krautrock, new age, ambient, electronica, going from Jimi Hendrix & Pink Floyd-inspired psychedelia to environmental music, classical passages to space rock, soundtracks for film...

The English electronic music composer Delia Derbyshire may be best known for her eerie Doctor Who theme song but she held a creative chair at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for over ten years, contributing to hundreds of productions. From Coventry, she played piano and violin as a child and expressed interest in mathematics and sound. After flat rejections from record companies that refused to hire a woman for the studio (ahem, Decca), she found some work with Luciano Berio in '62, as well as joining the BBC that year. There she and her colleagues composed for various science & learning...

The original hippy, the mystical eden ahbez wrote a tune called "Nature Boy" and by chance was able to hand it to Nat King Cole who turned it into a mega-hit in 1948. He looked like a hippy long before it was a thing and lived outdoors in Los Angeles. He lived under the "L" of the Hollywood sign and held a job as a piano player in a raw foods store. He was a vegetarian, straight edge and an anti-vaxer and wore a white robe. This lifestyle inspired "Nature Boy", and after the hit by Cole, ahbez became an...

Musique concrète composer and writer Tod Dockstader was from Minnesota but went to Hollywood in the '50s where he lined up a job doing music to accompany the Tom & Jerry cartoon. Dockstader also wrote a couple of the episodes. He also contributed sound effects for Mr Magoo. His first album Eight Electronic Pieces was self-released before being picked up by Folkways in 1961. Music from those recordings were later used in the film Fellini Satyricon. He released his organized sound masterpiece Quatermass in the mid '60s. He continued his experimental sound art into the '70s, while also composing and...