Perrey And Kingsley

In the mid-1960s Frenchman Jean-Jacques Perrey, the electronic musician who had aided the spread of the Ondioline—an early keyboard capable of violin- and flute-like timbres—joined forces with American composer and arranger Gershon Kingsley to produce a pair of forward-looking electronic pop albums. Working with tape recorders, scissors, and splicing tape, the pair assembled playful variations on pop themes that, though they later struck many listeners as quaint, embodied the cutting edge of electronic sonics available in that era. Vanguard issued the resulting LPs, The In Sound from Way Out! and Kaleidoscopic Vibrations, toward the close of the decade. Perrey went on to cut several solo albums devoted to Moog synthesizer music and resurfaced in the 1990s after appearing in the volume Incredibly Strange Music. Artists ranging from Stereolab and µ-Ziq to the Beastie Boys and hip-hop super-producer Timbaland placed Perrey-Kingsley motifs at the center of their own recordings, while Perrey resumed making music both independently and alongside fellow Frenchmen Air.