Florian Schneider (ex-Kraftwerk) releases new song to save the oceans – Listen here
Florian Schneider, who left Kraftwerk in 2008, has just released a new piece of music, ‘Stop Plastic Pollution’, as part of a campaign called ‘Parley For The Oceans”. Aimed at raising awareness of the fragility of the Earth’s oceans and to ‘collaborate on projects that can end their destruction”, Parley is a collection of “creators, thinkers and leaders”.
In an interview with Dazed Schneider explains that “taking a swim in the ocean at the coasts of Ghana, watching fishermen catch nothing but plastic garbage in their nets” provided his own motivation to create the new track. It was put together from samples of water dripping, sampled at a Dan Lacksman’s apartment in Brussels. Lacksman is one half of the legendary Belgian electronic duo Telex, who are featured in this month’s Electronic Sound, talking about their Eurovision performance of 1980. The idea for the track came Schneider’s friend and well-known German musician Uwe Schmidt, also known as Señor Coconut, who made an entire album of bossa nova Kraftwerk cover versions in 1997.
Telex at work (Telex au travail)
An interesting documentary presenting the Belgian synth-pop trio Telex at work in their amazing analogue studio.
Telex and Lacksman
From the 1981 album “Sex” and with lyrics co-written by Ron Mael
Taken from the album Electric Dreams (2013). Buy the album from iTunes.
ELECTRIC DREAMS – – New Album by Dan Lacksman
– – (Album Release 17th of May 2013)
Mac or PC – Live Performance @ Botanique – – (Les Nuits 2013)
Musicians: Dan Lacksman / Alice Lacksman / Ad Cominotto
Live Sound Engineer : Hassan Chaïdi (Beatracks Production)
Video made by Floris Erbuer
Camera : Clement Nourry – John Erbuer – Floris Erbuer
Rock ‘n Roll – spiced up Telex track
A Telex (Belgian band) inspired ditty with electronic synths and drums. With a special virtual guest.
The Belgian synth-pop group Telex was formed in 1978 by Marc Moulin, Dan Lacksman, and Michel Moers, with the intention of “Making something really European, different from rock, without guitar — and the idea was electronic music.”Mixing the aesthetics of disco, punk and experimental electronic music, they released a stripped-down synthesized cover version of “Twist à St. Tropez” by Les Chats Sauvages. They followed up with an ultra-slow cover of “Rock Around the Clock”, a hilariously relaxed and dispassionate version of Plastic Bertrand’s punk song “Ça Plane Pour Moi”, and a perversely mechanical cover of “Dance to the Music”, originally by Sly Stone. Like Kraftwerk, Telex built its music entirely from electronic instruments, and the sounds of the two groups have a certain similarity. However, unlike Kraftwerk’s studied Teutonic irony, Telex favor a more joyously irreverent humor.
The group’s debut album, Looking for Saint Tropez, featured the worldwide hit single “Moskow Diskow,” one of the first-ever electronic dance/pop songs.
In 1980 Telex’s manager asked the group to enter the Eurovision Song Contest. The group entered and were eventually sent to the finals, although it apparently hoped to come in last: “We had hoped to finish last, but Portugal decided otherwise. We got ten points from them and finished on the 19th spot.” (Marc Moulin) The group’s song “Euro-Vision” was a cheerful bleepy song with deliberately banal lyrics about the contest itself. The Eurovision audience seemed unsure how to react to the performance, and after the band stopped playing, there was mostly stunned silence, with scattered polite applause; Michel Moers took a photograph of the bewildered audience. The band walked off amid sounds of muttering. A mark of the confusion caused by the performance was when vote-counting began, and Greece awarded Belgium three points, the announcer thought she had misheard and tried to award the points to the Netherlands.
For its third album, Sex, Telex enlisted the US group Sparks to help write the lyrics. However, the band still refused to play live and preferred to remain anonymous—common practice in the techno music artists the group later inspired but, nevertheless, unusual in 1981. The fourth Telex album, Wonderful World, was barely distributed.
In 1986, Atlantic Records signed Telex and released the album Looney Tunes in 1988. By then, the band’s earlier sound had influenced many other groups, but they had abandoned it in favor of sampling and a more up-tempo humorous style. “Temporary Chicken,” for example, was a strange joke track about a man so desperate for work that he accepted a part-time job in a chicken costume. It was social commentary but so bizarre as to be almost incomprehensible to most listeners: the album found little commercial success.[citation needed]
In 1989, Telex revisited all of their old tracks and remixed them to resemble house music and other genres that had followed in the wake of Telex and others’ early pioneering work in electronic pop. The result was Les Rythmes Automatiques, which apparently inspired Kraftwerk to do the same for its album The Mix in 1991.[dubious – discuss]
After almost two decades of silence, Telex made a comeback in March 2006 with How Do You Dance on EMI Records. It contained five original compositions as well as five covers. The group’s last release, as of 2006, is a cover of “On the Road Again”, originally by Canned Heat. They also began producing remixes for other artists’ single releases, including “A Pain That I’m Used To” by Depeche Mode and “Minimal” by the Pet Shop Boys.
Electronic Eurovision
Norway did their best to position electronic music on the Eurovision Song Contest. But they certainly where not the first.
Telex from Belgium had a Moog Modular 55 on stage and some other Moog keyboards, although all un-connected.
Here’s a reportage from Telex home studio shown the guys in cozy pullovers.
Some equipment spotting:
Moog Modular 55P synthesizer controlled by PPG Computer Sequencer 350 keyboard,
Polymoog keyboard
Multimoog synthesizer
Micromoog synthesizer
Sennheizer VSM 201 vocoder
Roland CR 78 drum machine
Roland 100 modular sequencer
Orange ashtray on the mixer
Orange/White 60s chair
Weekend music listening
Here’s a couple of songs to get you in the right Saturday mood 
http://youtu.be/-bAvjrdJzhI
Cheers all
DATAMASKIN
