Perrey + Kingsley – Swan’s Splashdown
Perrey + Kingsley – Swan’s Splashdown
Electronica. Hong Kong action films. Ambient tape mixes. Chipotles. I can quietly pride myself for being ahead of the curve on a number of popular fronts. Through nothing but osmosis and luck (and, of course, my unerring sense of cool), I was able to hook into a number of trends well before they took off. Such was the case with the so-called lounge revival.
In the ‘50s and ‘60s, the recording industry went through a period of unprecedented growth, and the market was flooded with all sorts of aural effluvia as labels sprang up like mushrooms to try and carve out a little slice of the exploding pie. This was also the age of stereo experimentation, and a number of artists were doing what they could to show off the dynamic stereo imaging that was suddenly possible. Synthesizers were just beginning to become useful and affordable (although just barely on both counts), a newly minted social class called “teenagers” were buying albums by the truckful, and recently returned servicemen that had been stationed in the Pacific were coming home with a jones for tropical sounds and tiki torches. All of these factors blended together to create one of the most fertile eras of recorded music. Since all the rules were being rewritten and all the paradigms were shifting, anything was possible.
One of the effects of this was the creation of a kind of music that tried to capitalize on all of these fronts at the same time. Artists like Esquivel wrote and recorded music with extreme dynamic shifts and wild panning effects so that bachelors could show of their new hi-fi systems. There was also smooth, latinesque rhythms and tropical instrumentals to coax that bird out of her feathers once she had been wowed by the stereo’s gymnastics (and a couple of highballs).
As technology improved, these early sonic wonders lost much of their novelty appeal and were hauled up to the attic or sent off to thrift stores. Eventually, broke ironists in the ‘80s started discovering these records while they were picking up their mismatched threads at the Salvation Army. These records were goofily appealing and a small subculture started forming around them – populated largely, it seemed, by underground commix artists. I myself got interested in these crazy records about the same time, but my chosen treasure grounds were not the thrift stores, but the public libraries. I didn’t want to actually own much of it, I just wanted to hear it and tape what I liked for future enjoyment. And public libraries were the perfect source because most of the “cool” records were either scratched beyond playability or perennially checked out, but the racks were full of obscure celebrity recordings and odd experiments in exotica that could be listened to with no risk or expense.
Shortly after moving to LA in the early ‘90s, I compiled a tape of my favorite tracks and called it Space Age Bachelor Pad Music, which is how it was starting to become known. I played my tape at work and some other hipster heard it and we swapped tapes, and he put me in touch with this commix artist named Wayno, who lived out in Ohio or something, and we swapped a couple of tapes. It was through Wayno that I discovered the wonders of Esquivel and Perrey & Kingsley.
Jean Jacques Perrey, a French electronic musician, teamed up with American Gershon Kingsley in the mid ‘60s to create a couple of albums of (then) state-of-the-art electronic music. But rather than go the serious, academic route of somebody like Morton Subotnik, they laboriously cut and pasted together light-hearted pop tunes and stuffed them full of wacky sound effects (this was, it should be noted, a couple of years before Walter Carlos switched on old man Bach and really opened the floodgates for electronic interpretations of existing tunes). They were going for a futuristic feel, but nothing ages faster than past visions of the future, so their sonic experiments quickly became the stuff of kitsch. And some of the best kitsch there is.
Swan’s Splashdown is their take on Swan Lake, and, though purists might grumble, it’s such a winningly goofy version that it can’t help but bring a smile to the ears of those who hear it.
Right after I started immersing myself in what was becoming known as lounge music, it suddenly exploded (okay, it didn’t really explode, but there were small pockets of hipsters championing it and some of the best examples of this space age bachelor pad music started to get reissued on CD). Perrey and Kingsley got caught up in the revival, and all of their work was re-released a couple of times, including one 3-CD set (The Out Sound from Way In, riffing on their first album title, The In Sound from Way Out) that features several remixes by of the moment entities such as Fatboy Slim and Eurotrash. Even culture vultures The Beastie Boys copped that title (and cover art) for a collection of instrumentals (by far their best disc as it features authentically funky grooves without their annoying chatter all over them).
Soon, the winds of change blew by the lounge scene, and it has now returned to the attics and thrift stores from whence it came, waiting for another generation of irony soaked hipsters to discover it and mix up some highballs of their own.