All information stolen mercilessly from Wikipedia. But seriously, the Barrons are so goddamn interesting.
Louis and Bebe Barron's composition for
Forbidden Planet is credited as the first fully electronic soundtrack to a movie. Louis and Bebe Barron married in 1947 and moved to Greenwich Village and began experimenting with
musique concrète.
Says
Wikipedia:
The sounds and patterns that came out of the circuits were unique and
unpredictable because they were actually overloading the circuits until
they burned out to create the sounds. The Barrons could never recreate
the same sounds again, though they later tried very hard to recreate
their signature sound from Forbidden Planet
. Because of the unforeseen life span of the circuitry, the Barrons made a habit of recording everything.
If you listen to this without keeping note of the (albeit hilarious and absurdly descriptive) track titles; you could easily shelve this alongside Michel Chion, Iannis Xenakis, and Conrad Schnitzler.
On the back of the
Forbidden Planet record sleeve, the Barrons explained:
We design and construct electronic circuits which function
electronically in a manner remarkably similar to the way that lower
life-forms function psychologically. [. . .]. In scoring Forbidden
Planet – as in all of our work – we created individual cybernetics
circuits for particular themes and leit motifs, rather than using
standard sound generators. Actually, each circuit has a characteristic
activity pattern as well as a "voice". [. . .]. We were delighted to
hear people tell us that the tonalities in Forbidden Planet remind them
of what their dreams sound like.
Fun facts:
"Bebe" Barron was nicknamed by Anaïs Nin
The Barrons made some of the first audio recordings of Henry Miller reading his work aloud, and Anaïs Nin's full version of
House of Incest.
Said Nin of their music,
"[Barrons' music sounds like] a molecule that has stubbed its toes." — From the Diary of Anais Nin, Volume 7
