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[miko2]

Today's Song: Powerhouse by Raymond Scott

This song was featured on NPR KUOW's The Beat, and let me just add that it's highly annoying that their web site doesn't provide much reference to the show -- I was listening to this at work while answering phone calls and such, and I missed exactly who they were talking about, and their web page was no help whatsoever. After I tracked down the information (I had caught the name "Scott" and the song title), I left the information at work and when I got home couldn't remember anything. It took a lot of searching before I came across the name Raymond Scott and the song title Powerhouse again.

But anyway, Raymond Scott was a composer, orchestral leader, piano player from the 30's onward. He was also a cutting edge innovator in the recording studio and would splice music together in a way that has become much more common in the computer age... and he was an inventor of electronic instruments who made ambient electronic recordings in the 1950's, many years before Tangerine Dream and Brian Eno began doing essentially the same sort of thing.

As the radio show pointed out, you may think you aren't familiar with Raymond Scott, but you know a lot of his music very well. Warner Brothers aquired the rights to much of it in 1943 and it was subsequently used in some 120 Merry Melodies and Looney Tunes cartoons. Imagine for a moment a busy factory scene -- perhaps one in which the gophers Mac and Tosh are arguing over who should go first: "After you!" "Oh no, I insist, after you!" The music that you hear in the background is most likely Powerhouse by Raymond_Scott.

You can download this tune from iTunes. I just did in fact. ^_^ I want to pick up at least one cd of Scott's music, but this will do for the moment.

You can hear a longer excerpt of this song on Scott's myspace page. Yes he has one, even though he's been dead for a while now.

I have Youtube links to a short performance of this song, a full version, and two of Scott's other tunes:

Powerhouse
Powerhouse (full version played by Scott's Quintette, set to video from Halo)
War Dance for Wooden Indians
Twilight In Turkey (taken from Eddie Cantor's 1937 film "Ali Baba Goes to Town").