Electronic Pioneers: Jean Jacques Perrey

A respected member of grandpa-electronics, one of the first moog musicians, one half of the Perrey-Kingsley duo and a composer for TV, ballet, dolphins and insomniacs in need of musical theraphy... good old J. J. Perrey is no less an inspiration for all electronic musicians of our era. Formerly an accordeon player, Perrey started his career in electronic music as an ondioline salesman and his first album came with his first partner in crime, Gershon Kingsley. The album's name is "The In Sound From Way Out" which can be recognised by anyone familiar with the Beastie Boys discography, since they have an instrumental album from '96 with the same title, which is in fact a tribute to the Perrey-Kingsley album.(even the album cover is a remake of the original) Speaking of covers, E.V.A. from his "Moog Indigo" album (1970) is probably one of the songs producer/dj's love to sample most. (Ice-T, DJ Premier, Fatboy Slim and god knows who else) His most succesful career move however was probably catching the attention of Edith Piaf, who was then at the height of her fame and who introduced him to the right people as well as arranging for him to have the use of a recording studio and tape machines, thus stirring Perrey's interest in tape manipulation.

"Working with a growing library of prerecorded sounds, Perrey measured out teeny-tiny tape bits with a special ruler that marked lengths in notes, then spliced these together into songs. In one early experiment, Perrey spent a week to cut and glue excerpts from a field recording of live bees into the melody from Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumble Bee."

While producing advertisement jingles, off-Broadway projects and even letting Walt Disney use the song "Baroque Hoedown" as the theme music for the Electrical Parade on Main Street in the then new Disneyland, he had many famous counterparts among the space-age pop musicians like Harry Breuer and Andy Badale. Now living in his homeland, Perrey against his 75 years in this world, has still been producing and has even performed at several venues in the U.S. in 1998. It seems there isn't much to stop him if he wants to spend his 2000s making music. He has recently produced a CD with Rephlex-head Luke Vibert and also done a children's book soundtrack with Dana Countryman Rock on, gramps!