Snowflakes are Text-Sound

Text-Sound - Snowflakes
Sham-Repro. SR-001. CDR



Chicory Tip’s 1972 number one hit ‘Son of my Father’ sounded good even through the shitty little speaker of my three band Hitachi transistor radio/cassette player with built in condenser mic and carrying strap. That synth riff did it for me. It was the song that introduced me to synthesizers, even though I’d no idea that it was a synthesizer I was listening to. The song was co-written by Giorgio Moroder and the synth was a Mini Moog. Moroder released his own version of it a year earlier where it did nothing to trouble the charts and would have probably died a death until Chicory Tip’s manager suggested they do a cover version of it. On such moments careers are built. You should check out the primitive video of Moroder singing his version in a barely disguised ‘lets get this all over and done with as quick as possible’ fashion, all while sporting the most enormous and unruly black mustache seen in pop history until the emergence of the Village People. Something to aim for there. Then you can go and look at Chicory Tips version as filmed on the seafront in Southsea. Did synth pop begin this far back? It probably did.  

Three years later Japanese synth wizard Isao Tomita released his album of haunting Debussy covers, ‘Snowflakes Are Dancing’. Which at the time cropped up regularly as incidental music on Radio 1. I seem to remember Dave Lee Travis having a liking for it, though this would probably have been a few years further down the line. When I eventually got my own copy of ‘Snowflakes ...’ it not only piqued my interests in synths further but in Debussy too and then on to piano music itself. Wins all round. Thank you Tomita and DLT, or as he’s know around these parts, the man who got a three month sentence [suspended for two years] for indecent assault during Operation Yew Tree.   

So imagine my surprise to receive in the post, totally anonymously, without a word of warning the above CD with the Tomita’s fizog on the cover. I recognized him immediately as the image is taken from the back of the Snowflakes LP. The person taking in applause on the flip I didn’t recognise at all, but a reverse image search came back with Sten Hanson, an obscure Swedish experimental poet and composer. Sten Hanson released an album called Text-Sound and what you see is its cover minus some of the wording.

The CD lasts for twenty minutes and is the first side of Snowflakes with various sounds layered over it. These sounds range from irritating animal squeaks to vocalisations to electronic burbles. After listening to some Sten Hanson via YouTube, including a live performance recorded in Essen in 2004 where sounds such as these exist, I’m making the assumption that this CD is Hanson and Tomita layered over each other. The result is that rare thing, something virtually unlistenable. I really struggled to finish it and all the while kept asking myself, why? Who would do such a thing? I’ve tried searching online for this release but have come up with nothing. Then I realised that the word ‘snowflake’ has more than one meaning these days and that this may be a wind-up. I really don’t care. This may be a complete waste of resources and twenty minutes of my time, but it introduced me to Sten Hanson and got me listening to Chicory Tip again. So all together now SON OF MY FATHER dee dee dee di di di di dee.