Electronic Dance Music Origin 7/14

Hold on, that wasn't when electronic music started. Go back even earlier, to 1917, when Leon Theremin, a Russian,
invented a device that was so fucking weird he couldn't really name it after anything already existing or even anything futuristically existing,
since it was so beyond the future, it was like in a parallel dimension. So he named it after himself: the Theremin.

What made the thingamajigger so weird to begin with? Well...for one, you didn't have to touch it to play it. It responded to your body movements,
and if you wiggled your hand around in the general vicinity, it would respond accordingly, using your body as a reception receiver.
Kind of like the old days when the television set required antenna to pick up signals,
and you had to stand in a special spot in the room for crystal clear reception, or else the bloody thing wouldn't work.
Secondly, the sound it produced was a completely analogue, real-time, high-pitched alien-like whine, like a microphone feedback squeel,
and because it depended on YOU to stand still to play any notes of any discernible length, it tended to waver off a lot because, well,
no one can stand completely still. So due to your erratic movements, the thing squiggled around a lot, and I mean a lot,
making it sound like a garbled radio frequency dial oscillating to all hell and back. But at least it was electronic.

Because of its unpredictability, music composers couldn't really think of anything useful to do with it. The thing was unpredictable as fuck.
How do you even begin to write music for a device like that? Theremin demonstrated the device to the 8th Soviet Congress,
thereby allowing secret Theremin technology to fall into the hands of those diabolical communists.
Of course the Americans couldn't stand to let there be a Theremin gap,
so they raced furiously to find their own Theremin boxes and to frantically find SOME thing to do with them.
The answer came 30 years later, in campy, B-grade, pulp sci-fi movies about Evil Things What Come From Outer Space (Klaatu barada nikto and all that),
where the Theremin's utterly bizarre noise was perfect for describing the mysterious and the foreign (and the Russian).

But perhaps it's crowning achievement was when the Beach Boys insisted on using one for their 1967 #1 hit Good Vibrations,
which took over one year, three different recording studios and twenty different versions of the song to complete because the blasted Theremin was so god damn inoperable.
Brian Wilson, fed up with the thing's unresponsiveness, appealed to Bob Moog, telling him to build a more user-friendly one so that they could finish the stupid song already.
Moog complied, and the end result is what you hear on "Best of..." Beach Boys compilations today. They should have released the others as remixes.

So here's to the Theremin: the most frustrating musical instrument of all time, and the first entirely electronic instrument, ever.

Fuente: Ishkur's Guide