Episode 46, Introduction: "So, What Went On Last Week with That Power Grid Failure in Texas?"

SPOKEN WORD WITH ELECTRONICS #46: The BRUCE HAACK SONGBOOK! (And the 2021 TX Power Failure) Hi, everyone, welcome back to SWWE. We're just now getting through an entirely wild week of weather and bureaucratic power grid failure here in Texas. Texas has been on its own power grid since 1935, or approximately since power grids existed in the United States. This isolationism on Texas' part meant that if we, say, refused to weather-proof our electrical grid (not needed if you aren't regulated!) then, perhaps, close to 4 million people would be without power during the coldest week of weather in decades. And, it's not like TX politicians care about dead bodies, but it would also add to Greg Abbott's death count for 2021, with some very tragic stories. So the first two tracks (introduction and discussion) this week discuss how my wife and I got through a week of blackout, with single digit temperatures outside, no heat – and then, no water. Pretty wild experience! Once water became scarce, people started gathering snow and other fluids (of unusual color) to fill their toilets. Fortunately, we had a filled bathtub, thanks to my wife's good thoughtful preparation. But the week was purgatorial in a way I haven't experienced in a long time. Somehow a power failure is time stopping, even though it's mostly just camping inside your house. But we couldn't do anything and just had to sleep through the cold of it. Wild event. But if you're jumping to this post based on the BRUCE HAACK headline, chances are you're much more interested in the main item: I have a copy of The Bruce Haack Songbook. This was self-published by Bruce Haack in 1975 and if you enjoy electronic music and the pioneers of its artform, Bruce Haack ranks pretty high up there on the list. There's Wendy Carlos, Raymond Scott, Clara Rockmore, Morton Subotnick, and a few others – but for me, Bruce Haack is high genius on a level above them. He started by making children's records in the 1960s and built his own synthesizers to perform the music, including a vocoder. All of his work is amazing. I can recommend this film as a perfect primer if you've never been properly introduced to his work, and I'd just start with the first album, Dance Sing and Listen (1963) and follow the discography in order from there. You'll find so many interesting musical ideas throughout, and weird harmonic experiments, including duets Haack often sings with himself, one voice singing and the other vocoding. I consider him similar to the Velvet Underground in breaking apart Electronic Music into less academically rigid and more wildly awesome performance. And there are fewer examples of this wonderful mind of Haack's more displayed than in the SONGBOOK, itself. This is a 60 page book, saddle stitched and large format, that Haack decorated himself with art and illustration, and even contains lyrics! Most of the tracks are uploaded to Youtube, presently, which you can find links to in the Boing Boing post for this week's show, along with a full song contents list. SO, in terms of scans of this book, I feel like images should be made available. The current scalping on a copy of THE BRUCE HAACK SONGBOOK goes for, roughly $350-$1,000 dollars. So I will be uploading as many images of the book as possible onto http://www.ep.tc/bruce-haack-songbook (check back later if it has no content presently) – I've had my own copy for 20 years and the spirit of sharing that this show hopes to be, I'll be uploading scans later tonight. We end this with the sad mention that Esther Nelson passed away in October of last year. I just heard about this and as a young listener TREASURED her voice, her dance, her laughter, and her kindness – which is on all of the albums she shared with Haack, himself: https://twitter.com/BruceHaack/status/1320865864875347968 We all loved you, Miss Nelson. Enjoy this week's show, all - Thanks Ethan