Maison d’Ailleurs

Galactic Hits is a new CD put together to complement the music and science fiction exhibition at Maison d'Ailleurs. Compiled from an open call for submissions, the CD features a wide-range of well-known artists including synth-pop legend Jean-Jacques Perrey, noise pioneer GX Jupitter-Larsen, key figures in electronic music such as Staalplaat Soundsystem and Scanner, surf-rockers the Nematoads and a host of other auditory delights.

It is produced in partnership with the magazine Vibrations. You can order a copy from Maison d'Ailleurs exclusively (8.- CHF or 6.- Euros, postage not included), along with the March 2010 edition of the magazine.

01 Pierre Bastien – Rousselliana

Pierre Bastien is a French musician. He currently lives in Rotterdam. He has built several automatic orchestras. He always performs his concerts along with the last version of his many contraptions. The previous versions have a second life -though not virtual- as sound installations. His collaborations include film maker Karel Doing, fashion design company Issey Miyake inc., video artist Pierrick Sorin, musicians Alexei Aigui, Pascal Comelade, Robert Wyatt, Steve Argüelles, choreographers Dominique Bagouet, Roberto Olivan, circus companies Trottola and Jérôme Thomas. His music is released on Gazul, G33G, Inpolysons, Signature, Rephlex, Western Vinyl. He is inspired here by Raymond Roussel and his fiction filled with strange and complex creations.

02 Matt Wand – Consumerworld : Isle 4

This theme was recorded for a UK science fiction TV series, it didn't get used in any final episodes and has drifted around, unloved and unheard, for 6 years or so in the cold but dry cyberspace of various back-up drives until now. Matt Wand once had a healthy career in a little known 20th century art form known as 'Music'. He currently remains frozen as part of a Special Exhibit in 'The Museum of Previous Cultural Perversions', Patricroft, Manchester awaiting thawing, dissection and closer study by modern audio archaeologists.

03 The Nematoads – Theme from The Inscrutables (UFO version)

The Nematoads, a trippy, twangy, five-piece modern instrumental surf-rock combo from Austin, Texas, straddle the line between '60s retro cool and tall-in-the-saddle Tejas twang. With influences ranging from the classic sounds of the Ventures and Davie Allan & the Arrows to the surf-punk of the Dead Kennedys, the twangy madness of Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, the sonic attack of the Pixies, and old B-movie soundtracks, the Nematoads have created a unique sound that'll blow you away. Theme from The Inscrutables was loosely based on the 1970 Gerry & Sylvia Anderson science fiction TV series UFO. Theme from The Inscrutables conjures imagery of an epic space battle with vivid drama and power coupled with a spy theme.

04 Douglas Benford – Solid State Steam Punk

Benford has released music under various guises, primarily under the name 'SI-CUT.DB'. As well his solo work, his collaborators include Stephan Mathieu, Iris Garrelfs, Scanner, Philippe Petit, Marc Weiser and Ben Edwards. Performing internationally, he has also been a co-curator of Sprawl events since 1996. The piece for this album is a reverse-engineered amalgam of acoustic and actual steam engine recordings, created as an imagined tribute, in the spirit of the parallel world or alternative realities, to the sub-genre of science fiction, 'steam punk'.

05 David Fenech – Octoservo

Fenech released the album Polochon Battle (inPolysons), worked at the IRCAM (French Institute of Acoustic/Musical Research and Coordination), and built small musical robots. Here he signs a purely instrumental vision of sci-fi, between mechanical proliferation, mathematical precision and organic anarchy.

06 Vlantis – Interstellar Feller Man

While the other kids played their Game Boys, Vlantis was writing lyrics to Game Boy music in his Macomb, Illinois basement. He's since transported to Kobe, Japan, where he casts blip-pop demons out of his brain and into your headphones at a nice, relaxing pace.

07 Scanner – Formanville

Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner is a conceptual artist, writer, and composer working in London, whose works traverses the experimental terrain between sound, space, image and form. Since 1991 he has been intensely active in sonic art, producing concerts, installations and recordings, the albums Mass Observation (1994), Delivery (1997), and The Garden is Full of Metal (1998) hailed by critics as innovative and inspirational works of contemporary electronic music.

08 Richard Pinhas – If you find this world bad…

Founder of Heldon, Pinhas is a reference of Zeuhl. In this track, he takes over an unreleased recording of the brilliant Philip K. Dick.

09 Future Conditional – Oh God, What Have We Done ?

While pursuing Piano Magic, Glen Johnson multiplies side projects (Textile Ranch, etc.) and conjures up here his group Future Conditional to evoke disillusioned days to come.

10 Reverse Engineering – Artificial Man

Influenced by the electro scene and old sci-fi films, R.E. explores the dark paths of Hip Hop with heavy rhythms and cinematographic atmospheres, which form the foundation of their music.

11 Jean-Jacques Perrey et Dana Countryman – Huckleberry Duck / The Toy Trumpet

Jean-Jacques Perrey is a legend, and a pioneer in the popular electronic music field. He was the second musician to ever own a Moog Synthesizer, and one of the first to record with it, way back in 1966. Over the past five decades, Perrey has released many classic MOOG albums, featuring his trademark crazy tape loops and his catchy original melodies. Even today, Perrey's music has been sampled by countless popular Hip-hop and Rap artists, including Ice T, DJ Premier, Gangstarr, and many others. Dana Countryman was in many bands, from rock 'n' roll bands to jazz and lounge groups, and for 7 years, Dana was the editor and publisher of a music publication called COOL AND STRANGE MUSIC MAGAZINE. Jean-Jacques eventually considered Dana his official biographer, due to his many interviews with JJ. Eventually, this lead to the two recording two CDs for Oglio Records, in Countryman's home studio in Seattle, WA.

12 Autistici – Infinity Shell

Autistici creates audio narratives aimed at exploring the interchange between sound and space. In this realm, reflection and fantasy recontextualise the sound according to the listener’s inner world & incorporates a wide range of sources including textural sound design, orchestration, space & fragments of found sound or field recordings. Tracks focus on representing details from both the natural and manmade world. Each detail (including elements from his own body) has the potential to become incorporated into the composition. There is an intimate, intense and enmeshed sense of connection with tiny details (e.g., dust on vinyl, a door opening, heart beats, breathing, snoring).

13 Peter J. Gorritz – The Launch Pad

"The Launch Pad" was written by composer & musician Peter J. Gorritz specifically for this compiulation. The piece was inspired by a lifelong love of science fiction and the music & sounds featured in classic SF films as well as the sounds and styles of the lounge music of the 50's & 60's, particularly the sub-genre that has come to be known as "space-age pop"

14 Preslav Literary School – Eschatos

Preslav Literary School (Adam Thomas) makes live tape collages using sounds drawn from an ever-growing archive of self-generated or discovered outsider noise, found sound and spoken word cassettes. A process of transference, overdubbing and live manipulation reworks these source materials into compelling, ambient broadcasts. Adam has released three albums, numerous live CDrs and played at venues and festivals throughout Europe.'Eschatos' is a new work that presents a speculative, end-times narrative in the form of a degrading, last-gasp broadcast echoing out towards the stars and featuring decaying tape recordings of Holst's The Planets, intercepted radio transmissions and distant field recordings.

15 Bio – The Failure

Julien Baillod has traversed all the musical scenes from jazz-punk to avant-garde. With this track, he creates the haunting score of a cyclical history, where rupture is only temporary.

16 Ben Richter – The Center of the World

Ben Richter is a composer and folk/rock musician from New England in the United States. He writes for orchestra, chamber, and vocal ensembles; performs as an accordionist and musical saw player; and writes and performs songs as The Land of Dreams. "The Center of the World" was born from a short-lived science fiction music project called The Dr. Christmas Biplane. All instruments were recorded entirely without electronics, including the musical saw, acoustic guitar, accordion, and various objects interacting with the interior of the piano.

17 Carsten Stabenow – ~/Downloads/torrents $: unrar x bladerunner.mkv. rar/Documents/Movies/

Artist and curator, born 1972, lives and works in berlin since 1994. He is a member of Staalplaat Soundsystem and founder of the media art festival 'Garage' in Stralsund, artistic director and founder of the architecture and sound initiative 'tuned city' and the co-founder of the media lab 'Dock-Berlin'. The file is the result of the 1:1 process of un-raring a torrent file of the bladerunner movie recorded directly on the usb port by voltage to audio input (listening to the inside of machines is known as one of the secret pleasures of androids).

18 GX Jupitter-Larsen – Last Days On Theia

GX Jupitter-Larsen is a media artist and writer, based in Hollywood, California. Underlying all of his work is a mix of aesthetic and conceptual obsessions, particularly entropy, professional wrestling, and a self-created lexicon consisting of personalized units of measurement such as the polywave, the totimorphous, and xylowave. Last Days On Theia is GX's sonic re-write of his own science fiction manuscript - a tale about the hypothesized protoplanet that crashed into the young earth, giving birth to the Moon. The story is about what it might have been like if someone were actually standing on Theia, looking up at the sky, and watching the earth crashing in.

19 Thierry Besançon – Nocturne pour Theremin et Piano

Composer of lyrical and concert works, Besançon evokes the themes of Love and Space in this romantic Nocturne, thereby creating the ideal soundtrack to an imaginary SF classic.

20 Richard Lainhart – Lift-off

Richard Lainhart is an award-winning composer, author, and filmmaker - an electronic artisan who works with sonic and visual data. Since childhood, he's been interested in natural processes such as waves, flames and clouds, in harmonics and harmony, and in creative interactions with machines, using them as compositional methods to present sounds and images that are as beautiful as he can make them. "Lift-off" is a realtime improvisation for Buchla 200e analog modular synthesizer controlled by a Haken Continuum three-dimensional keyboard controller. The sounds and structure of the track are directly inspired by the space-music soundtracks of the classic SF films of the 1950s.

The world-first presentation of the extraordinary JULES VERNE watches by LOUIS MOINET took place on Feburary 11th 2010, in the Espace Jules Verne of the Maison d'Ailleurs, in Yverdon. The VERNOSCOPE, a highly original new concept, was unveiled; and an historical piece – the first prototype to contain an authentic piece of the moon – was officially handed over to the Museum.

The VERNOSCOPE is an object measuring 50 cm across and 50 cm high. Its mahogany base highlights the many brass and copper pipes and counters that lend it a distinctly “Vernian” look. In all, it features no less than four apertures, doors and portholes revealing the surprises and mysteries of JULES VERNE and LOUIS MOINET. These include the MOON, a work by artist Jean-Yves Kervévan, hand-modelled and adorned with moon meteorite particles. The VERNOSCOPE also serves as a presentation box for four original “Number 1 watches”.

Now that Lines of Flight has closed, the museum staff is busy with the install of Galactic Hits! A few images of our work in progress...