“Swan’s Splashdown” (1966) – Perrey-Kingsley * Written by Jean-Jaques Perrey and Gershon Kinsley (Tchaikovsky uncredited) * LP: The In Sound from Way Out! * Label: Vanguard
On the back cover of this first album by Moog synthesizer trailblazers Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley, the two men appear as studious music scientists dressed in lab coats. The dual meaning of the teen lingo LP title implies that they are also turning music inside out, exposing its inner essence to uncharted modes of interpretation. As Perrey made clear in an Incredibly Strange Music interview, though, he was primarily concerned with giving instrumental music the ability to express humor, something he considered to be a lost art. Partnered with Kingsley (who wrote the original version of “Popcorn”), his work on this album and the follow-up, Kaleidoscopic Vibrations, demonstrates hard work at the laugh lab, sending up genres and familiar melodies with electronic squitches and squiggles. On “Swan’s Splashdown,” the Allegro Moderato section of “Danses des Cygnes” in Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake gets a honked-up dressing down. You will possibly think about that ballet’s duality-themed story of the good swan and evil swan and compare it to the musicians’ story of serious music and unserious music. Or you may think about Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, where the character Swann, in the fourth volume (“Sodom and Gomorrah”) thinks about the “binary rhythm which love adopts… bearing no close and necessary relation to the woman they love, but pass to one side of her, splash her, encircle her.” You may also wonder if SmashMouth were listening to this before concocting “Walkin’ on the Sun.”