mid seventies: Electric Music Theatre

In the mid seventies Michel Waisvisz started a series of what he than called 'electric music theatre' pieces. The image above shows an early version of 'The Electricity'. He can be seen on the left, with on the right composer/double bass player Maarten Altena. As founders and organisers of the first sound festival in Holland 'The Claxon Sound Festival' they also performed their own pieces with great intensity.

Quite often the pieces were blatently critical about the rise of High-Tech culture. This culture was portrayed here as a cardboard facade during a musical interlude.

Waisvisz can be seen playing a modified Putney VCS3 synthesizer. He connected the miniature pins of the VCS3' patchbay with touchpads in order to play the synthesizer directly - without the keyboard - with his bare fingers. Also one can see that the backlid has been removed so that he could also touch/play the inner wires using skin-conductivity as well.