Friday, October 14, 2011

Songs in the key of my life: Laughing Hands - Dog Photos


The internet is an amazing thing. While compiling this list of songs I have come upon quite a few titles that I have had in my head for decades, but was always unsuccessful to find and purchase. These last few weeks I have been very successful, and I'll be reporting about them all in due time. Only today a song came back to my mind that I had heard on that Bavarian radio show 'Zündfunk' in 1981. It was a fascinating and weird peice of electronica, I'd say it was like the Residents playeda Kraftwerk song, and the listener was informed it was by an obscure Autralian band named Laughing Hands. That's 30 years ago, and I've been searching for that band ever since. In those days it was really not easy to get the music you were searching for. There was no internet, you lived in a provincial Bavarian town with record stores who hardly sold truly independent music, even in Munich the specialty stores didn't sell 'everything', the same goes for mail order companies. I never came across that Laughing Hands album. Stupidly I did come across a cd by a band of the same name and bought it, I guess it was the mid 90s, but unfortunately that was a nice, but otherwise not particularly world music combo from Denver, Colorado (who are still active, it seems). Alas, just today I decided to do a new research online, and though it can be said there is little information available, I was tremendously successful: I found out that there is a Japanese cd compiling both albums of the original Laughing Hands and I ordered it. And even better: that one title that has been lingering in my head since 1981 is on Youtube! It has no title, it's simply track 6 on thier 'Dog Photos' album. Amazingly my memory has stored the music as exactly as it sounds. More information was to be found as well: Laughing Hands were the first band of the Australian electronic composer Paul Schütze, a legend ever since, who has produced quite a few remarkable ever since. So this is another artist I'll be looking into more in the near future.

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