Dissevelt, Tom
Entry updated 7 February 2019. Tagged: Music, People.
(1921-1989) Dutch instrumentalist and composer, working on the borderlands between electronic, jazz and pop. His early releases were moderately ground-breaking in terms of the sonic palette he created from often home-built electronic instruments. His debut album Song of the Second Moon (1957) which contained the remarkable "Sonik Re-entry", a genuinely extraordinary piece of music half a century ahead of its time. His biggest success came with Fantasy in Orbit (1963), released on the major record label Philips, which was subtitled "Round the World with Electronic Music by Tom Dissevelt." Its sleeve illustration (from Jules Verne's Autour de la Lune, 1870) made clear the sense in which "round the world" was intended, and the music's perkily plangent stylings might as well be called "orbital". Philips re-released the work in 1967, with a Mercury capsule on the cover, to cash-in on the contemporary NASA-inspired craze for Space Flight; later re-releases added a new subtitle: "An Astronaut's Impression Whilst Orbiting the Earth". [AR]
Tomas Dissevelt
born Leiden, Netherlands, 4 March 1921
died Netherlands 1989
links
previous versions of this entry