Robert George "Joe" Meek (5 April 1929 – 3 February 1967) was a pioneering English record producer and songwriter.
Meek's 1959 concept album
I Hear a New World is regarded as a watershed in modern music for its innovative use of electronic sounds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Meek
The album was Meek's pet project. He was fascinated by the space programme,
and believed that life existed elsewhere in the solar system. This
album was his attempt "to create a picture in music of what could be up
there in outer space", he explained. "At first I was going to record it
with music that was completely out of this world but realized that it
would have very little entertainment value so I kept the construction of
the music down to earth". He achieved this as a sound engineer by
blending the Blue Men's skiffle/rock-and-roll style with a range of
sound effects created by such kitchen-sink methods as blowing bubbles in
water with a straw, draining water out of a sink, shorting out an
electrical circuit and banging partly filled milk bottles with spoons;
however, one must listen carefully to detect these prosaic origins in
the finished product. Another feature of the recordings is the early use
of stereophonic sound.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Hear_a_New_World
Joe set up his own independent label, Triumph. It was for this label, in
1960, that he recorded his most way-out work, the first-ever concept
album I Hear A New World. The world was obsessed with space travel:
Satellites and rockets, science-fiction and men from Mars. Tracks on
Joe's record include 'Entry Of The Globbots' and 'March Of The
Dribcots', and it sounds like a trip through cold, dark space and into
the future. He layered sound effects including bubbling water, toilets
flushing, radio interference and speeded-up voices over weirdly
distorted Hawaiian guitar and layered, shifting spookiness. The record
is now regarded as a pioneering work that stands alongside Kraftwerk and
Aphex Twin in electronica's history. At the time it just sounded alien.
Only 20 copies of the full album were pressed, for promo purposes.
Kate Hodges
http://www.thetruevinerecordshop.com/JOEMEEK.htm
“I hear a new world/Calling me/So strange and so real/Haunting me”
These poignant phrases of exploratory thought became eerie prophecies
of a life headed strange-ward into the void. As David Toop once noted,
Joe Meek — like Brian Wilson, Lee “Scratch” Perry, and Phil Spector — is
one of those rare sound scientists that wrestled on the fringes of
sanity in order to conjure music from some “not-yet-existent” other
place. The risk of course, in attempting to tap into such depths, is
total disillusionment — a sudden detachment from reality. Wilson’s
LSD-addled mind was lost somewhere in his sandbox, Perry flooded, then
burned his cherished Black Ark studio to the ground, and in 1967, Meek
murdered his landlady before turning the shotgun on himself.
Meek is now rightly regarded as one of the most influential engineers
of all time, a pioneer of the studio-as-instrument (and
producer-as-artist) recording approach. In 1959, Joe Meek, alongside Rod
Freeman and The West Five, fleshed out the spectacular, space-themed
visions ghosting his brain. The result was
I Hear a New World, a
collection of dreamy pop vignettes, adorned with dubby echoes and
tape-warped sonic tendrils. These pop experiments, originally released
in abbreviated form, were all but ignored at the time. It seems that
music made for and about the future must wait for the future to arrive
before it can be sufficiently understood and appreciated.
Jonathan Patrick
http://www.tinymixtapes.com/news/joe-meeks-pop-masterpiece-i-hear-a-new-world-gets-the-chance-to-haunt-a-whole-new-generation-of
A profound influence on artists as diverse as Steven Stapleton and
Saint Etienne, Joe Meek's magnum opus was destined to languish in
obscurity for several decades. Aside from a couple of highly collectable
EPs of the material, and a few white label copies, it didn't get an
official release in Meek's lifetime. Having developed an obsession with
transmundane sounds when working as a radar operator during his National
Service, Meek had his passion further inflamed by the Russian and
American satellite programmes Consequently, he resolved to create a
record which would explore life on the Moon. Aware that this was going
to be "a strange record", Meek brought his entire gamut of unorthodox
recording techniques to the fore. Speeded-up tapes, rattling washers,
combs dragged across ashtrays, etc, were thrown into the mix, along with
the clavioline and all manner of home-built effects. The results are at
times an adumbration of techniques used in later electronic music; at
other times the record is undeniably quirky with its risible speeded-up
voices. But undoubtedly, it was a significant work, suffused with
exquisitely simple melodies and genuinely strange intros that still
sound way ahead of their time.
John Everall
http://www.discogs.com/lists/The-Wires-100-Records-That-Set-The-World-On-Fire-While-No-One-Was-Listening-extra-30-Records/421
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