Beaver & Krause
Beaver & Krause were a musical duo made up of Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause. Their 1967 album The Nonesuch Guide to Electronic Music was a pioneering work in the electronic music genre.
Beaver introduced Monkees singer-drummer Micky Dolenz to the Moog, which became a featured instrument on the fourth Monkees album, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd., and Beaver himself performed on one track, "Star Collector" in 1967. In addition, he led workshops at the Beaver & Krause LA studio attended by a who's who of film composers and session keyboardists of the time.
In June 1967, Beaver and Krause set up a booth at the Monterey Pop Festival, demonstrating their newly purchased electronic synthesiser, one of the first constructed by Bob Moog.
Thanks to their demonstrations of the Moog at Monterey, Beaver and Krause also introduced the instrument to a number of other leading American pop acts including The Doors, Simon & Garfunkel and The Byrds, helping to create the vogue for the Moog that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Krause introduced the instrument first to Sir George Martin, producer of the Beatles, and then to George Harrison during Harrison's 1968 visit to California while producing the Apple artist, Jackie Lomax. He used it to generate his 1969 free-form solo Electronic Sound album for Apple Records' spinoff label Zapple, with the first side of the disc consisting of not only Krause's composition, but also his performance – one that remained completely unacknowledged and uncompensated for.
In 1968, Beaver and Krause released an album for Mercury Records imprint Limelight Records, Ragnarok, then released a series of three albums for Warner Brothers Records, In a Wild Sanctuary (1970), Gandharva (1971) and All Good Men (1972), effectively creating both the electronica and New Age musical movements.
The final chord of the track "Spaced" from their album, In a Wild Sanctuary, is abnormally similar to the later synthesizer THX Sound Logo heard for years in movie theaters and named deep note. The THX performance conveniently begins on the same first note (a G pedal tone), splits into an 8-tone glissando with four notes rising and four descending, and ends on the same open (D Major) chord. Despite THX's contention that it was not directly influenced by Beaver and Krause, no other musical rendering of that kind can be found over the entire course of musical history.
Both Mike Bloomfield and Ronnie Montrose played guitar on the Beaver & Krause song "Saga Of The Blue Beaver".
The duo ended with Beaver's premature death in January, 1975, at age 49.
Krause released at least two more solo albums: Citadels of Mystery in 1975 and Gorillas in the Mix in 1988. He also scored music and/or effects for many movies like Apocalypse Now on synthesizer.
Since earning his Ph.D. in Creative (Sound) Arts with an internship in bioacoustics (1981), Krause has specialized almost exclusively in the recording and archiving of natural soundscapes from wild habitats worldwide and has been a major influence in the introduction to bioacoustics of the fields of soundscape ecology and ecoacoustics. In 2014, Krause collaborated with Richard Blackford, former composer-in-residence at Balliol College Oxford, to compose a symphony titled, The Great Animal Orchestra Symphony for Orchestra and Wild Soundscapes, commissioned and performed by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Echoing the pioneering ecoacoustic approach in Beaver & Krause's In A Wild Sanctuary, the symphony featured the first full orchestration combining wild soundscapes performed live as a component of orchestration. In 2015, Blackford and Krause were commissioned by the Alonzo King LINES Ballet, an internationally known corps based in San Francisco, to score the ballet, Biophony, which premiered in April of that year.
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