BRUCE HAACK – 4 albums
Much like Mort Garson, viagra Bruce Haack was a relatively unsung pioneer in the field of electronic music who, ailment in the past several years, audiologist has achieved a cult status while having a large amount of his prolific works commercially unavailable. What separates Haack from most of his contemporaries is his innate funkiness. Sometimes on his albums, the songs tend to blend together because of their sameness, but they’re always danceable, always likely to make you tap your foot. Allmusic sez:
“Bruce Haack (1931-1988) was one of the most musically and lyrically inventive children’s songwriters of the ’60s and ’70s. Despite — or perhaps because of — his intended audience, his music was unusually expressive, combining homemade analog synths, classical, country, pop and rock elements and surreal, idealistic lyrics. Haack’s innovations and desire to teach still sound fresh, making his music a favorite with fans of analog synths and esoteric recordings. Contemporaries like Raymond Scott and followers like Luke Vibert and Add N to X championed his unique musical vision, which embraced concepts like ‘Powerlove’ and turned household appliances into synthesizers and modulators.”
For a brief moment, Haack enjoyed major-label support for his “The Electric Lucifer” LP, a psych-synth freakout which made wonderful use of early vocoder technology. This marketing push would be short-lived, though, and most of Haack’s LPs were self-distributed on his Dimension 5 label.
In addition to the far-outness of the psych stuff, Haack also made a gaggle of kids’ records, for which he collaborated with children’s dance teacher Esther Nelson. These works remind me an awful lot of the Steve Allen children’s album “How To Think” in the bestest way possible.
Towards the end of his music-making, Haack returned to the darker side of things with a few albums that revisited the “Electric Lucifer” period, and some of this material went unreleased until fairly recently, although so far these final albums, with the exception of “Electric Lucifer II” (which has been re-released on CD in the U.S. by Omni Records as a companion to the first volume), have been Japanese-only releases.
The third and fourth records I’ve posted below are compilation CDs that came out in the late ’90s, but are now out-of-print.
Bruce Haack – “Bite”, 1981 (ZIP file)
Bruce Haack – “Haackula”, 1978 (ZIP file)
Bruce Haack – “Hush Little Robot” compilation (ZIP file)
Bruce Haack & Esther Nelson – “Listen Compute Rock Home: The Best of Dimension 5″ compilation (ZIP file)
apropos of nothing here, check out kraut-team.blogspot.com for an lp by Lokomotiv Kreuzberg. if you’re not already familiar with them, they’re a strangely funky/rockish/disjointed/grooved German 70′s outfit which went on to support Nina Hagen on her s/t ’78 lp & Unbehagen i believe as well.
re: anti-spam: Long live Geddy Lee. LOVE that guy!
Yesss! Have the two comps but not the other two, muchos gracias, Eggman.
Thank you Thank you Thank you
I hadn’t heard of this guy before, but I love what I have heard off the Haakula album thus far. Thanks for turning me onto some new…to me.
Thanks a lot !
Cheers! Thanx a lot. I love Bruce Haack.
Thank you. I ended up here after posting Bruce Haack – “The Electric Lucifer” on the Prog Not Frog blog. And was told about your posts by a visitor.
A big thank you to him and a Big thank you to yourself.
Thank you so much! I’ve been looking for more Bruce Haack albums for some time now. Great Blog!
has anyone on hear seen the documentary on Bruce called ‘Haack: King of Techno’???
yeah, the ill named documentary has a lot more good points then bad points. But since there’s so little material on him it’s darn good to have. It’s out on DVD and I think a edited down? version was on some cable channel a bunch of times. I guess the problem is there just weren’t many films or videos of him and I heard something about there were all sorts of issues about the documentary not going into certain areas of his life or someone or other wouldn’t participate. So it winds up a bit too much about plugging some ‘tribute’ album the filmmakers were involved with and various present day artists saying how cool his music sounds and not knowing anything about him. Unlike the Moog Movie which has a tribute concert filler connection and present day artists who like to talk about their ignorance, that movie was fortunate enough to have the namesake appearing all over the movie, which couldn’t be done with the long deceased Haack.
This is really wonderful. Thankyou . I feel smarter..like the first time I saw Blade Runner.
hey Nick… good to hear your thoughts. I’m the filmmaker of this doc and yes… there were alot of issues, as most films have, and having made this on a shoestring budget didn’t help the matter. Overall there were very limited resources to work with, but after it’s been said and done I think we packed as much info as possible into a cohisive picture of Bruce’s mysterious life… please w/b with any other thoughts
ive bin looking for Haackula for a while now and when i stumbled across this web site i was glad my surch was over. i appreciate you having these out ov print compilation CDs as a zip file download, it makes things much easier to download and start playing. i will continue to visit your web site and hope you will add EL Book 3:IFO. iv read that IFO was actually worked on by Bruce after the original electic lucifer? any ways ther is probly a ton ov material that was never released like the tracks he did for russell simons, or the music he did for commercials. i like collecting rarities and think you would be best to supply those treasures, thank you GOSMO
thank you thank you thank you
i have loved bruce haack for a long time and you’re doing a great service.
take care
avy
already have all of these, except bite (which ive been trying to get fr a while, so THANK YOU!), and I just think haackula is ridiculously good! ive always wanted to hear Bite, and now i have it, so thanks again. anyone know where I can get “This Old Man”… its the only other one i dont have right now
p.s. i really enjoyed the doc! considering how little info is out there on Haack, i was thoroughly entertained.
Do you know where I could find Chris Kachulis’s – Look into your love by any chance?
im working on releasing my own renditions of bruce haacks
electric lucifer book 3 “ifo”
you can find a video of one of the tracks below on my youtube page
its called “the prophet” originally by bruce haack and chris kachulis
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yj2laj9ba3Y
Thanks for posting these. I’ve been interested in Bruce Haack for years but I’m just now getting around to collecting all the of his music I can find. I just bought The Electric Lucifer and I’m looking forward to listening to Bite which I’m downloading now. Best wishes!