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Bernard Szajner: “Welcome (to Deathrow)”

From the album Some Deaths Take Forever (1980)

Some music works on you gradually, slowly seeping through your pores and into your brain like a sonic time-release capsule.  Other music affects you directly, a sensory blast of absolute immediacy.  ”Welcome (to Deathrow)” is such a piece of music.  The first 40 seconds of this song are a call to arms, a manifesto for the dawning age of fully synthetic music. 

Born in France of Polish-Jewish parents in 1944, Bernard Szajner (pronounced Shy-nair) worked for many years as a lighting designer for performing musicians before he began to make music himself.  Around 1980, Szajner invented an instrument called the “laser harp,” (also known as the “Syeringe”) in which notes or other sound events are triggered when the player’s hands breaks the beams of light emitted in a fan-like spectrum from a projector. The laser harp was supposedly inspired by an instrument described in Samuel Delany’s 1968 science-fiction novel Nova.  It was popularized by Jean-Michel Jarre during his concert tour of China in 1981.

Szajner’s breakthrough 1980 album Some Deaths Last Forever emerged from the soundtrack he composed for a 30-second anti-death penalty commercial made by Amnesty International.  Some Deaths is a concept album about the experience of two inmates awaiting execution on death row; as Szajner explained the motivation for the album, “it was not made to make people feel at ease. If people feel uneasy that’s perfectly right because one of the aims was to make people think, ‘something’s not right about inflicting death.’”  Szajner put out several other albums before withdrawing from music in the late 80s.  He has recently re-emerged with promises of new material, and many of his old albums have been newly released.

Szajner’s music came out in the heyday of electronic pop, in a scene dominated by acts from the well-established Kraftwerk to newer bands such as The Human League.  Szajner’s music moves freely between these influences the darker and more experimental touches of British industrial outfits such as Cabaret Voltaire.  In fact, he explicitly aligned himself against the “pleasant” and polished sounds of German electronica:

“The Germans were making only pleasant, obvious sounds which would please the ear immediately, that were beautiful and all that. I thought, well, this is so limited, pleasantness is only one aspect of perception. Unpleasant things exist also— you can express them and you can create emotion with them. You can enjoy something which is even ugly if you’re interested in that sort of ugliness.”

May 20, 2010, 12:32pm