While browsing through the titles on Netflix expiring at the end of this month, I noticed that the documentary 'Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey' is currently streaming until May 1st. I saw this at the time of release in the mid-nineties, and think it's an excellent documentary for anyone interested in this perhaps minor but I think very interesting instrument or pioneering electronic music. The inventor's story is quite amazing and the doc also features a slightly frightening interview with Brian Wilson.

The trailer

Theremin playing his instrument:

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9C0DE4DA1439F932A35753C1A962958260

Theremin An Electronic Odyssey (1993)

FILM FESTIVAL REVIEW;The Strangest Instrument and Its Even Stranger Inventor

Surely the theremin is the weirdest of all musical instruments. It looks like a podium with a horizontal loop and a vertical antenna. It is played by musicians who don't touch it, creating sounds simply by moving hands in the air. The noise it emits, described by newspapers of the 1920's as "ether music" and "music like none other ever played," can suggest a violin or a soprano or a Martian making a landing. It is surpassingly strange.

The theremin's sound may not be instantly identifiable, but it has been prominent in certain thrillers and science fiction films, used to signal the presence of the unknown. You can also hear it on the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations," in those octave-skipping wheeps and whorls that shoot through instrumental breaks in the song.

If the theremin itself is bizarre, the story of its creator is much more so. It is told in Steve M. Martin's "Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey," a fascinating, offbeat documentary that stands as a fine job of detective work as well. Painstakingly, Mr. Martin pieces together the separate parts of Leon Theremin's life, which spanned nearly a century in milieus as different as the avant-garde music world of New York in the 1920's and the inner circles of the K.G.B. He died last November at 97.

The Russian-born Theremin invented his instrument accidentally in 1918 while trying to build a radio. He found that an electromagnetic field produced noises that could then be controlled, and by 1922 he was in the Kremlin, demonstrating his instrument for Lenin. In 1928 he was the toast of New York, playing at Carnegie Hall. He had a pretty young protege, Clara Rockmore, whose 18th birthday he celebrated by building a cake that lighted up and rotated when anyone approached it.

Clara Rockmore, still a theremin virtuoso, is on hand to play movingly for Mr. Martin's camera and to help tell this story. She and other acquaintances of the inventor describe his disappearance in 1938, when he was kidnapped by Soviet agents from his West 54th Street studio. His wife, a ballerina named Lavinia Williams, never saw him again, nor did any of his old friends for a very long while. After a reporter found him in the Soviet Union, it became known that Theremin had been enlisted to pioneer the art of electronic bugging.

Although the film begins with the sound of a quavery, heavily accented voice describing his memories of light glimpsed from within his mother's womb, Theremin's eventual appearance on camera is almost a surprise. By the time the film has described such Theremin ideas as making cars move through the air without bridges, the inventor himself has taken on an eerie, otherworldly aura.

Robert Moog, who went from building theremins to inventing the synthesizer, has been heard attesting to Theremin's brilliance. And Brian Wilson, the unpredictable genius behind the Beach Boys, has spoken meanderingly about what the instrument meant to him. So when the inventor begins reminiscing with Mr. Martin, the film has already invested him with considerable magic. That magic also colors a staged New York reunion between the inventor and Ms. Rothmore, a meeting that would seem contrived if it were not so honestly touching.

"Isn't it nice we could see each other in our old age?"

"What old age?" Theremin asks.

"Theremin," a fond, engrossing portrait of an astonishing man, will be shown at 4 P.M. tomorrow as part of the New York Film Festival. On the same bill is "Carnival," a five-minute short featuring clouds, parasols, animated shapes, strange headgear and a chicken, all moving about the screen to musical accompaniment. Arty but whimsical, the short works better in the context of Mr. Martin's film than it would alone. The Film Festival's short films have been particularly well paired with its features this year.

[Edited 4/26/13 17:51pm]

Great post topic.


Queen of the Theremin...



...Clara Rockmore



Music for adventurous listeners

tA

Tribal Records

Alison Goldfrapp likes using a Theremin (the final 40 seconds):



The last time I saw her use it live, I was sitting in the front row at Radio City and the Theremin wasn't working so she tossed it behind her in frustration.

Always been fascinated with the Theremin.

It has a kind of "mystical" quality about it (aided, I suppose by its actual sound and the man that invented it).

Cool thread..thx.