The In Sound from Way Out! (Perrey and Kingsley album)
The In Sound from Way Out! was the first collaboration between electronic musicians Perrey and Kingsley, and an early mainstream electronic music album. It was released in 1966 on Vanguard Records, an independent label in Santa Monica, California. Perrey and Kingsley came together during Kingsley's stint as a staff arranger at Vanguard. At that time, Perrey was experimenting with tape loops, which he had been introduced to by the French avant-garde musician Pierre Schaeffer. Each loop was a laboriously hand-spliced assemblage of filtered sounds, pitch-manipulated sounds and sometimes even animal calls. The end result of their first collaborative effort in 1966 combined Perrey's tape loops, and his inventive melodies with Kingsley's complementary arrangements and instrumentation and their album was filled with tunes that sounded like an animated cartoon gone berserk. The result, titled The In Sound from Way Out!, was released on Vanguard that same year. Since this was decades before the advent of widespread digital technology, each tune took weeks of painstaking editing and splicing to produce. The twelve rather whimsical tracks bore names such as "Unidentified Flying Object" and "The Little Man from Mars" in an attempt to make electronic music more accessible. The offbeat titles and happy, upbeat melodies added a genuine sense of humor to the popular tunes. In fact, "Unidentified Flying Object" and another of the album's cuts, "Electronic Can-Can", became theme music for "Wonderama," a Metromedia Televisionchildren's program of the early 1970s. Though most of the melodies were original, two borrowed from the classics. "Swan's Splashdown" was based on Pyotr Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake", while "Countdown at 6" borrowed from Amilcare Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours", much as Allan Sherman did in 1963 with his hit recording, "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh". The last few bars of this track were also used on an animated Sesame Street segment several years later. The final cut on the album, "Visa to the Stars" is co-credited to "Andy Badale", who would go on to fame as Angelo Badalamenti, arranger of the music in many of David Lynch's movies. In contrast to the rest of the album, "Visa to the Stars" is a more serious gesture and lacks the unusual sound effects of the other eleven cuts. It is highly reminiscent of the style of Joe Meek and his hit "Telstar" by The Tornados. Perrey's Ondioline carries the melody throughout. In 1996, the title and cover art were referenced in the Beastie Boysrelease of the same name, while Smash Mouth borrowed the opening riff from "Swan's Splashdown" for their 1997 hit "Walkin' on the Sun". In March 2020, Turbotax used "Barnyard in Orbit" for their commercial titled "Help".
