The Simonsound

expo 67 ↘↖

The Tone Generation’s Ian Helliwell will be giving a talk at the Royal College of Music, :ondon on the 18th of November at 5.15 PM. Its free, so if you enjoy electronic music from this period or just want to find out how this Expo in particular made such an impact by exposing challenging experimental music, film, design and architecture to the masses, go and check it out.

Expo 67: Electronic Music for a World of Tomorrow
At Montreal`s Expo 67, electronic music and multi-screen cinema were brought together on a scale previously unseen, drawing from ideas and techniques fostered by avant garde composers and filmmakers. This highly experimental approach was thrust into the commercial exhibition arena via the massive popularity of Expo 67, and experienced by millions of visitors with no previous knowledge of such challenging work. National government as well as corporate pavilions featured new audio-visual presentations, and involved many of the most cutting edge artists of the day.
This forum will consider the circumstances and impact of experimental music and film colliding with the mainstream, and to give a sense of the sights and sounds of the Montreal fair, Ian will premiere his specially made split-screen collage of archive music, audio extracts and photographic stills.

Full details here

Ian Helliwell’s website

11 November 2010 • expo 67 experimental music electronic music sound design avant garde Ian Helliwell Montreal Worlds Fair multi screen cinema architecture film

I visited Disney EPCOT Center recently and thoroughly enjoyed wandering around the futuristic buildings with high tech Monorail trains whizzing smoothly past every few minutes. The highlight and center piece of EPCOT is the huge geodesic dome ‘Spaceship Earth’ that houses the ride of the same name.  I hadn’t realized that this dome’s structure was designed by the same man who was responsible for the USA’s Geodesic Dome at the 1967 Worlds Fair in Montreal. On further reading it would seem that Frank Heger was involved in many exciting futuristic space age designs during the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s including the Monsanto House of the Future, a NASA Lunar Module simulator and a structure to house a multi mirror telescope in Arizona.

Frank Heger’s website

Listen to electronic music composed for Expo’s.

26 April 2010 • EPCOT futuristic design architecture Disney Frank Heger Geodesic Dome Buckminster Fuller Expo 67 Spaceship Earth