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Tom Dissevelt & Dick "Kid Baltan" Raaymakers

 B i o g r a p h y

Thomas (Tom) Dissevelt (4 March 1921, Leiden – 1989) was a Dutch composer and musician. He is known as a pioneer in the merging of electronic music and jazz. He married Rina Reys, sister of Rita Reys in 1946. Tom Dissevelt was also known as bassist / arranger in the Skymasters and helped on the records of Rita Reijs. Between 1939 and 1944 Dissevelt studied at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. He took over three years in trombone lessons and then went onto study clarinet, music theory and piano. He stopped studying the clarinet because he was too busy and took bass lessons from Herman Stotijn of the Residence Orchestra.

After the war Dissevelt moved to Indonesia with the Jos Cleber Orchestra to work. He was in love with Rina Reys, and married her in 1946. In 1947 he did an international tour with Ilcken Wessel, the husband of Rita Reys, and the orchestra of Piet van Dijk. This tour lasted three years, where she acted in Spain and North Africa.

In 1955 Bep Rowold, leader of the Skymasters, hired Dissevelt as a bassist and arranger. He became interested in 12-tone music, listened to the many German radio stations, and heard works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and Anton Webern. Recommended by Philips, he was invited to the Natlab studios electronic music. Together with Dick Raaijmakers (alias "Kid Baltan") he composed electronic music. Many of his compositions are now heard on the record "Popular Electronics – Early Dutch electronic music from Philips Research Laboratories, 1956–1963".

The way pop music was emerging and the changing of the way radio stations operated (with the disbandment of radio orchestras) made Dissevelt decide to give up working with orchestras. He became assistant to renowned Dutch entertainers such as Wim Sonneveld and Toon Hermans.



Dick Raaymakers (also Raaijmakers; 1 September 1930 – 4 September 2013) was a Dutch composer, theater maker and theorist. He was known as a pioneer in the field of electronic music and tape music. In addition, he realized numerous music theater pieces, art installations, and has published many theoretical essays.


Raaymakers was born in Maastricht and studied the piano at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague. From 1954 to 1960 he worked in the field of electro-acoustic research at the NatLab of Royal Philips Electronics Ltd. in Eindhoven. Using the alias Kid Baltan, he and Tom Dissevelt formed Electrosoniks and produced some of the very first electronic pop music. Jean-Jacques Perrey visited them at the time and cited them as an inspiration. While at NatLab, Raaymakers assisted Edgard Varèse with assembling his piece Poème électronique, commissioned by Philips for Expo 58. From 1960 to 1962 he held an appointment as scientific staff member at the University of Utrecht. From 1963 to 1966 he collaborated with Jan Boerman in his own studio for electronic music in the Hague. He was one of the co-founders of STEIM, the STudio for Electro-Instrumental Music. In 1966 he founded the electronic music studio at the Royal Conservatory of the Hague and lectured on electronic and contemporary music until his retirement in 1995. From 1991 he taught music theatre at the Image and Sound Interfaculty at the same conservatory. He died on the third of September, 2013. His archives are preserved at the Netherlands Music Institute.
   

 A l b u m s


Song of the Second Moon: The Sonic Vibrations of Tom Dissevelt & Kid Baltan (Philips, 1968)