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Alpine Summer

uploaded: Tue, Oct 26, 2010 @ 3:10 PM

by	rocavaco
Featuring	Mihai Sorohan, Die lustigen Toggenburger, vo1k1, Clarence Simpson
length	4:36
BPM	100
Recommends	Recommends (14)

Skiing season already started last week - so it was time to pack my summer impressions into this track. I visited my Mom in the Austrian Alps. Made some field recordings in the mountains and reactivated the gramophone of Grandma. Found some very old shellac disks with Volksmusik only. And I even found a packet of unused needles made by Polydor. The instruction said something like this: “each needle guarantees a flawless playback of 20 disk sides” :-)

The recording is a Mazurka called “Brüder” (Brothers), played by “Die lustigen Toggenburger”. The disk is labelled “Jumbola”. I could not exactly find out the age. The label Jumbola has gone a long time ago. But I found some disk label collections in the internet with matching design from 1908. The disk is most likely more than 100 years old! Since the company vanished so long ago I hope that copyright is not an issue.

In case you didn’t know - cows in the Alps wear bells to be found by the cowboys in the fog. Since the bells have all different sizes you can hear a lot of different tones at the beginning. The gramophone is labelled “King” and it is a portable(!) with a wooden case. All recordings made with a Zoom H2.

The trumpet is played by a Romanian named Mihai Sorohan, found at freesound.org (not in the Alps). “Jazz Trumpet Loops Pack in F 90 bpm” by sorohanro

Maybe it’s now too long ago that I have been in the mountains. An urban touch inherited the track. Hope you enjoy the Alpine Summer Remix - and pump up the volume!