13 tracks, 53 minutes
Stream or download on Archive.org
I think this is only one of two albums on the list that don’t actually have an ‘artist’ as such: all the music on this one is played by steam. To be more precise, it’s steam as pumped through a Voigt Ruth Model 35a 69-Keyless Band Organ, built in 1930. The organ was built in Germany, lived in Bressingham Gardens and Steam Museum for most of its time (hence the name), and was bought in 2002 by a collector in the Netherlands, where it still performs regularly.
The sound of the thing is really charming. There are loads of organ pipes of different timbres, including flutes, trompettes, oboes and strings, all with different types of tremolo available to them; there’s also a xylophone in there and a snare drum and some cymbals. And all of those are programmed into hole-punched reels – I can only imagine the amount of meticulous effort that goes into programming all that; unfortunately the name of the programmer has been lost to time. They’re not simple pieces either. The repertoire on this album is a mixture of mostly light classical pieces, Viennese waltzes, chamber dance styles and marches, mostly, although there are some outliers, such as a ‘Medley of 1954’ of some pop tunes of the day, including Hank William’s ‘Jambalaya On The Bayou’. It’s all so cheerful!
But let’s be honest, I didn’t stumble across this album out of the blue, or from a pre-existing love of mechanical music as such. No, it’s another video game soundtrack! The game Rollercoaster Tycoon from 1999* is a theme park building and management sim, and it’s one of the most perfect games of all time – it’s perfectly weighted, it’s challenging while still being incredibly relaxing and it has a wonderful aesthetic. It doesn’t have music of a soundtrack though, aside from a theme tune when you boot up the game and ambient noises of the theme park you’ve created. And that’s where this album comes in. The only music featured in the game itself is played whenever you have a merry-go-round going in your park. When it came to choosing what sounds the ride made, developer Chris Sawyer remembered an album in his dad’s record collection that would fit the bill; that was The Bressingham Voigt and so all the music in the game is just taken directly from this album.
Like the humongous dweeb that I am, when I learnt that the music from Rollercoaster Tycoon wasn’t just available as an album, but on an old vinyl from 1976, I had to get my hands on it. And I did! Pleasingly cheap too, from discogs, although now you can download it directly from Archive.org.
People have told me that they think it’s creepy – it reminds them of abandoned fairgrounds and killer clowns, they say – and I understand that a little bit, but for me it’s just too jolly! I guess it helps that it’s connected to hours and hours of Rollercoaster Tycoon in my head, but very little of the music that I listen to is so unabashedly light-hearted, so considering I’ve found some, I want to hold on to that. It’s just steam, a load of pipes and some really wholesome noises coming out of them. And if it doesn’t make you want to ride on a creaking wooden merry-go-round to feel the wind rushing through your Victorian pin-curls with one of those comically-sized lollipops in hand…well, maybe you had a bad experience with a clown when you were little, I dunno.
*It was actually released 20 years ago to the day that I’m writing this – cool!
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