A Futuro House Sold in Paris for 140,000 Euros

Futuro video clip 1


Futuro 2

On Tuesday 27 November 2007, one of the remaining Futuro houses was sold at Christie's auction in Paris for 140,000 euros. Futuro was a flying saucer-shaped fibreglass house designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in 1968, reflecting the era's futuristic space age dreams. Futuro was the subject of Mika Taanila's 1998 documentary film Futuro - A New Stance for Future and also appeared on Jimi Tenor's video The Year of the Apocalypse.

Related news @ YLE

The Cosmos Is Red!

Signale - Ein Weltraumabenteuer - with Terranova's music

Teema, a digital channel of YLE (Finnish Broadcasting Corporation) will show during this fall some Communist-era science fiction films of East Germany's DEFA-Studio from the 1960s and 1970s in its Kino Into series. Obviously some of these were inspired by Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (and apparently Tarkovsky's Solaris too), but appropriately depicting an utopian future world where socialism has overcome. Der Schweigende Stern (1960) is based on Stanislaw Lem's 1951 book Astronauci, and the film was also released in 1962 as American dubbed version called First Spaceship On Venus. Lem disowned the movie.





From the top:

Der Schweigende Stern (DDR-Poland 1960)
Im Staub der Sterne (DDR 1976)
Signale - Ein Weltraumabenteuer (DDR-Poland 1970)
Der Schweigende Stern
Eolomea (DDR 1972)

Der Schweigende Stern a.k.a. First Starship on Venus trailer @ YouTube

Eolomea: a review @ DVD Verdict

Eolomea: a review @ The Spinning Image

Roy Vedas: 'Fragments of Life'

Roy Vedas: 'Fragments of Life'

Another version of this song (though I prefer myself the one above)

One of my all-time favourites is this 1998 "retro-futuristic" song from Roy Vedas (imagine a typical 1964 beat group taken through a time warp by abducting aliens into record-producing). I don't know anything else about this act except that they were two guys called Frank Di Mauro and Maxi Trusso; Trusso's vocals being manipulated here with a vocoderish effect called autotuner, which became more famous with Cher's Believe (the song which was famously parodied in South Park). Roy Vedas, apparently another act in the endless list of one-hit wonders, disappeared as soon as they emerged, but I prefer their(auto)tune to that of the queen of plastic surgery.

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The production tricks of Cher's Believe

Raumpatrouille Orion: German Star Trek from the 60s

Raumpatrouille - Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffs Orion (a.k.a. Raumpatrouille Orion) was the Germans' own take on Star Trek, a black & white seven-episode sci-fi TV series, the first episode of which was aired in 17 September 1966.

Here you can see some video clips from these episodes on YouTube, with subtitles in English. Witness some hilarious dancing styles ("Dirty Dancing", indeed) and several cool 60s-type überbabes, among them a character called Commander Lydia Van Dyke... and of course some nifty futuristic set designs and spaceships. I can hardly wait to see this series myself.

The music was composed by Peter Thomas: there's a 2-CD called Warp Back to Earth 66/99 which includes Thomas' film and TV music, Raumpatrouille among them, plus remixes of his compositions by such people as Stereolab, Saint Etienne and John McEntire. Recommended if you can get this to your hands.

(Click here if you can't see these video clips.)



The series intro in colour.

And the infamous "Dirty Dancing" scenes -- these dancing styles have to be seen to be believed!