CD 1 ENIAC girls
(duration: 50:09)
Florian Ross – Hammond B3
Dirk Rothbrust – percussion
Rie Watanabe – percussion
Udo Moll – modular synthesizer
Sarah Krasnow – voice
Michaela Ehinger – voice
Robbie Lee – flutes
sample from „drei goldene tiger“
by Klaus Lang
recorded 23/05/2017 at Fattoria Musica Osnabrück by Jan Kuhn
Sarah Krasnow & Robbie Lee recorded summer 2015 in
New York City by Udo Moll
mixed & mastered by
Reinhard Kobialka at TOPAZ Studio
CD 2 ENIAC girls Radio Version (duration: 50:36)
Sarah Krasnow – voice
Michaela Ehinger – voice
Matthias Scheuring – voice
Audrey Chen – voice
Florian Ross – Hammond B3
Rie Watanabe – percussion
Dirk Rothbrust – percussion
Etienne Nillesen – snare drum
Udo Moll – modular synthesizer
commissioned by
Deutschlandfunk Kultur
recorded 15 & 16/12/2017 & 23/01/2018 at Deutschlandfunk Kammermusiksaal Köln by Eva Pöpplein Audrey Chen recorded 13/01/2018 at Studio P4 Berlin by Christian Bader mixed by Eva Pöpplein mastered by Reinhard Kobialka
CD #0036 Double-CD Udo Moll : ENIAC girls
"Look like a girl, act like a lady, think like a man, work like a dog !"
(Betty Snyder Holberton, ENIAC programmer 1945)
Seventy years ago, computers were as big as swimming pools and were programmed by country girls. ENIAC, the world’s first fully electronic, vacuum-tube-based universal computing machine, sported a weight of 27 tonnes and used 18,000 vacuum tubes for calculating. And, each day, at least two of those vacuum tubes gave out. When this machine was presented to the world public in 1946, six young women, most of them maths students from the rural Midwest of the USA, had spent three years inventing a method of programming computers. At that point, the women programmers were never introduced; they remained invisible. After 1948, their pioneering work was forgotten for decades.
The composer Udo Moll was accompanied by the story of the ENIAC girls more or less constantly since 2015: different versions of this piece emerged, ranging from solo electronica to ensemble and even a radiophonic soundart version. This cycle of compositions gets finalized with the release of the double CD "ENIAC girls". Contained are the ensemble version from 2017 und the radiophonic piece from 2018. The Radio Version (produced by Deutschlandfunk Kultur) won the special achievement award of the jury at the Prix Marulic - International Radio Festival run by Croatian Radiotelevision HRT. Field recordings of historic computers, oral-history interviews, experimental voice techniques, percussion, modular synthesizers, Hammond organ - Udo Molls remarkable work amalgamates all that into an electro-acoustic oratorio about the dawn of the thinking machines.
