#pigtrådsmusik

[i12bent]

Stig Møller is a Danish musician of the hippie era. He is 74 today. His first noteworthy contributions were in rock’n’roll bands of the early 1960s (in Denmark known as ‘pigtrådsmusik’ - literally ‘barbed wire music’), but it was in the band Steppeulvene (named after the Hermann Hesse novel, just like their more famous American counterparts, Steppenwolf) that he came into his own.

The only album by Steppeulvene, Hip (1967) is the quintessential Danish hippie/acid rock album. Stig Møller played guitar on the LP and has composition credit on 7 of the 8 tracks.

[i12bent]

Frits Schlegel (May 4, 1896 - 1965) was a Danish architect and a proponent of Functionalism in architecture. He pioneered the use of prefab concrete elements in some of his buildings. He is noted for many expensive villas, and several distinct public buildings, including two within the Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen.

Above is his Tivoli Concert Hall, a truly iconic building from 1954-6. It was a collaboration with another architect, Hans Hansen, who had fought in the Danish Resistance movement during WWII. The original Tivoli Concert Hall had been blown up by the Germans in a revenge act of Schallburgtage… The ‘new’ Concert Hall was renovated in 2005.

The other Schlegel building in Tivoli is the dance hall, Dansetten, which is even more significant in terms of cultural history. Dansetten (1948-1968) was where Copenhagen’s youth subcultures first came to dance jitterbug and a decade later to hear the new type of music called ‘pigtråd’ or ‘beat musik', and it was also where international jazz artists such as Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Louis Armstrong performed when visiting Copenhagen in the 1950s ans 60s...

Schlegel was also responsible for 'funkis' villas such as the Gorm Bremmer villa at Hasserisvej 115 in Aalborg (1937)...