(b Plzeň [Pilsen], July 14, 1939; d Prague, Oct 1, 2019). Czech pop singer, actor, and painter. The best-known and most successful Czech pop singer of the 20th and 21st centuries. In his youth Gott aspired to become a painter, and after completing his schooling in Plzeň, he applied to study art in Prague. After failing to be admitted, he trained as an electrician, and during his training devoted himself also to singing. He began by studying as an opera singer (lyric tenor) with Konstantin Karenin, a pupil of Chaliapin, at first at the Prague Conservatoire and later privately. In 1962 he was engaged at the Semafor Theatre in Prague of Jiří Suchý and Jiří Šlitr, where he achieved great success singing the songs of Suchý and Šlitr; in 1963 he won the Zlatý slavík (‘Golden Nightingale’) poll for the first time, with the hit Oči má sněhem zaváté...
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Gott, Karel
Karel Steinmetz and Geoffrey Chew
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Trimpin
Mandy-Suzanne Wong
[Trimpin, Gerhard]
(b Istein, West Germany [now Germany], 1951). American sound artist, kinetic sculptor, inventor, and composer of German birth.
A pioneer in the construction of robotic musical instruments, Trimpin combines music and sculpture, hearing and seeing, in installations and contraptions.
Trimpin grew up in Germany as the son of a woodwind and brass musician. Playing flugelhorn duets with his father in the Black Forest, he became curious about sound’s interactions with the environment. This curiosity became a lifelong interest. Allergies of the lips and tongue curtailed his wind and brass excursions, prompting him to try building automatic instruments from junkyard detritus. Even as a child, he had his own workshop. In an early experiment, he stacked ten shortwave radios in a sculpture-like configuration, which he connected to a 400-foot antenna. Arranging a pulley system that could operate the knobs on all ten radios at once, he enjoyed the strange sounds that resulted from tuning between multiple stations simultaneously....
