Artist

Peter Thomas Sound Orchester

Data may be outdated

Last updated: 1 month ago — Click refresh to get the latest statistics.

Peter Thomas is probably Germany’s most influential and most prolific score composer. Practically uncontested as the original German electro-lounge pioneer, Peter Thomas fused the spy-string paranoia of John Barry with Carnaby Street go-go music and abstract jazz on his recordings for several German sci-fi series of the 1960s, including the legendary Raumpatrouille (Space Patrol). His soundtracks for Edgar Wallace and Jerry Cotton made him to go-to composer in German television. Never afraid of unusual innovations, he introduced the vocoder into popular music culture in 1965 with the famous Space patrol countdown intro and built his own synthesizer Thowiephon before Moogs were ready for series production. He gave Donna Summer her first break with the single “Black Power” and his “Sound Orchestra” was also the beginning for another notable producer, Giorgio Moroder. The 1970s saw him acclaim international fame with soundtracks to the Bruce Lee movie “The Big Boss” and the film to Erich van Däniken’s book “Charitos of the Gods”.

Thomas experienced a revival of sorts in the late '90s. After several Raumpatrouille reissue collections in 1996, his work got heavily sampled and remixed by the likes of Public Enemy, Stereolab and most notably Pulp for the title of their 1997 album “This Is Hardcore”. George Clooney used four tracks from Thomas’ original Edgar Wallace soundtracks for his directorial debut Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind (2002) – as suggested by Quentin Tarrantino.

Monthly Listeners

68,628