This episode was written and hosted by Rose Bacci. She is a screenwriter who has dabbled in murder mysteries and a producer on Crossing the Line. 

RESOURCES

Read more about Ursula Bogner

Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating in Space (The Wire)

Synthesizing History (Frieze)

Invisible Women (The Wire)

Musical Hoaxes (New Directions in Music - Substack)

Sonne = Blackbox Review (Pitchfork)

Recordings 1969-1988 Review (Pitchfork)

Recordings 1969-1988 Review (All Music Guide)

Ursula Bogner: Recordings 1969-1988 (Pop Matters)

Ursula Bogner: Recordings 1969-1988 (Resident Advisor)

Read more about the women who pioneered electronic music

The Woman Who Could 'Draw' Music (BBC Culture)

TRANSCRIPT

This story is about an electronic musician named Ursula Bogner, whose lost works from the ‘60s potentially make her one of the genre's pioneers. I came across Bogner’s work after a conversation with a friend about how male-dominated electronic music is. As I Googled women electronic musicians, her name kept coming up, and I got sucked into her unlikely story. And Ursula had a very strange career for a musician. Strange is kind of my forte: I’m a screenwriter who has dabbled in murder mysteries and a producer on Crossing the Line, which is a true crime podcast that tells real stories that are much stranger than fiction. 

 

I'm Rose Bacci, and you’re listening to Have You Heard This One? A show about the stories in the back pages and hidden corners of music history.

 

AI: And I’m an AI voice. I know you’re probably already skeptical about me, what with all of the plagiarism, lies, and deep fakes. But don’t worry, the creators of this podcast brought me in to read real quotes written by real people. You can believe me. Everything I say will come straight from actual living, breathing music writers. By the way, those are all overrated traits for a writer to have, if you ask me. But you didn’t. I’ll only report the facts, or opinions, really, of so-called human writers.

 

I took the bait on Ursula, of course, and went all in on learning everything about her. As I dug, the story kept getting more and more bizarre. From what I could find, she’s said to be an overlooked electronic music pioneer whose work wasn’t discovered until after her death. Ursula created music from 1969 to ‘88, but never released it in any form. She didn’t perform, either. It was just a hobby — she had a day job at a German pharmaceutical company.

 

You can get a sense of her sound from the sparse, repetitive song “Modes,” which, as of this recording, is her most-played song on Spotify. 

 

Years after her death, her music has been reviewed by Pitchfork, The Vinyl Factory, and Pop Matters. Pitchfork describes the song, and her music in total, perfectly in one sentence: 

AI: “Bogner's M.O. is to take a few simple loops — rumbling bass, watery plops, chirping squalls, laser-like blasts — and overlap them.” The reviewer notes that her music can be amusing, childlike, contemplative, and sometimes hypnotic. The pieces here have a general theme, and that is the manipulation of the human voice. The opening title track mixes a banging piano loop with gorgeously rendered vocoder tones, conveying that peculiarly 1950s Disneyfied optimism about the happiness of a robotic future.” Mark Richardson, Pitchfork 2011 review of Sonne = Blackbox

 

So how did Bogner’s music end up being reviewed on Pitchfork, that bastion of tastemaker music sites? Well, the story goes that her existence might have remained buried on the dark back roads of music history…if not for a chance encounter. 

 

Bogner’s music was released into the world by fellow German electronic producer Jan Jelinek. In fact, it was the first album he used to launch his label, Faitiche, in 2008. According to Jelinek, he met Bogner’s son Sebastian when they sat next to each other on a plane. Electronic music came up, and Sebastian told Jelinek that his deceased mother composed on synthesizers for nearly two decades. They chatted the whole flight to Lithuania, and Jelinek asked to hear some of Ursula’s recordings. Jelinek subsequently released Ursula Bogner – Recordings 1969 – 1988. He later released another collection of Ursula’s works, Sonne = Blackbox…and even performed some of her songs live. 

 

After these records came out, rumors of a hoax began to emerge. In 2012, in an article for The Wire, journalist Frances Morgan discussed the possibility that Ursula never existed. She believed Ursula was a creation inspired by the ongoing fascination of uncovering marginal figures from electronic music’s past. The following year, journalist Abi Bliss touched upon the fact that Ursula almost too perfectly fit the stereotypical profile of forgotten female electronic musicians — a buzzy topic at the time. And rumors of the hoax get mentioned in most of the reviews of the albums. So, I went to the source, the man who released the albums, to ask some hard questions. Jan responded to my email but declined to be recorded, claiming to be both mic shy and camera-shy. He did respond to some of my questions via email, though. Here’s a little introduction in his own words.

Jelinek: Actually, I never intended to become a musician. I moved to Berlin in the 1990s to study sociology and philosophy, but my juvenile zeal and the turmoil of the fall of the Berlin Wall took me somewhere else. It was there that I met electronic music producers from whom I borrowed my first sound generators, such as drum machines. However, not with the intention of producing music but to pass time. I liked the DIY aspect of composing with electronic instruments: Anyone is capable of using these devices and handling them requires no practice.

 

In addition to making and producing music, Jan also launched a record label. It’s perhaps telling that he named his label Faitiche, explaining  the origin of the name as coming from the French/German Factish "(...) a combination of facts and fetishes, that  “makes it obvious that the two have a common element of fabrication."

 

 Interesting. It’s also worth noting that his recent work, a series of songs released in June 2022, is inspired by phishing emails he has received — which are their own weird version of an internet scam….or a hoax.

AI: Here’s what critic Ned Raggett had to say about the hoax in a review of Recordings 1969-1988 for All Music.

 

“One can take the release of Ursula Bogner's recordings via Jan Jelinek's label Fatiche one of two ways -- either at total face value, that these are selections from 20 years of recordings by a German musician who worked on them while she otherwise went about a conventional enough daily life, or as some sort of elaborate concept on the part of Jelinek himself. The latter certainly wouldn't be surprising, as any fan of the Aphex Twin could tell you, and there's certainly something very Richard James about songs like ‘Inversion’ and ‘Begletitung fur Tuba.’” 

 

When I asked about Ursula, the answer Jan gave wasn’t that different from reading her biography. He said she was born in Dortmund, Germany, in 1946. She moved to West Berlin at 19 to study. And she began her career as a research assistant at Schering, a pharmaceutical company that you probably know best for making Claritin allergy pills, Afrin nose sprays, and Coppertone sunscreen. She got married and had two kids, including Sebastian. She was also fascinated with the work at the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne, where she went to seminars by studio founder Herbert Eimert. And she got very into Musique Concrète, a type of experimental music composition that’s a precursor to electronic music as we know it. 

 

The technique featured audio derived from recordings of musical instruments, human voices, nature, and sounds created using computer-based digital signal processing. 

 

Jan also told me some more about how he came to be in possession of Ursula’s music. It was, as he says, as simple as making a genuine connection with her son after sharing that he was an electronic musician.

 

Jelinek: Sebastian generously handed over her archive to me. From then on, I began to immerse myself into the Bogner universe. I recognized a historic opportunity through Bogner's existence.
In post-war Germany electronic music was a purely academic genre. While older men in white lab coats worked on sounds ”never heard before on this planet,” electronic music was also used commercially in the U.S.A. and UK — for example, in advertising jingles or progressive radio pieces. And not infrequently, the creators of these progressive sounds were female. How tempting is a new perspective on German electronic music that reports on female producers who also have a sense of swing.   

 

It should be noted that Jan is the only person who seems to have any information about Ursula. Information that he allegedly got from her son. But here is where it gets suspicious: no one can find any trace of Sebastian's existence. But who knows…some people are just private, right? Maybe Sebastian is alive and well…and real. 

 

So I asked Jan if Sebastian wanted to talk about his mom or, you know, would be interested in proving Ursula’s existence — or even his own. After a diatribe about curating a 2019 exhibition of Ursula’s work in other mediums — apparently, she was also an artist who drew, sculpted, and made pottery — Jan said this:

Jelinek: Ursula Bogner verifies herself through her work and not through statements by her son. 

 

Now, if there is one thing I love more than mysteries, it is hoaxes. And while I am not saying Ursula Bogner is a hoax, per se, musical hoaxes are an especially fascinating subject. Case in point, the first Klatuu album, widely rumored to be the work of The Beatles upon its release in 1977. And these tales go back to the beginning of recorded music. These tales go back so far, some people even question whether Mozart actually composed his final requiem. Now that would be a story, right? To better understand musical hoaxes, I decided to speak to an expert.

 

Hebblethwaite: My name is Phil Hebblethwaite. I'm a music journalist. I used to run a pop music newspaper called the Stool Pigeon. Now, I mostly cover classical music for people like the BBC, New Statesman, Quietus, places like that.

 

So Phil, what do the people perpetrating these hoaxes hope to get out of it? 

 

Hebblethwaite: First of all, I'm not a psychologist. So, it's very hard to speculate on these things. And it's very hard to generalize because the people who perpetuate these hoaxes are obviously different people. I will say that you can often find other examples of deceit in their life story, that people who perpetuate hoaxes tend to be slightly slippery or screwy people. And another thing is they tend to continue these hoaxes forever. When the hoax is exposed, the interest dies instantly and catastrophically. But the hoaxer, they always continue in some capacity with a hoax.

 

They always continue with the hoax. Is that what Jelinek has been doing for over a decade? I noticed some references within Jelinek’s story about Bogner that feel almost like Easter eggs. The Pop Matters review of Bogner’s box set is almost entirely about the hoax, and ends by noting that her story is very much like that of Tickley Feather. Tickley Feather is a very real indie rock artist named Annie Sachs who created an internet presence for herself in the early 2000s. And who also happened to release an album in 2008, on Animal Collective’s small label, Paw Tracks. The band describe themselves as her No. 1 fan, kind of like Jan with Ursula. 

 

AI: In his 2008 review of Tickley Feather, Joshua Love wrote: "[Annie] utilizes wobbly simplistic key patterns and layers them with largely indecipherable singsong melodies or chirpy yells, occasionally a low-rent drum track, and other sonic detritus."

 

Tickley Feather is a single mom who says she started creating bedroom recordings on a four-track because she enjoys the process. Some of her recording process is evocative of the techniques in Musique Concrète, although she uses instruments and found sounds rather than synthesizers. As far as I can tell, there is no connection between the two artists, other than their eerily similar stories. Is it possible that Jelenik borrowed from Tickley Feather to create Bogner’s story? Or is that all a weird coincidence?

 

Ursula’s bio also sets her up for comparison to Kate Bush because it mentions Kate’s interest and research into Wilhelm Reich's Orgonomy and his discovery of Orgone Energy.  Kate also produced music using synthesizers and drum machines, and she wrote a song called “Cloudbusting” about the government taking Wilhelm Reich into custody for selling “orgone accumulators.” That’s a word derived from combining "orgasm" and "organism," which he thought was a universal life force.

 

The Food and Drug Administration thought it was a scam. Or, you know…a hoax. The coincidences are just piling up now. Or are they influences for Ursula’s creator?

 

AI: “At best, like on the jazzy "Punkte" and the cresting "Expansion," she crafts pulsing, organic melodies that burrow into memory like tree roots gripping the ground,” That’s what Marc Masters wrote in his Pitchfork’s review of Recordings 1969-1988. 

 

There are a few photos of Ursula and photographs of her notes, but none of these really prove anything. Jan could have forged the notes himself and simply shared old photos of a random woman. Musicologist and journalist Björn Gottstein even pointed out that Bogner looked like Jan Jelinek dressed in women’s clothing. Looking at side-by-side photos of the two, it seems possible. To me, Jan is really fitting the profile of the type of person Phil described. So I asked him what he thinks is going on here. 

 

Hebblethwaite: Alter egos are a part of the DNA of pop and they always have been. Generally, alter egos are fun. Sometimes alter egos take on a more sinister capacity.

 

Why do you think Jan would choose a woman as his alter ego, if that’s what he’s done, and why from this time frame?

 

Hebblethwaite: I think the main reason why Ursula is a woman is because the whole hoax seems to be aping other parts of electronic music history, particularly the BBC Radio phonic workshop, which is uncanny how many things he seems to have nicked visually and the whole aesthetic of his hoax, he was very in awe of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The two most famous people in the BBC Radiophonic workshop were both women: Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, and these are great pioneers of electronic music.

 

The BBC Radiophonic workshop was one of the sound effects units of the BBC, created in 1958 to produce sounds and music for radio and, later, television. And this is an interesting comparison that seems pretty spot on. These two women helped revolutionize music, but Daphne Oram has only been celebrated in recent years. After founding the BBC Radiophonic workshop in 1957, she spent her time soundtracking radio dramas. Eventually, she was told by her bosses to take time off due to an unnecessary concern about radiophonic equipment on human bodies — it’s worth noting that none of her male colleagues were subject to this request. So she quit and went on to create an impressive body of work. Delia did receive recognition for using the studio to create its best-known work, the Doctor Who theme song. But both women were tragically underrecognized, given their impact on modern music.

 

Hebblethwaite: As for why he particularly chose a woman, I suppose to create distance from himself, if he was trying to do that, not that adopting a different gender was particularly convincing.

 

When I cut to the chase and asked Jan if he would confirm Ursula’s existence or classify her as an alter ego or pseudonym, he gave me an answer that said nothing…and confirmed everything. And it sounded an awful lot like what I’d already been told about the need for hoaxers to continue a hoax indefinitely. Here’s what Jan said:

 

Jelinek: I totally can understand that there is a need to verify rumors. The narrative logic of the hoax demands clarification at the end. That's why I wouldn't want to call Ursula Bogner an alter ego. It is not about presenting a large-scale publicity stunt, but about working speculatively with an identity’s archive. For this reason, I have also made the Bogner Archive available to other artists. Both Andrew Pekler and Lucrecia Dalt found their very own interpretations of the Bogner legacy. Perhaps this is exactly how one should understand Ursula Bogner's legacy: Not as a separate identity, but as a multiple artist's personality open to other interpretations.

 

So, he could be saying that he doesn’t want to end the hoax by confirming or denying it. He could be explaining why he has performed Bogner’s work, and why he felt at liberty to add himself on to some of the tracks on Recordings 1969-1988. He did confirm that he chose a photo from her archives that resembles himself. 

 

Jelinek: The reception of the photo was interesting: Many articles speculated that the photo shows me in drag with a wig. So a new parallel narrative opened up about Jan Jelinek. Such speculations are wonderful. However, I have also made mistakes. By emphasizing Ursula Bogner's private activities and pointing out that she lived in a marriage that produced two children, she quickly carried the stigma of "music-making housewife." I was not aware that the role of the artist still seems to exclude the role of the mother and that the role of the mother degrades the artistic.

 

So it seems like Jan is trying to make a statement about how women artists are treated and talked about in music criticism, if they are talked about at all. Musicians including Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram, and countless other women have had their contributions to music overlooked, overshadowed, and omitted, leaving people who want to learn about them to dig their own rabbit holes. Which is how I found out about Ursula in the first place. So perhaps Jan’s plan worked — or perhaps, for whatever reason, he just wanted to hide behind someone else’s name.

 

At the end of our interview, it sounds to me like Jan is confirming that Ursula doesn’t exist, without actually confirming it. And when I asked about the biggest differences and similarities between his work and Ursula’s, he really hammered it home.

Jelinek: Ursula Bogner has enabled me to expand my artistic interests beyond music. Let me put it this way: If I were to draw and sculpt, my work would certainly resemble Ursula Bogner's work.

 

So, I’m left wondering: is there any point to getting to the bottom of this hoax at all?

 

Hebblethwaite: I guess what hoaxes do is they question like, what's authentic? If you can hear a piece of music and if you're hearing the story and it's Ursula Bogner, you hear it differently. You might find emotion, or you might find feeling in it that is not there. Doesn't mean that those feelings you experience if you listened to fake music aren't real, but they're definitely interesting points that get raised. Like what's in the DNA of the actual music? And what do we actually hear because what do we want to hear?

 

So there you have it. You can decide what you’d like to believe about Ursula. At this point, I think she’s a hoax, but there’s a quote that rings true in the booklet for Sonne = Blackbox from  the electronic musician Momus: “Every lie creates a parallel world: the world in which it is true.”