b. April 15, 1941
d. June, 2005
MANDALA (1968)
16mm, color, sound, 3.5m
“The film consists of abstract animation of mandala patterns with a classic guitar sound track.” (PDS, Film-makers’ Cooperative catalog No. 6 (1975))
MEDITATION (1968)
16mm, color, sound, 5m
“The film consists of single frame flashes of psychedelic mandala and moire pattern in time to an electronic music track by Mickie Zekley.” (PDS, Film-makers’ Cooperative catalog No. 6 (1975))
“DUTCH” (1968)
16mm, color, sound, 10m
“This film was made in a remote region of the Sierra Nevada. Dutch is an old man who camps there every summer and the film portrays his activities and the setting. It includes a lot of mountain scenery and some cloud time lapse photography. The sound track consists of the old man talking and playing harmonica.” (PDS, Film-makers’ Cooperative catalog No. 6 (1975))
POTPOURRI (1968)
16mm, bw, sound, 8.5m
“This film includes the psychedelic drawing of seven artists whose work blends and grows so that each separate personality is lost as such in the film and the final product is new and somewhat foreign to each artist. Combined with an equally organic multi-layered sound track the film conveys some of the feeling of a psychedelic experience. A great deal of the drawing in the film was done under the influence of LSD.” (PDS, Film-makers’ Cooperative catalog No. 6 (1975))
BITS (1968)
16mm, color, sound, 5m
“The film consists of one, two, or three frame durations of greatly varied pictorial material with an equally ‘fragmented’ sound track. Each time the film is viewed, a different combination of frames is ‘registered’ in the mind, and it never seems like the same film. Using a different background sound also changes the impact of the film greatly.” (PDS, Film-makers’ Cooperative catalog No. 6 (1975))
YIN-YANG (1968)
16mm, color, sound, 4m
“Music by Mickie Zekley. A psychedelic time-painting using positive, negative, and black light illuminated alternating frames, moving to the beat of a steel guitar blues music track.” (probably PDS, 1972 Creative Film Society catalog)
PULSE (1969)
16mm, bw, sound, 9.5m
“This film is entirely animated and consists of over 6000 meticulously executed, often detailed, drawings. Two artists spent over a year of full-time work to complete the task. Some of the work was done under the influence of LSD. The film contains abstract as well as representational elements. The sound track is a synthesis of sounds from an extreme variety of sources (bird calls, a tea kettle, voice, many instruments, pure electronic sounds, etc., etc., etc.)” (PDS, Film-makers’ Cooperative catalog No. 6 (1975))
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
My overwhelming impression is that Peter D. Spoecker seems to have been the key creator of the above films, with occasional collaboration, possibly from one or more of the friends he had also worked with on some of his psychedelic posters. “B.Y.M. Enterprises”/”B.Y.M. Productions” seems to be the name he used exclusively for the sale of his posters/prints and the production of these films, moving on to other projects by 1970. He clearly had an interesting life, born in Germany in the middle of the War, moving to US when he was a child, eventually finding himself in grad school at UC Berkeley, where his experimentation with LSD, peyote, and pot fueled his artistic endeavors (primarily drawing at that time). His early success in selling prints/posters of his psychedelic drawings led to him dropping out of school and making it a full-time gig, traveling eventually around the country to sell these works until the bottom dropped quite suddenly out of the business with the rapidly waning interest in psychedelia at the close of the 1960s. It was during this time he also produced the 16mm experimental films that were my own entry into awareness about him. He continued making art his entire life, from paintings (including two-sided glass paintings) to acrylic sculpture, and eventually to computer art. He also had an unusual music career, building his own synthesizer setup and releasing several cassettes of New Age-ish synthesizer music. In later years, he embraced the didgeridoo with the same characteristic obsessiveness that seems to have marked all of his endeavors, spending many years producing them for sale, teaching, performing, and even writing and presenting about the didgeridoo. He was a lifelong enthusiast for out-of-the-way natural landscapes, and was an extensive hiker and climber, also taking thousands of photographs of natural landscapes he encountered, with a particular emphasis on abstract forms. He died in June 2005 in a hiking accident, and was found June 26, though he could have died anytime in the 3-4 weeks prior. According to his brother Robert, “He was found in a lake at 11000 feet altitude in the High Sierras with his backpack on, his camera in a chest pack that he made himself and was wearing his snow shoes. No other reason than accidental drowning was found by the medical examiner. With the extremely cold water and all he was wearing I suspect that he just could not get out of the lake after falling in.”
I wrote the above based on bits and pieces taken from his website, as biographical information on Spoecker is only out there in fragmentary form. Since his website (didgeridoings.com) has been defunct for some time, I also thought it would be nice to offer a snapshot of his biography from that site here, thanks to the Internet Wayback Machine.
LIGHTSTRUCK 