Fischinger was born in Germany in 1900. An engineer and draftsman by trade, he co-owned an animation company in Munich by age 22, producing a variety of experimental films. His early artistic goal was to combine two of his great passions, music and the graphic arts. To this end, he experimented with photographing multiple forms — melting wax, cardboard cutouts, swirling liquids. According to Fischinger historian William Moritz, he devised "a machine that would slice very thin layers from a prepared block of wax, with a camera synchronized to take one frame of the remaining surface of the block.
Any kind of image could be built into the wax block — a circle getting smaller would be a simple cone, for example." Later he would create a Technicolor-style camera for Bela Gaspar that he would utilize in his early color films. Fischinger's technical and creative efforts were applied, along with scores from Bach and Beethoven, to a hitherto unseen abstract art form known as "visual music." A long-overdue reassessment of his achievement in this area is now possible, thanks to this thrilling seven-film compilation (the first of a projected series) that samples his work from 1927 through 1947.