This album attempts to emulate the biographies and psyches of twelve scientists, ten of them real, two of them fictional. All of them visionary and cracked, one way or another.1 Alice Coombs is a Californian particle physicist who (dis)appears in Jonathan Lethem’s 1997 novel "As She Climbed Across the Table". Her problem is falling in love with a scientifically created emptiness called “Lack” while researching it.2 Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince (1841-1890) was a French inventor based in Leeds, West Yorkshire. Around 1881 he began building cameras and experimenting with motion-photography. In 1887, years before Edison and the Lumière Brothers, Le Prince managed to shoot the very first moving images. He mysteriously disappeared, shortly before patenting a new camera, on a train voyage from Dijon to Paris on September 16, 1890.3 Honoré Fragonard (1732-1799) was a French anatomist who began to prepare bodies of animals and men as exhibits for studying purposes in the 1760’s. After six years of serving as a professor at a veterinary school in Paris where he made thousands of anatomical pieces – the so called "écorchés" – he was expelled as a madman. He continued to create those pieces at his home, selling them to members of the aristocracy.4 The eccentric Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz (1783-1840), son of a French merchant and a German mother, was considered a genius and a polymath in the early 19th century, working on botanical, zoological and linguistic problems. He helped deciphering the numeral systems of the ancient Maya civilization, and during a visit to the Kentucky residence of friend John James Audubon he discovered a previously unknown species – the Big-Eared Bat.5 Viktor Grebennikov (1927-2001) was a Russian entomologist and natural historian. His investigations of paranormal phenomena culminated in his 1988 claim to have invented (and used) a levitation platform using chitin shells of dead insects. He was unable to prove his invention, however, due to unexpected time warps and force-fields that allegedly deactivated his camera.6 Maria Cunitz (1610-1664), born in Silesia, was one of the first female astronomers. The book „Urania Propitia“, published in 1650, made her famous – as it provided unseen astronomic tables, new hypotheses and a groundbreaking solution to the notorious Kepler problem. On Venus a crater is named after her.7 Amalie Dietrich (1821-1891) was a German naturalist and botanist. Between 1863 and 1873 she was sent to Australia to do research and find pieces for exhibiting in a planned museum of ethnology; she collected and shipped not only plants and insects, but also the skin, skeletons and skulls of Aborigines back to Germany. It is not entirely clear how she came into possession of some of those body parts.8 Delia Derbyshire (1937-2001) was a British composer and pioneer in electronic music. Her Sixties tape loop experiments at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop remain a cornerstone in the development of the electro-acoustic avant-garde. She returned to making music after having abandoned it around 1973, in the late nineties. After her death 267 reel-to-reel tapes were found in her house. None of that music has been published as yet because of copyright complications.9 Agnes Meyer Driscoll (1889-1971) specialized in cracking codes for the United States Navy. Attacking German and Japanese cipher machines during World War II, she remained the foremost American cryptanalyst until 1949. In 1952 she joined the National Security Agency. She was only the second woman to be inducted in the NSA’s Hall of Honor.10 Jules Bourdais (1835-1915) was a French architect. His project for the Paris Universal Exposition 1889, the vision of a monumental lighthouse, a “sun-tower” supposed to illuminate Paris, failed gloriously. It was another tower that was finally built instead – by an engineer called Gustave Eiffel.11 Johann Friedrich Meckel, the Younger (1781-1833) was a German professor of pathological anatomy who specialized in the study of physical abnormities. He obeyed his father’s wish to be skeletonized by his son, and Meckel dutifully incorporated his dad’s remains into his collection of anatomical specimens. A lethal genetic disorder is named after him: the Meckel syndrome.12 Konrad appears in Thomas Bernhard’s novel “Das Kalkwerk” as a self-proclaimed private scholar, researching linguistics, sounds and noises. He is also a wife murderer.