Tag: synth

[Interview] Suzanne Ciani

Suzanne Ciani is a five-time Grammy award nominated composer, electronic music pioneer, and neo-classical recording artist whose work has been featured in countless commercials, video games, and feature films. A self-taught pianist with classical music training from The Longy School of Music and Wellesley College, Suzanne discovered electronic music in the late 60s and quickly became immersed in the worlds of sound synthesis and computer music. With her instrument of choice, the Buchla modular synthesizer, Suzanne revolutionized the advertising industry, and her sounds were featured in spots for General Electric, Sunkist, Clairol, and AT&T, amongst many others. Perhaps her most famous piece, the Coca-Cola “Pop n’ Pour” sound effect, was featured in hundreds of Coca-Cola commercials throughout the 70s and 80s. In the 90s, Suzanne transitioned from synthesizers back to the piano and formed her own record label, Seventh Wave. She’s been recognized as Keyboard Magazine’s “New Age Keyboardist of the Year,” provided the voice and sounds for Bally’s groundbreaking Xenon pinball machine, played concerts all over the globe, and carved out a niche as one of the most creatively successful female composers in the world. Her most recent release, Live Quadraphonic, is a live recording of Suzanne’s first solo Buchla performance in 40 years, released in quadraphonic sound on 180g vinyl and includes a hardware decoder to decode two channels of audio from the vinyl disc back to the four-channel recording, and can be purchased here. Interview by René Kladzyk, a NYC-based musician, perfumer and geographer who performs under the moniker Ziemba. Her elemental orientation is decidedly watery these days.

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My entrypoint to your work was through Seven Waves, which I imagine is the case for a lot of your listeners, so I’m wondering if you can tell me about the conceptualization and creation of that record. Seven Waves was my first album, and I had waited years to do it because I had to be in a position to afford to make it. By the time I got there, my vocabulary had changed. I had stopped doing pure Buchla, and I was frustrated that the public didn’t understand the music technology. The whole analog thing was a little too abstract. My roots were classical, so without much thought process what happened naturally with Seven Waves was that I synthesized my classical roots with my technological background, my ten years working with the Buchla. That’s the vocabulary of that album: it’s romantic and melodic. I wanted to make technology sensual because I was making the music for myself and I wanted to feel relaxed, calm, happy and safe, and to create an immersive space that I could just be in. It took two years, partly because I could only work on it on weekends, and partly because it was expensive, and I had to do things as I could afford them. I call the compositions waves, because each piece starts slowly and builds to a climax and then recedes in the shape of wave. I made waves on the Buchla of course, and each wave had a special personality for the piece. In the end I connected all the pieces so that they flowed in and out of the waves as one long uninterrupted piece. It was entirely electronic, and I thought of each of the electronic instruments as musicians in a way, so I credit every instrument– Every instrument! (laughing) Every instrument, including reverb and things like that, because it was all an essential part of the sound. I remember that in the early pieces, the notes were entered in a Roland MC4 or an MC8, do you know that? I don’t. Well, almost all of the music was written out, and for each note you had to put in a number for the pitch, a number for the duration, and a number for the volume. A lot of it was a very painstaking, and some of it was just flourishes where you create a gesture in the moment. I had a commercial music business by then, and my business partner was named Mitch Farber. Mitch was this wonderful guy, a jazz arranger and a great go-to guy for doing layouts. I would write out the music on my piano, but we needed a layout on score paper because there was so much information to enter. All these numbers had to go beside every note. He did the layouts of the score in the music paper, and I have those scores in a book. It’s not the type of score where you could perform it per se because…well I guess you could– Would you ever consider doing something like an orchestral Seven Waves performance? It could be orchestrated. Both in the context of Seven Waves but also more broadly, so much of the symbolic and poetic language around you is watery and associated with waves. Has your elemental orientation shifted at all over time? Do you think about the current work that you’re doing with quadraphonic Buchla in a similar type of symbolic language? It’s a different vocabulary, but the waves are there. My concerts always start with the waves because that’s where I’m comfortable, and the music rises out of the waves. That’s always been my approach. So the waves still figure in my work, though I don’t approach performance classically, the way I did with Seven Waves. It’s still note and pitch based, but much more loosely. I think of it more as jazz than classical: it’s more improvisational and in the moment, working with the machine and getting the feedback from the machine. As I do these performances, certain things start to settle and become familiar, but the experience is always a little bit unexpected. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do. Do you have any guiding intentions or rules for how you approach these more improvisational performances you’ve been doing recently? When I came back to this genre, this idea, I consulted a paper that I wrote 40 years ago. I tried to track down that paper on the internet, actually. You referenced it in an interview, and I was like, “I wanna read that!” Oh yeah? It’s in the Finders Keepers LP liner notes, for The Buchla Concerts 1975. Andy Votel, who published it, included the paper.

Suzanne has kindly shared this paper, which she calls The Buchla Cookbook, with us. This is the first time this paper has been made available online.

So I use the same sequences that I used in the 70s: four 16-stage sequences. I also still use a lot of the techniques that I developed over my years of playing the Buchla. One of the things that I think is so special about the quadraphonic performances you’re doing is how spatially specific they are. I’m wondering if you can describe the space you’re trying to create with these performances in non-musical terms? Like, what does it look like to you, or feel like, or smell like… Spatial control was always part of the Buchla, so from the beginning we worked in both quadraphonic space and imaginary space. You could create big, small, close, far away, all that, as part of the music. It’s different from a lot of spatial manipulations nowadays, where it’s mapped onto the music in post-production. The Buchla actually generates spatial characteristics, so it’s rhythmically in sync with the music. I use different kinds of space for different kinds of things, instinctively–sometimes it’s a continuous space, sometimes it’s a discrete space, jumping around in a different rhythm. And it’s alive. Without the space there’s nothing, because the output of this type of machine is essentially monophonic. Stereo was fabricated to spread things out over a span; it wasn’t meant to move sound. Quadraphonic in electronic language is meant to be a parameter, like pitch and volume and rhythm, so it’s really part of the music. It’s all about the motion of it– It’s all about the motion. I always say that, with the Buchla, it’s not about the sound, but the way the sound moves. And Don knew that. We weren’t trying to imitate a sound or make an amazing sound and then play it on a keyboard. The sound was a byproduct of the way it could move. So you have voltage control, with which you could move the sound quickly, slowly, whatever, and the sound changes with the movement. That was something I was really struck by when I saw you perform in New York. I think I told you after the show that it felt like an ecosystem. The nature of how it was alive with so many different characters, and the chaos in it–it felt very organic to me. I’m curious what some of your nonmusical creative influences are. Well, I have art roots. My sister is a visual artist, and I grew up in the art world. My first projects were with sculptors: Harold Paris, Ron Mallory, Joseph Robinson. Maybe people you don’t know, but Ron worked in mercury, and we did a film called Lixiviation, which then became the title of the album that Finders Keepers released— Oh, I heard the album but didn’t know it was a film soundtrack. Yeah, that’s where it came from. I’ve also worked with dancers. Nature and the sea are very big inspirations. One of my spiritual mentors was a photographer, Ilse Bing, who was from Germany. I met her when she was in her 80’s and I was in my 30s. She was a mentor to you? She was, because she was a true artist, and she worked in technology. She was called the “Queen of the Leica” and I’m the “Diva of the Diode.” She was a brilliant woman who worked in a man’s world and had this incredible edge. She discovered solarization before Man Ray, and she never got credit for it. She had a very successful career, and she was somebody that I could talk to about my work. She was an intellectual, and she always would say, “Tell me, tell me about your work!” I always wanted to talk about my boyfriends, but she kept me focused. So I had such an identification with her, as you do with a mentor. Who knows what mentoring is, or how that happens. She just was. It’s who she was. It just happened naturally? Yes, it happened naturally. I collect her work, so I have a huge collection of her photographs.  I collected them before I even knew her. When she was 60 she stopped photographing, and it was a total crisis for me, because I was young and idealistic. I thought, “How can you?” I didn’t understand, because I saw myself as somebody who was going to go forever in my art. What I’ve realized in maturity was that she didn’t stop her art, she just shifted gears, kind of like the way I shift gears. There might be people who are disappointed that I’m not playing the piano right now, and making my romantic music, but I’m doing what I do! That’s actually something that I wanted to ask you about. Can we talk about love a little bit? Sure. I don’t think I know anything about it, but sure. Well, there’s so much romance and sensuality in so much of your work, but–this was the trickiest question for me to formulate. I wanted to talk to you about love as a concept, but also romantic music and the different ways of expressing it, and whether with the compositional approach you have now, you’re intentionally moving away from a romantic expression. Well, yes! I think when you’re young and you have all those hormones, and you’re into that trajectory of finding your prince and all that, that’s a certain energy system. It’s wonderful, but it doesn’t last forever. Like the planet Venus ideological approach. Right! And what you find out, or what I found out as I was older, is that I love, but I don’t love in that focused, one person or one place kind of way. It’s more open now. There’s still love, but it doesn’t have to be that–what is that–the symbolic or male/female… Movie love? Movie love! (laughing) I love romcoms. I love the whole idea of love, and my favorite guy, what’s his name? The British guy that does all the… Colin Firth? No, the British guy that does all the romantic comedies. Hugh Grant? Yes! I love Hugh Grant, and I don’t know why! Because he doesn’t fit any of my images of an ideal. I just like his spirit, I guess. So yeah, I did have a divorce and it was a bit of a crisis because I had the perfect marriage in a way. It really was the crystallization of the utter total fantasy of love. Then when it broke, it was devastating. At the same time, I think I outgrew that idea of love. So I’m happy, I’m not looking for anything, and I think I found it! (laughing) And I love it all. I think it’s wonderful when you’re young. It’s a rough ride–it can work synchronously, sometimes perfectly, but most of the time it’s filled with illusion and bumps. But it’s worth it. It is worth it. If I can ask one last thing, I was wondering if you have any advice you’d like to offer to women working in the music industry, or even in the art world. We’re on the crest of a wave right now, and it’s a very important historic time for us. I haven’t seen this type of energy since the 60s, when we had another crest of the wave. Everything is waves. So now that we’re on the crest, I say don’t forget. Go with it, be yourself, take your rightful place. If you’re looking for validation as an artist, the only authentic place to start is with yourself. You must meet your own standards of excellence, because no one outside yourself can corroborate your artistic message. Women have trouble with self confidence because they’ve been trained to believe themselves to be lesser. It’s a very insidious thing. You have to remind yourself that you’re never less than. We also need to learn how to respect other women. Because women don’t even respect women. I think women are trained to turn on each other on a dime, and are very competitive with each other in ways that aren’t necessarily helpful. But you know why? It’s because we’re playing in a different playing field. We used to be competing with men, and we were trying to get an edge there. We’re not doing that anymore.  We’re competing with each other instead of with men; and we’re not trying to take over a man’s world, we’re creating our own world. It’s wonderful; it will be a world equal to the man’s world, and different. We’ll support each other; we just need to respect the talents and the abilities of women, and to respect ourselves also. We’re having a very important and formative moment right now. We’re making a shift amongst ourselves and in the world.

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Thanks to Suzanne Ciani, René Kladzyk, Rachel Aiello, and Matt Johnstone for facilitating this interview. Text has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Piero Milesi & Daniel Bacalov – La Camera Astratta, 1989

You may remember Piero Milesi from his excellent The Nuclear Observatory of Mr. Nanof (hi Adam, thanks again)–here he’s in collaboration with Daniel Bacalov, another linchpin of Italian minimalism from whom we’ll definitely be hearing more in the future. The two made La Camera Astratta as a score for a large-scale dance and performance piece, also referred to as a “video opera” by Studio Azzurro and Giorgio Barberio Corsetti (you can see some excerpts here). Though the record was released in 1989, it looks as if the score and the piece itself were both made in 1987. The score is most memorable for its use of samples, which are often treated as percussion: water splashing, a camera snap, gasps, exhales, shushes, shouts, and sighs. At times it becomes difficult to distinguish between sample and instrument: “Camera 1 Parte” is perforated by what sounds like crickets but (I’m pretty sure) is some kind of percussion; regardless, it blankets the song in a hushed evening pastorality. Elsewhere, the dry, blunt avant-gardism of “Sequenza Ragazze 1 Parte” might appeal to Meredith Monk fans; and personal favorite “Acqua” is deeply playful (despite being used to accompany some pretty anxious moments in the performance piece)–a calypso-esque percussive backbone punctuated by bathtub splashes, camera snaps, a cash register bell, worked up into nine frothy minutes. Though La Camera Astratta might seem deceptively academic upon first listen, it opens up with increasing generosity, revealing something deeply thoughtful, meditative, and even joyful.

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Ariel Kalma & Richard Tinti – Osmose, 1978

From the liner notes:
“When forest and music meet. Richard Tinti travelled to Borneo and recorded the sound of the forest. When Ariel Kalma listened to it, he could hear his melodies sung by the birds, even sometimes in the very keys he uses… Natural harmony and inspiration seems to flow from the same spring. Thus began the studio work: to tune, record, mix the different element together; to the animals and atmosphere of the jungle, answered generators, flutes, saxophones, bird-calls, synthesizers, organs. Some surprises also occurred, like this fly coming down to the mic at the end of “Planet-Air” … Mixed at the Groupe of Research in Music (GRM), a department of French National Audiovisual Institute (INA).”
Deep, densely psychedelic synth experiments. At times it’s difficult to distinguish between insects and electronics, and difficult to tell whether the natural cadence of bird song has been looped to sync with synthetic rhythms or vice versa. Big harmonium, reverb-soaked flute, circular breathing saxophone, long delays, drum machines, flanged keyboards, and plenty of synth, alongside birds, forest sounds, and war drums. Mostly voiceless, with the exception of the stark and heavy “Osmose Chant.” Clever play with space and distance, with the music sometimes pulling back into the distance in a way that allows room tone (or even unintended noises, such as the aforementioned fly on the mic, which makes several appearances) to become a kind of third musical actor. The whole thing feels like a very well-executed joke about what “ambient music” is. Try it with good speakers, if you can. Tracks 1-6 originally comprised Disc A of the 1978 double LP split with Ariel Kalma and Richard Tinti, with the second disc comprised of Tinti’s tracks (if anyone has these and would be willing to share, I’d love to hear them). Disc A was later rereleased in 2006 with two additional unreleased tracks that were recorded at the same time, credited as just to Ariel Kalma. While it’s just these Disc A tracks that I’m sharing today, given that these were made in collaboration with Tinti and with the aid of his field recordings (recorded on a Nagra recorder), I’m using the original credits. (I’m particularly fond of the closing unreleased track, “Orguitar Soir,” which is one of the more mellow moments in the collection: just gentle guitar plucking and a keyboard drone tucked into forest sounds.)

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Susan – Do You Believe In Mazik, 1980

Classic favorite. A singer, actress, model, and TV personality, Susan (Suzan Nozaki) was born in Japan to a Japanese mother and a French-American father, and as a teenager worked widely in commercials, radio, theater, and voiceover. This was the first of two records she released on Sony with a dream team: production, arrangement, and drums by Yukihiro Takahashi, co-production and guitar by Kenji Ohmura, programing by Hideki Matsutake, bass by Haruomi Hosono, keyboards by Ryuichi Sakamoto, cover photo by Masayoshi Sukita, etc. It is, as you might imagine from its context, a raucous, scronky, brilliant pop record. The 60’s referentiality shows up not just in the title track, a Lovin’ Spoonful cover, but also in the surf and garage rock sensibility of the songwriting (“24,000回のキッス,” “Dream Of You”) and the proclivity towards psychy vocal processing–though of course the overall texture and programming speak very loudly to 1980. The record’s best moments evidence both decades simultaneously: “Ah! Soka” flits between dry electro synth verses and choruses of reverb-soaked psychy guitar pop. My favorite is closer “Screamer,” with a very YMO churning and whirring percussive backbone underneath warped, spacious vocal layering–at almost seven minutes long, by the time it’s over I always wish it would keep rolling for a few more minutes. Still, nothing ever feels gimmicky or formulaic–there are too many thoughtful details for that. I hope you love this as much as I do!
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[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 24

Here’s my latest episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio. Breezy, summery synth pop and light funk, with a Bill Nelson alias, Sally Oldfield, a Bollywood moment, and a favorite from that World Standard record we all love. You can download an mp3 version here.

Tracklist: 1. Irv Teibel – Country Stream 2. Sally Oldfield – Mirrors 3. Hiroshi Satoh – Akanegumo-No Machi 4. Jacob Desvarieux – Emotion 5. A.R. Rahman, Chitra Sivaraman, Karthik – Nenthukitten 6. Orchestra Arcana – The Whole City Between Us 7. Fernanda Abreu – Você Prá Mim 8. Izumi Kobayashi – Coffee Rumba 9. Jah Wobble – Blowout 10. Yumi Matsutoya – 影になって (We’re All Free) 11. Di Melo – Se O Mundo Acabasse En Mel 12. Yasunori Soryo & Jim Rocks – Valley 13. Tim Maia – Nossa História De Amor 14. Patrick O’Hearn – Forever The Optimist 15. World Standard – 水夫たちの歌声 16. Yungchen Lhamo – Ngak Pai Metog

John Martyn – Piece By Piece, 1986

Edit: At the time of originally sharing this post, I was unaware that John Martyn had a history of perpetrating domestic abuse. I recognize the implications of embracing his work in light of that, and will do my best in the future to be more thorough in my research on the artists I write about! —

Piece By Piece is not for everyone. But what makes it such an exemplary slice of sophisti-pop, in my opinion, is that every time John Martyn toes the aesthetic line (is this too much saxophone? does this sound like late night lonely hearts suburban radio? are these lyrics actually just bad?), he redeems himself tenfold with startlingly gorgeous instrumentation and perfectly plump, high-gloss production. It continues to surprise after repeat listens, and is extra generous in headphones.

Backing up, though–for the unfamiliar, John Martyn was a British musician and songwriter who initially came up as a precocious folk scene giant but, as is well-evidenced here, branched out into much more exploratory territory. His body of work is as big as it is diverse, so much so that I still haven’t really wrapped my head around it. It’s been suggested that it was this very proclivity towards experimentation that kept him just shy of the mainstream success that he clearly deserved. He sadly passed away in 2009. He was a truly brilliant guitarist, he loved fretless bass, and his inimitable voice could turn from wistful sweet to inhuman growling on a dime. While Piece By Piece might be an odd place to jump into his very rewarding discography, I think it’s appropriate in its own way. “Angeline,” for example, is exemplary of Martyn’s particular breed of strangeness: at first it seems like a Toyota dad ballad, but its repeating out-of-sync broken drum sample acts as a reminder that there’s got to be more, and sure enough, the “chorus”–which isn’t really a chorus at all–breaks open so pleasingly into gorgeous washes of reverb in which the vocals disappear into dissonant synth and vice versa. Oh, and for the fretless bass die-hards, it’s all over the record in spades. A deep purple and navy blue world of a record that feels so good to live in for 41 minutes: moody, wickedly smart sophisti-pop, with more and more to say for itself at every turn. Ideal night-time driving music.

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Laura Allan – Reflections, 1980

Pristine, jewel toned celestial new age from personal hero Laura Allan, who, in addition to being a gifted songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and singer, also made instruments for the likes of Joni Mitchell and David Crosby. Allan sadly passed away in 2008 after a six month battle with cancer. I’ve been enjoying reading through threads of comments written by those who knew and loved her:
Laura Allan was a true talent, could pick up any instrument and play it, and had a voice that only an angel would dare to have. Getting ready for our 40th high school reunion, I saw Laura’s name on the list. I remembered in an instant her mesmerizing face as she played her kalimba out on the grass where we all hung out at lunch. Inspired, I went out and bought one which I have treasured and still sits on my bookcase. We became friends and she took a bamboo flute which I had with holes punched in some of the strangest places (no wonder it wouldn’t play) and she taped up the ones that shouldn’t be there until it found its voice. Laura was a very different and enchantingly beautiful friend who made a lasting impression on me.
Reflections is exactly as it should be, veering in between lyrical, devotional folk (“As I Am”) and more cosmic new age spirals (“Nicasio”). Though there are synth lines tucked in around the edges, Allan’s zither takes center stage, and as such there’s an acoustic roughness to this record that I love. I also love the reverb quality, particularly that on Allan’s vocals. Featuring Paul Horn on flute (he really goes off in “Passage”), Steve Halpern executive production, and Geoffrey Chandler on synth (you may know him from his excellent Starscapes, released the same year). Dappled with sunlight and pale green, Reflections is prime summer new age. Ideal for fans of Dorothy Carter and David Casper. Thank you Andy for the reminder about this!

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[Interview] Todd Barton

Todd Barton is an accomplished composer and musician whose lifelong investigation into sound has taken many forms. He has built Renaissance musical instruments, lectured on the musical notation of the Middle Ages, and written numerous scores for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, where he was Resident Composer for over 40 years. His DNA-derived Genome Music has been the subject of numerous articles and exhibitions, and he has released several albums of Zen Shakuhachi meditation music. Since 1979, he has been composing and performing works for analog synthesizer, and is currently a consulting artist for Buchla USA. He’s a generous and dedicated educator, and in recent years has contributed a wealth of knowledge about Buchla, Serge, Hordijk and Haken synthesizers to various online platforms. Among his discoveries is the Krell Patch, named for the self-generating circuits that Bebe and Louis Barron created for the 1956 film Forbidden Planet. In the early 80s, Barton began a collaboration with author Ursula K. Le Guin that became the recently reissued Music and Poetry of the Kesh, a “speculative music” for the fictional peoples of the 1985 novel Always Coming Home. In addition to Le Guin, Barton’s collaborators include Anthony Braxton, Zakir Hussein, William Stafford, and Lawson Fusao Inada, and his compositions have been performed by the KRONOS Quartet, Oregon Symphony Orchestra, San Jose Chamber Orchestra, and the Shasta Taiko, among others. Interview by Peter Harkawik, a Los Angeles based artist working in sculpture and photography.

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Hi Todd, thanks for being here! To start, where are you, and what are you working on these days? Hi! I’m in my studio in Oregon. I have a solo Buchla Easel performance coming up at Modular 8 in Portland on June 10, and I’ll be performing at The Tank in Colorado in the Fall. I just finished a composition for Tone Science Module 2, and now I’m working on a collaboration with UK painter Edward Ball. The rest of my time is spent teaching modular synthesis and exploring sound in the studio. Can you tell me a little bit about your process for making an album like Music from the Studio? I get the sense that it was culled from a larger assortment of recordings. Good intuition! I actually made it years ago for immediate friends and family, including my grandkids. They had heard my work through the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and when I’d play them the more serious, more abstract electronic work, they’d nod and say, “Yeah, that’s cool.” (laughs) I wanted to make something more accessible for them. It’s all the Music Easel or Buchla 100 or 200 series, and there might be one on there that’s made with the Haken Continuum. How does the specific cultural history of the Buchla factor into your work? I’m thinking of the Tape Music Center, Experiments in Art and Technology, and the ethos of the 1960’s. Is it kind of baked into the instrument? Absolutely. Don Buchla created the 100 system for Morton Subotnick at the Tape Music Center. His approach to synthesis, which was so different from Moog on the East coast, is immediately evident to anyone who has ever touched a Buchla instrument. One of my favorite quotes from David Tudor is something like, “I don’t try to make the synthesizer do what I want it to do, I listen to what it wants to tell me.” If you listen to a Buchla, it will start rewiring your synapses. How has making electronic music changed since you first started working with synthesizers? The person who turned me onto the Buchla back in the 70s was a guy named Douglas Leedy. His major album is Entropical Paradise which was done on a Buchla. He popped in and out of Tape Music Center, so there’s one degree of separation there. I bought my first synth from Serge Tcherepnin in Haight-Ashbury in 1979. For the first 10 years it was a Serge and a Roland Jupiter-8. By 1985, the Yamaha DX7 and the Korg M1 had come out, and everyone went digital. Sure, Stockhausen, Subotnick, lots of folks had taken the analogue synthesizer to great heights, but I felt there was more to learn. I was raising my hand and saying, “Wait! We haven’t found the edge of analog synthesis yet!” People looked at me like I was the village idiot. They took pity on me and gave me their analog gear, and by the mid-80’s, I had a wonderful collection to experiment with. Now we’ve come full circle and everyone’s getting back into analog. Eurorack is taking off. Morton Subotnick is having a great second act, touring all over the world with both older and newer work. People are starting to push the analog envelope further, and doing it through the lens of all the genres of music that have cropped up since 1980—hip hop, dub, trance, etc. As a new generation of musicians discover the Buchla, what do you see as your role? Don Buchla created a musical instrument that he said had no “preconceived ideas.” He wanted people to figure out how they wanted to interface with it. You see that with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Alessandro Cortini—they’re bringing their own voice to the palette. For my part, I’m obsessed with sound, with the “Buchla Paradigm.” Every day I explore with sound in the studio. Since I retired from the Shakespeare Festival, I’ve been making little videos, putting them online, sharing my discoveries and hoping people take them to places I never considered. A friend of mine told me that her first boombox came with a CD of music by Paul Lansky, as a demonstration of the burgeoning potential of the CD format. I thought that was funny at the time, but now it strikes me that all electronic music is in a sense a kind of demonstration. How do you draw the line between the music you make, say, for the purpose of showing off the capabilities of the Buchla, to what is considered a song? Well, for me, demos are demos. If I’m exploring sound, I’ll stumble onto something with one of these synthesizers, be it a Serge, a Buchla or a Hordijk, and I’ll think, “Oh that’s interesting,” and I’ll make a demo of it. Sometimes I’ll do a voiceover and say, “Here, let’s patch this together,” or, “Here’s what it does, these are the knobs you want to explore first, but feel free to take it further.” Sometimes the demo will just be the camera on my hands on the synthesizer, but I’m still exploring some specific aspect, and each aspect becomes another arrow in my compositional quiver. The word compose is Latin for “to put together.” When I compose, there’s definitely intent there. Sometimes the structure presents itself as you’re sculpting the sounds. I might say, “Well, what if I start here, and then go towards this.” I might change a few things on the way there, but the process creates the form. I grew up performing acoustic music and composing for string quartets, small ensembles, and orchestras. Everything was written out. When I’d write a note, it would tell a musician what fingers to put down on their instrument, how loud to play it, etc. But when I started composing electronic music, I was composing from the perspective of the sound, not the musician. I was creating a sound that wasn’t, say, an oboe, or a clarinet. It might have some sonic gesture, some glitch or grit in it that’s not even possible on an acoustic instrument. Composing electronic music is a completely different ballgame because you’re creating at a granular level, making up the instruments as you go. A composer can use the twelve-tone system in a serial way or in a more harmonic, melodic, modular way, but it’s still just 12 notes. A synthesizer can get everything in-between, all the bizarre timbres and tone colors of your imagination. This touches on something I saw recently in a documentary about Canadian composer Martin Bartlett. He spoke about the potential for electronic music to erase the distinction between composer and performer, presumably because the composition process can be done by way of patching in real time. Is this how you think about performing with a synthesizer—“composing” for an audience? Absolutely. It goes all the way back to Stockhausen, the idea that a musician can actually “hold” sound, create sound from nothing. I create compositions that end up on CDs, cassettes, or LPs, and often the bulk of that comes from improvisation, and I might layer it, remix it, tweak it a lot. Other times, when I do a performance, let’s say for 30 minutes, I feel that I’m performing a composition, even though it is completely free improvisation. The Buchla Music Easel has all these beautiful colored sliders, switches, knobs. Sometimes before I start I’ll have a ten year old come up from the audience and move everything around. Then I turn the volume knob up, and start from there. I follow that sound to a composition, to an improvisation. You did a project in 1997 where you composed a roughly one minute piece every day for a month, then released it to CD and the web. In the liner notes, you encourage the listener to “reprogram” the CD by listening out of sequence. Is this kind of interactive listening something you’ve explored further? I don’t know that I’ve explored that since. This was the 90’s, so the idea was kind of ”make your own playlist.” In a way, it was an excuse to use every synthesizer in my studio, even the neglected ones. I woke up every morning and I had until 10 o’clock to finish the piece, and then I would put it online. For each synth, I had to re-learn or re-figure out what it was telling me, and go with it. My first experience with electronic music was probably in the late 90s, early 2000’s. I remember going to noise shows, where the setup was almost always a solitary person on the floor surrounded by electronics that were being fiddled with. Do you think electronic music is prone to this kind of relationship, where a performer is in a sense in dialogue with themselves or their own “feedback loop,” or can it be more of a social process? I think it depends a lot on the venue. I do Easel duets regularly with my colleague, Bruce Bayard. A few years ago, I got four performers together. That was a bit of an homage to the Electric Weasel Ensemble, which was Don Buchla, Allen Strange, Pat Strange, Steve Ruppenthal, and David Morse. Those five were actually the first to get Easels. When I was in Berlin in October I did a little talk and a solo set, and then afterwards there was a jam with six other synthesists. Almost every city now has a synth meet. LA has Modular on the Spot. I think they meet in those big drainage ditches that don’t have water in them. We call that “the river.” Yes! I hear they play at different outdoor spots all over LA. They’re mostly solo artists, but they have a community. I think the solo paradigm is equally valid. I’ve been plenty of places where there’s just one person on the floor surrounded by DIY stuff, foot pedals, doing their thing. I’ve been reading about Terry Riley’s 1958 improvisations with Pauline Oliveros, about how the rule was that they wouldn’t speak before or during the session, only after. It’s interesting because my first exposure to minimalist music was in the context of these very tight, very contained performances and recordings. As I learn more, I’m finding out about the social history, connections to Stuart Brand, things like the Homebrew Computer Club, that history of California experimentation. These were also jam sessions. You know, Don Buchla created speaker arrays and mixers for the Grateful Dead, for processing their sound. Wow, really? Yeah. And the other person doing that was John Meyer. His speakers are the gold standard these days. He was working with Don. Do you think about the aesthetic experience a musician has with an instrument, especially one like the Music Easel or the Continuum? I don’t mean the look of performing with it, but the personal experience of the musician. I think about timbre and wanting to, what I’d call, “follow the sound.” If I’m doing an improvisation or I’m composing notes on paper, there’s a continual feedback to the sounds that are happening. I try to guide or sculpt the sound into something new, or at least new to me, and the feedback keeps going. Sometimes I try to sculpt it in one way, and it goes in another, and I think, “Oh, that’s interesting.” I come from a wind instrument background. I grew up playing trumpet, and I’ve studied shakuhachi for 30 years now. The gestures I make, have made my whole life, are connected to breath. If you really practice, you can hold long notes on the trumpet, but eventually the breath runs out. The oscillator on the Easel will keep going as long as there’s electricity. I just finished a piece that I sent off to the UK for a compilation. It’s full of long, washy, drone sounds, with harmonic timbres that go from very consonant or thin, to very dense and complex. Those shifts are probably not unlike a slow breath. I’m noticing, especially on an album like Analog Horizonings, the influence of Indian classical music. I was exposed a lot as a teenager to Indian music, ragas, and I personally played tamboor in some sessions, so it’s an influence for sure. I’ve done some meditation music too. My friend who plays sitar, Russ Appleyard, studied and toured in India for years. He and I also at one point in our development locked into didgeridoos. There were a few years there where that was just it. There were stories about aboriginal cultures that would play didgeridoo from sunset to sunrise. I remember we got about three hours once. It was mind-altering. I’ve been listening to an excerpt of your extraordinarily beautiful tape from 1986 called I/Shi-Ho: Meditation Environments. Can you talk a little bit about this piece? Are all the sounds on this tape made with a synthesizer or are there vocal samples as well? I think I was influenced a little bit by Brian Eno’s Music for Airports and things like that. I didn’t have much technology at that point. The samples are actually (laughs) either an 8-bit Ensoniq Mirage, or maybe a Korg Wavestation. Pretty primitive compared to today. Maybe a Roland Jupiter-8 made it on there for a drone or washy thing. I was probably using the first iteration of a software DAW called Cakewalk. Version 1! The title came from the I Ching. I don’t know anything about making music, but I have accidentally built some sculptures that turned out to be musical. It strikes me that there’s a great many reasons to make your own musical instrument: achieving a different sound, actualizing a kind of philosophy or worldview, producing visual spectacle, or just for ergonomic reasons. Can you talk about the instruments that were made for Music and Poetry of the Kesh? When it comes to instrument building, I was more of a dabbler. I made baroque flutes and trumpet mutes–that’s really a niche there–and renaissance recorders. That informed a part I wrote in Music and Poetry of the Kesh where I described Kesh instruments. Ursula Le Guin and I would bring instruments that we had “found,” in our imagination, from the Kesh culture. I would describe them, and explain how they were built and what sounds they made. Of course, as she was working on the book, I was working on the music–this was from 1983 to 1985. We didn’t have time to build these instruments and beta test them, so I did it all on a Roland Jupiter 8. Once the book was published, people actually started building these instruments, and they ended up sounding like what I had dreamed they would sound like! Since then, I haven’t built any instruments per se, but anything can become an instrument—found metal, found wood. These days, in the electronic world, it’s people with their Arduinos and Raspberry Pis. That’s beyond me. Really? I don’t have a lot of technical experience in that way. I know what a resistor and a capacitor do, but I couldn’t build anything from scratch. I’m a composer and performer fascinated with sound. I have a working knowledge, and I’ve soldered up synthesizer modules, but that doesn’t mean I know exactly what that resistor’s doing when I put it in there. People will cold call or email me with two pages of “Is that plus or minus five volts?” I read it all, and say “I’m sorry! Please contact my friend so-and-so.” You’ve said you’re not interested in producing a traditional score where the timbre would be open to interpretation, but if that’s the case, how do you notate your music? Is there some other format or way of making a score that interests you? Well, there are formats out there. I’m not categorically against scores for electronic music— (The interview is interrupted because Barton finds a black widow spider.) Those are serious. I was bitten once, it was horrible. I had a fever for a month. I think I got it. Where were we? Oh, scores. A score for electronic music, and I’m being totally reductive here, is a graphic score. A score might say, “Start with this curvilinear gesture, play it for 30 seconds, then that’s followed by this series of plots,” etc. There’s a huge history of that from the 60s on, with some really amazing scores out there, but it presupposes you’ve got musicians who have worked in an improvisational way and are open, imaginative, and creative about how to interpret it. Sarah Belle Reid, who teaches at CalArts, started a score project called The Postcard Project (which was inspired, in part, by James Tenney’s Postal Pieces). She sent me a postcard of a graphic score, and I then interpreted it using the Music Easel and sent it back to her, along with a graphic score I made for her to interpret. She did this with lots of composers. That’s one way. When I’m writing an acoustical score and I write middle C, I know how the flute player is going to finger it to get that note. I can add extended techniques to it, but it’s still going to sound like a C. On a synthesizer it’s a different story, especially with different setups. Let’s say I’ve got a EMS Synthi, you’ve got a Buchla, and my friend has a Hordijk, and somebody has some weird collection of Eurorack stuff. There’s no telling if everyone has the components to do the gesture I’m looking for. I did write a piece for four Music Easels, since the Easel is designed as a complete instrument. That’s something like, “Ok, we start with these knobs set at these marks, and we take two minutes to fade in these sounds, and then we’re gonna take forty five seconds to change the setting on the reverb, which is going to change the sounds dramatically, and then there might be points of free randomness for a minute, but we’re all gonna go back toward this next setting of the sliders and knobs.” In a way, it was as specific as when I used to write for acoustic instruments. But that’s only possible if you’re all working with the same instrument. Can you tell me a little bit about your drawings? Do you see this as a parallel practice or does it inform your music? It began as postcard art, about ten years ago, when my mentor and good friend was diagnosed with prostate cancer. We both love fountain pens and the way ink flows when writing or creating art, so we swapped postcards every day for at least three or four years. It began as a form of therapy. I don’t consider myself a visual artist, but I started on a journey. The good news is, he just turned 80, he’s in great shape, and still composing! The other aspect is my fascination with the work of Wassily Kandinsky. When I started, I hung up a big print of “Komposition 8.” I would just sit there for awhile and think about a dot. Where would the most interesting place for another dot be? I’d add a line, maybe a triangle. I think I was remixing “Komposition 8” in my own way. Kandinsky worked in charcoal, oils, acrylic, pastels, pen and ink. I started exploring different media. I did that every day for years, and I think I’m happy with some of what I did. (laughs) When I make music, I’m sculpting sound. When I make a drawing, I’m sculpting ink. I think I read recently that the first Buchla design was a lamp, a rotating disc with holes in it, and a photoresistor. So from the very beginning the synthesizer had an “eye” in it, a connection to visual phenomena. I think whether it’s dance, poetry, music, it’s all just sculpting energy. Of course, it can take a little while to get your technique together!

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Thanks to Todd Barton, Peter Harkawik, and RVNG Intl. for facilitating this interview. Text has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Thomas Leer – Letter From America, 1982

Ideal “first day of spring spring” soundtrack, released on the legendary Cherry Red Records. If you like Martin Newell, you’ll love this. Aside from the obvious comparisons–a diligently lo-fi DIY ethos, jangly guitar, spronky synth pop, cassette culture, etc.–there’s a similar tendency to couch really pretty and smart songwriting in a playful, totally unserious affect. (For the record, Leer is much funkier.) A part of me wonders if Leer and Newell sold their brilliance short by taking this approach, but at the end of the day I think this was the most truthful language that they could speak. This wasn’t just the way they chose to tell their stories; it’s an important part of the story itself. His world is far from simplistic, though. More whimsical-sinister tracks like “Gulf Stream” and “Soul Gypsy” paint a picture of imagined travels through Leer’s warped version of the world. And that quietly smirking, scuffy, faraway-in-a-big-room thing (“Choices”) clearly evidences Leer’s love of krautrock, but Letter From America is sunsoaked and, well, accessible, or at least I think so. Still, in spite of its lo-fi trappings, Letter From America (later issued as 4 Movements) is surprisingly dense and elegant up-close, almost sophisti-pop in sensibility. Tracks like “Tight As A Drum” are full of gorgeous washes of sound, with such thorough care for spatial depth that it becomes difficult to disentangle one instrument from the next. As such, be forewarned that this record really suffers in bad speakers–it actually took me a couple years to fully enjoy it, because it took me that long to listen to it in headphones and realize that it was a lot more than tinny, scronky, dude guitar pop (sry guitar dudes). Miraculously, Letter From America keeps opening up with increasing generosity and wit with every listen. Happy spring.
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[Mix for NTS Radio] Getting Warmer Episode 22

Here’s my latest episode of Getting Warmer for NTS Radio. I was happy to be able to do this set live out of their LA studio! This was a collection of very reverb-heavy songs, mostly synthetic reverb. If you like it, you can download an mp3 version of it here, with the spoken segments cut out so you can listen to it as an uninterrupted mix. Enjoy!

Tracklist: 1. Ryuichi Sakamoto – Out Of The Cradle (Canon E-Magic 2000) 2. Franco Nonni – Aria 3. Above & Beyond – Good For Me 4. Gail Laughton – Pompeii 76 A.D. 5. New Child – Nataraji Bengawan Solo 6. Love, Peace, and Trance – Kokoro Da 7. Rüdiger Oppermann’s Harp Attack – Troubadix In Afrika 8. Kenji Kawaii – Nightstalker 9. Art of Noise – Ode To Don Jose (Ambient Version) 10. Veetdharm Morgan Fisher – The Great Lakes 11. Naomi Akimoto – Izayoi No Tsuki 12. Daniel Lentz – Requiem 13. Osamu Kitajima ft. Minnie Riperton – Yesterday And Karma