There's a jazz discussion thread so I thought I'd post one for synth. The below performance is by Bernd Kistenmacher. I didn't know of this musician, I just found out about him today. Pretty good though.
There's a jazz discussion thread so I thought I'd post one for synth. The below performance is by Bernd Kistenmacher. I didn't know of this musician, I just found out about him today. Pretty good though.
This album is not a synth record in its entirety, but this section is mostly layered Synthi A with occasional tapes(water sounds,frogs,kalimba).This is one of my favorite records and i'm always looking for an excuse to play it,and..well...here it is.Alvin Curran-Songs And Views From The Magnetic Garden-Section II.Enjoy.
Last edited by walt; 03-28-2017 at 01:50 AM.
"please do not understand me too quickly"-andre gide
I'd never heard of these artists before or of the Buchla synthesizer, but I've been enjoying this a lot lately:
https://kaitlynaureliasmith.bandcamp...vol-13-sunergy
Kistenmacher has a lot of material out there heavily influenced by Klaus Schulze. Even went so far as to collaborate with Harald Grosskopf on multiple occasions.
This is sort of a soft sounding synth album, but I enjoy it.
Rather nice recent-ish discovery. If you’re big into Klaus Schulze circa Mirage or TD circa Force Majeure, check it out:
Confirmed Bachelors: the dramedy hit of 1883...
The I. C. label. I really liked Pegasus by Robert SchroederOriginally Posted by hippypants
This may not be to anyone's interest, but I used to own an Arp Odyssey, and this guy is basically explaining the Arp 2600--a bigger model.
I've heard of Schroeder, I'm not sure if I have anything by him or not, but I'll look him up.
Yeah, that Bock album is nice.
A few of my favorite synthesizer players:
Del Dettmar: the stuff he does on the early Hawkwind albums, especially In Search Of Space and Space Ritual is awesome. He proved you didn't have to the abilities of a Keith Emerson or RIck Wakeman to make the synth sound good.
Sun Ra: Ra owned one of the original Minimoog prototypes. I've heard it said that Bob Moog only meant to lend the Model B to Ra, but apparently, when you put something in Ra's hands, you shouldn't expect to get it back. Side one of the album Space Probe, and both of the My Brother The Wind albums feature some very amazing work. Supposedly, there's more unreleased tapes of Ra from circa 70-71 putting his Minimoogs (he owned at least two of them) through their paces. For what it's worth, Ra put a Clavioline through it's paces on some of his 60's era albums too, notably on Cosmic Tones For Mental Therapy and side one of The Magic City.
Karlheinz Stockhausen: One of Stockhausen's great masterworks was a piece called Sirius, which featured four soloists (two vocalists, a bass clarinet and trumpet) performing to a backing tape of sounds Stockhausen created on an EMS Synthi 100. The piece Sternklang also makes extensive use of synthesizers (photos of early 70's performances show the musicians all using EMS gear, Synthi A's and VCS-3's), though they mostly seem to be being used to process acoustic instruments. Stockhausen also made great use of ring modulators on his pieces Mikrophonie II, Mixtur and Mantra.
Morton Subotnick: OK, so Don Buchla didn't like calling his instruments "synthesizers" and insisted instead that they were "Electric Music Boxes", but most everyone else considers them to be synths, so I'll mention the great string of albums that Subotnick made in the late 60's through the early 70's, including Silver Apples Of The Moon, The Wild Bull, Touch, Sidewinder, Until Spring and Four Butterflies.
Andrew Rudin: No, not the guy who recently did that classical guitar concerto with Jon Anderson, but an older guy, who replaced a great album in the late 60's called Tragoedia. Released on Nonesuch Records (same label that put out Silver Apples Of The Moon). Unfortunately, Tragoedia apparently was never reissued. Rudin was a frequent contributor to the AOL Classical Music boards back in the late 90's, and then he mentioned that he was "close" to getting a label to put it out on CD, but the deal apparently fell through. So you have to either track down an LP copy, or find a torrent site that has the unauthorized download version that I found a number of years ago.
Wendy Carlos: Wendy Carlos' A Clockwork Orange (NOT the soundtrack album that Warners put out, but the record she initially issued on CBS, then later reissued on ESD) is a favorite, as is Sonic Seasonings.
Bob Ostertag: In the early part of his music career, Ostertag worked with a Serge modular synth, appearing on a handful of records in the late 70's and early 80's. Unfortunately, most of these seem to be out of print, save for three. One is actually an archival release, of one of Anthony Braxton's Creative Music Orchestra concerts from a 1978 European tour, captured in Cologne, Germany. The other two are a pair of recordings by John Zorn, Pool and Hockey. Ostertag seems to be play longer solos on the Braxton album, though again, he's performing in a big band situation, so basically you're still talking about relatively brief vignettes in a larger group context. Due to Zorn's way of working with his so called "game pieces", you only get the briefest of blurps and bleeps from Ostertag's synth, but it's still kind of interesting to listen to, if you enjoy that kind of thing. After taking a sabbatical from music in the mid 80's, Ostertag switched to using samplers, only returning to modular synthesis in the last few years, releasing three albums done entirely on Buchla and Serge synths.
Tangerine Dream: I imagine everyone knows TD by now, but I'll make special mention of side one of Rubycon, just because I love the ring modulator bells that open the piece. There's also some cool synth sounds on most of the live performances from that era, particularly on the Royal Albert Hall and Melbourne shows from April 1975. Of coures, all of their albums (except the first one) have cool synth playing on them. Well, they did up until about 1983 or so.
Tim Blake: It's very short, but his synth solo piece entitled Crystal Machine And The Octave Doctors, on Gong's Flying Teapot album is another favorite. He also adds some great colour on other tracks on that album, as well as Angel's Egg and You. The two solo albums he did in the late 70's, Crystal Machine and Blake's New Jerusalem are both great too. And let's not forget his appearance on Hawkwind's Levitation album.
Rick Wright: Love his playing on Wish You Were Here (particularly Welcome To The Machine) and Animals. But I really wish when Raving And Drooling morphed into Sheep, they had kept the synth solo he performed in the song's original arrangement, as I always thought that sounded great.
Geddy Lee: It's kind of amazing to me how Rush decided they wanted to add synths, but not a synth player, so Geddy said "No problem, I'll do it myself". And did it, he did quite well!
Richard Teitelbaum: Another musician I mostly know from his work with Anthony Braxton, particularly on the albums Time Zones and Trio & Duo.
Malcolm Clarke: composed the epochal score to the Doctor Who serial The Sea Devils, performing it entirely on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's EMS Synthi 100. There's a modular synth filter, apparently based on the one on the Synthi 100, named in honor of this particular Doctor Who story.
And then there's a whole slew of synth pop stuff I would mention, everything from Human League to Gary Numan to Thompson Twins to Ultravox. And Nick Rhodes did some cool synth stuff on the first couple Duran Duran records, too.
I didn't know of that Geddy Lee solo album, and I'll have to check out some of the others, though I'm familiar with a few of those: TD, Carlos, Subotnick. Thanks.
I don't know if this came from an actual album, bootleg or what, I'd have to google it.
Ron Geesin's library recordings
Beaver and Krause
Ruth White
Pauline Oliveros
Mort Garson ( Black Mass)
Tangerine Dream
Klaus Schulze
Pauline Anna Strom
Stomu Yamashta..... particularly the Iroha series in the early 80's
Robert Schroeder- Pegasus ....
Da Da.....Japanese duo consisting of synth and guitar. Some pieces are quirky and cheesy like The Residents. Other pieces are dark Berlin school approach.
Neuronium.....The early recordings combine synth, mellotron, and guitar. I
didn't like their drum machine sounds.
Nice list, some I'm familiar with and others not like Ruth White & Pauline Strom, which I'll have to Google. I love Oliveros though who I just learned about last year.
Nice Holzman solo.
Richard Burmer died some years back, but his music lives on
I have the Reverberations boxset, a 12 CD set of music she recorded in the 60's. Much of it is of what she called "classical electronics", ie mainly oscillators (originally designed for testing and calibrating electronic circuits), along with essentially the same tape loop system that Robert Fripp would, a decade later, call Frippertronics, and sometimes other bits of sonic esoterica. A about two or three of the late 60's discs have her playing an early Series 100 Buchla Electronic Music Box.
There's also three other discs of music from the same. One is called Electronic Works, and includes I Of IV (the Reverberations set has the other "...Of IV" pieces, and a couple other pieces. Then there's two discs on the Pogus label, one is called Alien Bog/Beautiful Soop, and the other I think is called No Mo'. All of these are great electronic pieces, much of which predates the advent of what we now think of as synthesizers.
For what it's worth, the Reverberations liner notes suggest that Pauline didn't like the Buchla as much as her old Hewlett-Packard oscillators. She apparently felt the "classical" electronics were "warmer and more organic". I suppose it's kinda like the analog vs digital debate with synth users that have gone on for the last 30 or so years.
Here’s 28 minutes of dreamy synth time. You don’t have to be from Berlin...
To be fair, you couldn’t do what she was doing on “I of IV” using synths, at least not to my knowledge (perhaps you could with heavy modification). The oscillators were actually tuned to outside the range of hearing, and the sounds produced are created by interference frequencies. Alvin Lucier, with whom she frequently collaborated, was also fond of making music in this manner (see: Bird and Person Dyning, for example).
Confirmed Bachelors: the dramedy hit of 1883...
Absolutely.
Another American electronic group (duo) that seldom gets discussed, but Finders Keepers did reissue some early albums on vinyl, and they also put together a great compilation called The Stargate Tapes.
Aqua Regia (1982) is my favorite Emerald Web album (I still have the cassette), but they're all awesome (yes, even Dreamspun).
B1 Emergence 2:08
B2 Photonos 10:02
B3 Ars Nova 3:16
B4 Sanctus Spiritus 6:19
Well, yeah, certainly not with a prepatched synth like a Minimoog or a Prophet-5, but one suspects you could probably do something similar using modular synthesizer oscillators, so long as they're able to reach the frequencies she had her old H-P oscillators tuned to.
Here is a synth song with a wicked synth beat, from a German group and I have loved this song since the first time I heard it, back in the late 80's!
https://youtu.be/4XIblmWICww
My Favourite Headache isnt great but its certainly OK and Ive given it occasional repeat listens over the years.....The main thing I appreciated about it was Geddy exploring things that he never does under the "Rush" umbrella, such as harmonies and lush string arrangements - just to name two - which makes it such a departure from the Geddy Lee I had grown accustomed to for decades
Copy that!You must be the ONLY other guy I know who digs this. Double Fantasy changed their name and nothing they recorded was as good as Universal Ave. A real under-the-radar synth classic. While everyone else was diving head-first into DX/D50/M1 factory sounds, Double Fantasy avoided a plasticky facade and just made a cool album.
I'm not familiar with CBL but they sound influenced by the Berlin school of synth
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks