We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.
/

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more. Paying supporters also get unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app.
    Purchasable with gift card

      name your price

     

  • Buy the Full Digital Album

about

My guest is analog synthesizer master Doug Lynner, who has performed evolving live compositions on the Serge Modular Synthesizer for over 40 years, as well as editing the classic electronic music magazine Synapse.

Who invented the electronic music synthesizer, and why did they do it? I thought I should dig into this a little, some background to explain my guest Doug Lynner’s place in musical history. Well, as in most fields, there was an army of inventors, each one leading to the next. Early on, in the nineteen-teens and twenties the notion of making sounds electrically or electronically came up, but these instruments were thought of simply as new sound resources, to make music conceived of and played in more or less conventional ways. But later, after World War II, musical avant-gardists became interested in making a music whose very body, structure and organization grew out of exploiting the semi-wild – but guided – operation of electronic circuits themselves. This sort of ”embodied abstraction” was first done by repurposing various laboratory equipment, combining oscillators, filters and tape recorders in ad-hoc ways to make or record sound sequences and structures.

In 1960 German musical engineer Harald Bode published a paper on his notion of cleaning up this mess with a modular music synthesizer, a matching ensemble of sound creation and processing units built in one rack, to be freely connected together in multiple ways for different musical effects. And within a few years Bob Moog, on the east coast, and Donald Buchla, on the west coast, had developed and released commercial products along these lines, each with their own brilliant quirks and strengths. A third quirky inventor/genius of this stripe emerged in the early 70s: Serge Tcherepnin, the Russian/Chinese/French/American composer and engineer, son of celebrated Russian composer Alexander Tcherepnin. Serge had made his way from Europe, to CalArts in southern California, along the way studying with Boulez, Stockhausen and Luigi Nono, among many others.

Here’s where my guest Doug Lynner enters the picture. As a student at CalArts in the early 70’s he glommed onto Serge’s brilliant realization of the modular synthesis concept and never let go, over the course of the next 40 years working steadily on the Serge Modular synthesizer, creating living synthesis compositions, and helping, through his electronic music magazine Synapse to keep alive a culture of analog synthesis that lives and burns ever brighter today. I had a chance to talk with him before a recent performance at the Outsound music festival in San Francisco.

credits

from Noisy People: the Podcast 2015, released March 1, 2016

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Tim Perkis image

Tim Perkis San Francisco, California

more at:
perkis.com

soundcloud.com/perkis

artifactrecordings.bandcamp.com

contact / help

Contact Tim Perkis

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this track or account

If you like Tim Perkis, you may also like:

Bandcamp Daily  your guide to the world of Bandcamp

On Bandcamp Radio

Featuring Riley Pinkerton (aka The Rat Queen) from the theatrical NYC rockers, Castle Rat.
listen now