Latest / Electronic Music / Suzanne Ciani - Adventures In Electronic Music
Transcript
- Caro C: Hello, and welcome to the Sound On Sound podcast about Electronic Music and all things synth. I'm Caro C and in this episode I have the honour of talking to Suzanne Ciani, who's a bit of a synthesizer and electronic music legend. Suzanne did loads of futuristic sound design in the 1970s, such as that iconic Coca Cola bottle opening sound that many of us will be familiar with. She's also composed a Hollywood film soundtrack and is a Grammy nominated artist. Suzanne's career is still very much flourishing as she tours around the world and releases music on Andy Votel's Finders Keepers label. In this online conversation between Manchester, UK and California, Suzanne talks about her path into electronic music, her deep relationship with the Buchla synthesizer and how quadraphonic sound is the natural home for electronic music. First of all, I'm going to play you a minute or so of Suzanne's music to get you in the zone. Hello, Suzanne. It's such an honour, wonderful, to speak to you today. I've been working in electronic music for over 20 years now and of course know of your pioneering work in the electronic and synth based music worlds and yeah, wonderful to talk to you today. How are you doing? Suzanne Ciani: Great, Caro. It's my pleasure to speak with you. Caro C : Obviously you have a huge sort of CV, portfolio, experience, wisdom behind you and I thought it'd be nice to unpack that a bit. So very much from how you're feeling it at the moment, could you tell us a bit about your path into electronic music? Suzanne Ciani: Aha, let's see. I would say what comes up is Berkeley, California. So, I'd heard of electronic music when I was still an undergraduate in Boston, because MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology was my brother's school and that was the first time you know, we had a little evening get together with the music class. My music class was very tiny, about four or five people and we went to MIT and the professor there was trying to make a sound with his computer. Now this was, I graduated from undergrad in, let's see, 68. So it wasn't that early, really. I mean, there had been some life in electronic music but news didn't travel fast then. We didn't have all these systems of interconnection and so I really didn't know anything until I got to the West Coast, where I went to graduate school in music composition and that just happened to be the right place to be at the right time, because that's where Don Buchla was. He's really credited with being the first, who cares, you know, specifically, but, you know, he invented an analogue modular electronic music instrument. I met him in Berkeley. He was in Berkeley his whole life and when I came back out to the West Coast, you know, many years later, we reconnected. Caro C : And had he already invented his 200, for example, by the time you met him, or was that still in development? Suzanne Ciani: He really had done the, you know, he had his initial assignment with Mort Subotnick and who knows what that looked like. Then he had the 100 system. By the time I came along, you know, when I finished graduate school, I went right to work for him and I was soldering circuit boards at a big table with a few other people and we were making the 200s. Yeah, I came in full blown during the 200 and to me, that 200 system was the apotheosis of, you know, pure analogue instrument design, it was so amazing. Caro C : And what I find really interesting is you were particularly and you probably still are, particularly attracted to the getting away from the keyboard approach. Suzanne Ciani: Well, the funny thing was that I was a pianist, so that was my childhood instrument of love. But I was completely indoctrinated by Buchla. Yeah, he knew that the keyboard was dangerous because there was no understanding back then. You know, these things were new, nobody knew what they were. They couldn't figure out even if they were musical instruments and the downfall of the whole possibility of looking at this new instrument in a new way was when they put a keyboard on it. Caro C : Yeah right, Dick Mills from the radiophonic workshop says the same thing actually. Yes, I can see that narrows the focus from the palette and that is the exciting thing about electronic sound back then and still now I’m falling in love with the possibilities of electronic sound all over again at the moment. I just, the way you can touch things beyond the societal constraints of Diatonic pitch or whatever. Suzanne Ciani: And other constraints you know, the constraints of digital you know, menu diving and mousing and all of those non-real time interactions. I think you know, there was a hunger for getting connected again to the immediacy, the feedback loop, of doing something and hearing what it does. It's so alive. You know, so here we are, the kids are into it. Caro C : Yeah, I mean I suppose you could say that you've had a bit of a, would you call it a renaissance of your career? A revival of your career? Suzanne Ciani: You know it's funny because I always dreamt of this situation, that analogue electronic music that everybody would have. And it's hard, we didn't even use the word synthesiser back then. Again, this was a Buchla thing because synthesiser connoted synthetic, people just immediately thought of a keyboard instrument. So it's a little bit of a mouthful not to use it, you know, electronic music, analogue, modular but anyway in the day, in the late 60s, early 70s, my feeling was that this was just around the corner. This is not an unusual outlook. I was reading the book about the Theremin. Have you read that book? Caro C : No, but I've watched the beautiful documentary where Leon Theremin gets reunited with Clara Rockmore and he's just in tears listening to her play his instrument. Suzanne Ciani: So in the twenties there was a lot of momentum for this theremin. It was being used in orchestras. They imagined that every household would have one. Instead of kids screeching on the violin, they would very quickly adapt to the theremin and so this type of vision, that this was just around the corner and was going to proliferate, it's part of the energy system of this music technology. The fact is, is that it just took a long time but I think we're here at a very important stage of actually assimilating the concepts that Buchla, I'm a Buchla person, he’s in my DNA and I say he's the Leonardo da Vinci of musical instrument design. He's obviously not the only one but for me, because I work so closely with him, I see a lot of this world through his eyes. Caro C: Yeah. Well, obviously it's a relationship you have with the Buchla and over however many years. How alive is that relationship now? How has that developed? Suzanne Ciani: Well, here we are, you know, Buchla passed away a couple of years ago already and here I found myself at a similar node, professional node in a way, because I had come back to the Bucha before he died, he suggested that I get a system and I hadn't had one in 25 years, 35 years, so I did order a 200e The 200e has a digital component, it has a lot of the DNA of the 200, but it's a different animal. So I got it and it took me a long time. You know, these things happen, they assimilate slowly. It’s an organic relationship that has to evolve and develop and so, you know, check in a year later, a year and a half later and I'm starting to warm up to the instrument. Caro C : Wow. Talking of immediacy, that's so interesting. In order to get that immediacy, you need the intimacy in a sense of that, putting in those hours. Suzanne Ciani: It's a relationship and it's exploratory and I don't like to rush anything. Anyway, you know, there's a flow that happens and I like to be in that flow and I trust that everything will happen that is meant to happen and anyway, here I find myself having developed a new relationship with this 200e and I'm starting to miss a lot of things from the 200. And so now, you know, there have been a lot of episodic things going on with the whole relationship because the Buchla company was sold. Yeah, it's been re-bought, not in total, but I'm now working with the Buchla company for many years. I didn't because of Buchla. So now we're back in contact and we're looking at redoing the 200 and some of the modules, so I'm very excited. I know there's a lot of reissue going on in a lot of companies and a pure reissue, the 200 would be wonderful for me. The only thing is, it is not as compact and if I'm on the road, which I have been for the last four years, trucking my, or airplaning my Buchla in a suitcase all over the world, the compactness of it is essential. Caro C : And the robustness you know, I remember even taking a called Poly 800 across to Berlin too many times and it went, nope, I've had enough now. It just didn't like the traveling too much. Suzanne Ciani: Yes, yeah, I'm glad we share those experiences. Caro C : Anxiety management skill. Suzanne Ciani: You know, when it's on, we love it. When it's off, it's like hmmm. Caro C : Would you say there's any other instruments that are just as integral to your sound as the Buchla? Suzanne Ciani: Well if we're talking about now, I mean certainly historically I've had a wonderful relationship with Prophets, with Dave Smith's instruments. One of my things is that I want to interact. I want to be able to change the sound and do whatever I do and the Prophet 5 lent itself very much to that. I mean, certainly there was this menu of preset sounds, but you could actually interact with it and now my new interactive traditional, more traditional instrument is the Moog One. It is beautifully designed and even though there is no particular physical patching, the interface is so elegant. You know, they have these little buttons all over in every single department and you can go in deeper to that particular, whatever it is, filter, module, envelope and I'm loving working with that. I have also, I just did something with Moog for the Moog Subharmonicon and rhythmically it was just like a new frontier. I mean, it's an analog control of time. You know, we get so used to time being divided up into these little slices of quarter notes, eighth notes, 16, 32, whatever it is, whereas the Subharmonicon you can just throw in there any kind of division that flourishes into this defined space and then you go back to the, so you have a combination of the defined rhythm with a completely kind of unpredictable rhythm that comes out and then goes back in. So I'm really loving it, it’s very alive. It feels like crickets singing in the field, I don't know what it is. It's organic. Caro C: Actually, I noticed how the natural world plays a big part in your sound world. I love how the ocean sound is a popular one for you to almost ground yourself when you start on your journeys of discovery live or recorded, actually. Suzanne Ciani: Well said. It is a grounding place, it is and it became that, you know, my first album was Seven Waves and I didn't realise at the time, now I have a different perspective, but how perfectly suited the Buchla was to making waves and to this day there's no better instrument for making wave sounds. You know, people didn't even know they were made by machine, they thought they were real, which is so strange to me. Now I live on the ocean I have the real sounds right outside my window and I do confuse them with the inside sounds. They do sound the same to me in many ways. It's kind of art imitates nature, imitates art, yeah. Caro C: I'll never forget, we did a commission down in a tiny little island called Hayling Island, which is just off Portsmouth. We were there for five days and we had that five days and then my commission was to make a sort of sound poem in, really and it was funny, the whole five days, because I thought, oh, I'm going to collect all these sounds and, oh, obviously we're going to have the sea and we're going to have this. The wind just went, nope, nope, you're not having any of those sounds. So it wasn't until the last morning I managed to get a little bit of waves lapping, but apart from that, the wind just wasn't having it. I just thought it was brilliant because it meant I needed to go home and you synthesized that for yourself, just being given an MS20 Mini. So I actually just spent time getting all the, the whooshes and the swishes from that. And I actually really liked that journey of it not being fed to me, direct from, from a microphone kind of thing and it was that, no, it's got to go through me and then come back out. Suzanne Ciani: That's funny that the wind, it does take over, doesn't it? You can't do anything when the wind is there. Caro C: I know and yet to actually record the wind nicely is also really hard. So it's the sound recordist's greatest challenge, I think. Which is good, keeps us in our place. Suzanne Ciani: So, Finders Keepers, you know, Andy Votel, he's always surprising me. He's releasing these very old recordings and the next one has a lot of wind in it. It's called Denali and I had done it for a documentary film about climbing Denali and I haven't been able to find this film, I can't remember who who came to me the mountain climber and the sound files are of course very archaeological, you know, they're not high quality but they do have good sonic musical evidence, I guess. But there's a lot of wind in that because of climbing that mountain. I mean, the wind was made on the Buchla, of course. But, um... Caro C: Yeah wow, lush and that's coming out soon is it? Suzanne Ciani: Yes it is, yeah. Andy’s amazing, you know, he does all this. He came to me, whatever it was many years ago. Now he said, do you have anything in your vault? And I thought well, I've got a huge vault of stuff that came out from New York and it's been sitting in there for 25 years, just here and I wasn't really interested in going into the vault, I found it depressing. I didn't know where to start, there was just too much stuff in there and I had lost the index. I had a numbers on boxes with contents and that was lost. But then I realised that these tapes were disintegrating and that they needed to be transferred. Anyway, so I started this little project of just transferring the tapes and then I just sent some to Andy, without thinking that there's anything there. Caro C: Magic, yeah, he's good at unearthing that treasure. Suzanne Ciani: I guess it's treasure, you know. For me, it's a little... here I spent my whole life developing my professional skills, working in the trenches of New York City music production at the best studios in the world with the best musicians and all of that and then out comes these things that I did in my garage before I knew what I was doing. It's like, oh my God. I listen to it and I think, oh, that high end is distorting, oh, that rhythm is a little bit out. I certainly got a lot better playing in time over the years. But, you know, there is some life force in these things. Caro C: Yeah, and that's it. I feel like, especially with my Delia Derbyshire Day charity, part of it is, is that we're at a point in electronic music where it helps us to take stock and look back and it helps us to honour the ancestors, I call them, you know, of where we're at now and that lineage, really, you know. I mean, when I discovered people like yourself and Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire, it gave me a lineage instead of being this, oh, you're weird because you're a woman doing this. It's like, no, I'm just weird and there's plenty of us and it's wonderful. Suzanne Ciani: Oh my God, aren't you lucky? Caro C: Yeah, exactly. Suzanne Ciani: When Andy said something about my being the Delia Derbyshire of the electronic I don't know what. Caro C: Atari age or something, yeah. Suzanne Ciani: I didn't, I'd never heard of Delia Derbyshire. I didn't know her at all. Here I am in the United States and maybe everybody knew her in, you know, where you live and so for me, this was a discovery, a very important discovery. And then that discovery, just a year and a half ago, included Daphne Oram. Well my theory about women and electronic music was that it was just the perfect intuitive venue for them because you could do it on your own. Caro C: Yeah exactly, this is what I found. Exactly. Let's say the most possibly accessible instrument nowadays, if you can have a laptop pair of headphones, I could develop my sound. I was using analogue stuff as well, but I could develop my sound without somebody telling me how it should sound and then you start to really develop your world and that agency. That's where electronic music is more accessible in that way. Suzanne Ciani: And it also appealed to women because they didn't have this huge investment already, you know, in those early days anyway, in the way things were done, that sonic world that men had created, their go-to ways of getting sound, a go-to EQ for a bass guitar or whatever it was and women had fresh ears. They weren't invested and so I found that I worked better with female engineers because I was doing something that didn't have a go-to solution and the guys I worked with, I worked with wonderful male engineers too, but I always felt more comfortable with the women because they were intuitive and understood that this was not what already had been, you know. Caro C: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's no manual to refer to or no formulas, conventions to refer to and that's the point. Suzanne Ciani: Yeah, so I think women have had a very, very important, the last time when I was playing at Royal Albert Hall, the BBC proms, and before the show, this camera person came up to me and said, well, tell me what you think about Daphne Oram and I thought, hmm, excuse me, that didn't conjure up anything in my little empty brain. There's nothing in there about Daphne Oram and after the show I absolutely had a meltdown. I cried. I mean, this woman was remarkable, her symphony, which they premiered after 70 years. Oh my god. But it is a good time I mean in the early days, what I get, I used to write letters to the editors of these sound magazines because the only women you saw in them were modelling equipment and let's face it, we don't like that representation to be our exclusive visibility. Aren't we out there professionally doing stuff? Caro C: Yeah. I love how you describe the possibilities of electronic sound giving you both freedom and control and I love how these two are always an interplay, I think. Suzanne Ciani: Well, it's a feedback system so, you know, it is definitely something that you interact with in a way that you're learning all the time. You do things and then you can tweak and respond and that's the beauty of it is that it's real time interaction. Caro C: Yeah. I also love how you talk about how quadraphonic sound is the natural home for electronic music. Suzanne Ciani: Well I grew up in quad because Buchla, right from the very beginning, had a quad interface. By the time I came along and worked with him, there was a module called the 227 with voltage control of spatial location. He also had a voltage controlled reverb. It was a silly spring reverb, but you could move the sound closer or farther away with a control voltage. So you had all this possibility of creating imaginary spaces. I just took that for granted. That's where I lived, I always played in quad. So when it came time to perform, to do concerts in New York, I had a gig at Avery Fisher Hall and it's in the big classical complex. And I said, oh good and now I need two speakers in the back. And they said, absolutely not, we are not doing that. And I said, but wait a minute, I can't play without those and so I had to cancel the concert. I actually don't know how to play if it's not in quad. So when I came back to this performance mode 40 years later, I was thrilled because at first there was a little bit of a resistance. I was like are you kidding, you know, these big festivals, they didn't want to deal with two more big speaker towers to match the front ones. But I absolutely had my threshold of possibility and I would just say, well then, I can't play. And if you do hold the line, they do come through. Like this is non negotiable.You need that or I don't play. And so, I don't know why, maybe it's because spatial sound is now just more generically part of our world, but I don't have any problem now coming back to this idea that it's a native thing for electronics. It is. It is. And it's the most suitable content for spatial sound, it just is. And I think the first time around when it failed, it was because there was no content, because they were making replications of the standard concert hall experience and putting the back of the theatre and the back two speakers and it was quite boring. Not very immersive, not very interesting. And electronic music, it's a monophonic signal basically and it comes alive when it moves and it can move in such an integrated, meaningful way, because the movement is voltage controlled, just like the rest of it. You know, with the 227, the Buchla 227, I have all that at my fingertips. I'm waiting to see the Eurorack people come up with a good spatial interface. Caro C: Right and talking of what you're looking forward to, is there any unrealised dreams that you think are now they're around the corner or they should be or they could be? Suzanne Ciani: Well, it's funny, in technology, it's like there are always expectations and then there's a gap. So you envision something, you think it's around the corner, 10 years later there it is, 50 years later there it is and so I guess one of the places that I always look is just in the past. What did I expect was going to be there immediately, this is where we were back then. I had designed a piece of furniture which was for 12 people, a big circular, soft pellet pillow and each location that would hold a person had its sequencer control. So it's kind of interactive music where everybody was lying around and tuning their own pitch in the sequence. Caro C: Oh, like an electronic choir. Suzanne Ciani: Yeah. It's just fun. Will that happen? I mean, I don't know, but I did always think that when I had my Buchla, I mean, it filled my space. It was on all the time and I lived in it. So I had these patterns that were going and interactive, self-generating pieces and it was just kind of like the air that you breathed and it was very comforting and just nice and non-intrusive, just like a big airy cushion of sound that was alive and, and constant. So I used to think then this muzak came along and the idea that you could have background sound that was old pop tunes that you didn't really have to listen to very closely, I just thought that there would be a more creative background sound. That when people get adapted to these analogue instruments, they will have them. I don't know if this is really feasible, I did come from a very particular world and I think we always see our own outlook as being much more expansive. Caro C: Yeah, cool. Let's leave it on that expansive note. Thank-you so much Suzanne. It's been such a joy to speak with you and all the best with your continued voyages of discovery. Suzanne Ciani: Marvellous and all the best to you Caro. Thank-you. Caro C: Thank-you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for further information, as well as links and details of the other episodes in the Electronic Music series. And just before you go, let me point you to soundonsound.com/podcasts, where you can explore what's on our other channels. This has been a Caro C production for Sound On Sound.