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Modulisme Session 059

by VA. Synthisis Sonoris III

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« EMS made the most portable vintage synthesizer, the suitcase AKS, and the least portable, the behemoth S-100! With 20 oscillators (including the self-oscillating filters) and 7,200 physical patch points, the S-100 allows you to enter uncharted territory and endless audio possibilities. It has to be the most idiosyncratic synthesizer ever made, the nearest comparison would be Buchla in terms of 'free synthesis'. It was ground breaking In 1969 to include the first digital sequencer, with 3 layers and a control key, it was designed to work with the Compu-Synthi running its own music software 'MUSYS’. The S-100 is perfect for experimentation and discovery of new unique sounds. However, I have found that all things are not created equal. I have a treatment patch that I frequently use on the AKS, I discovered the same patch on the S-100 sounds completely different and different once again on the VCS-3!  Much experimentation and trial and error is needed to conquer this very IDIOSYNCRATIC synth. Is it worth it, absolutely -  just try stair casing the three ring modulators and see where it takes you…completely endless. »
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Synthi100: Stelios Giannoulakis, Piano: Vassilis Roupas Recorded during June - July 2020, at CMRC / ΚΣΜΕ, Athens Conservatory, Greece
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I had known about the VCS3 since the 1970s, from listening to music by Pink Floyd and Roxy Music. When I began buying gear for my music studio in 2005, I was interested in the VCS3, but prices in the re-sale market were too high, and I basically forgot about it. Around 2010, I somehow heard that EMS was making a limited run of new Synthi and VCS3 synths. I contacted Robin Wood at EMS and added my name to a waiting list. I heard nothing for years and assumed that I would not get one. Then, suddenly in 2016, Robin contacted me to ask if I was still interested. I was, and in 2017 the VCS3 arrived at my house. Although I couldn't afford to buy one of the new Cricklewood keyboards Robin offered, I knew that the VCS3 could be controlled using a midi keyboard with a CV-Midi converter box. I actually bought a converter box because I fully expected to use a keyboard with the VCS3 in the same way I used a keyboard with my Arp 2600. But once it arrived, I began exploring the VCS3 without a keyboard and quickly saw that it could add a new dimension to my music simply by doing what it does best: creating interesting textures, colors, sounds and effects. The VCS3 has encouraged me to take my music further into spaces outside of standard and non-standard harmony, which is something that has interested me since I began avidly listening to music by Xenakis, Penderecki, Partch, Stockhausen and others in the 1970s. I love exploring the VCS3 even though aspects of it still slightly baffle me. But I've heard others who've used it for decades say the same thing. It's helped me approach composition from new and different angles. And it's created opportunities in my music for unexpected, purely intuitive things to happen that add wonderful colors to pieces. It's a beautifully constructed and elegant instrument, and I'm grateful to have it.
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I started experimenting with synthesizers in January 1988, in my early 20s, en Buenos Aires. At the end of the 80s and early 90s, at the height of the rise of digital, I felt that analog technologies -although considered obsolete- could complement each other very well in a sound art dominated at that time by samplers, MIDI, digital synthesizers and computers. In 1994 I incorporated two devices that clearly went beyond the concept of synthesizers as "musical instruments": the ARP 2600 and the EMS Synthi AKS... both equipment are literally self-integrated portable labs for electroacoustic art, involving enormous possibilities for self-generativity, external signal processing (something I had already found fascinating in the Korg MS20), and the creation of the whole range of articulable harmonic and inharmonic spectra with extremely flexible shapes from very inspiring front panels. In particular the Synthi AKS - with its attaché format, its joystick, its interconnection matrix, its digital / analog sequencer, its capacitive keyboard, its voltage-controllable decay and reverb, etc. - it turned out to be (and is still to this day) one of the most fascinating devices for electroacoustic sound art. The AKS (I bought the first of my Synthis from the great Argentine composer Alicia Terzián, who used it in the 70s to make a couple of works and then kept it for almost 20 years in a closet) is the synthesizer that has accompanied me to the most concerts in the last three decades, I have recorded it in countless musical productions, it is one of the most captivating didactic tools when I teach sound synthesis and it is an incredibly seductive piece of technological art and I find it permanently inspiring, both for its wild sound and for the conceptual and practical genius with which it was conceived. In 2006 I met the Synthi 100 from the Gabinete De Música Electroacústica De Cuenca (in Spain, now restored) and I had my first contact with the VCS3 of a friend from Madrid. In addition to the ergonomic differences between the VCS3 and the Synthi AKS (both beautiful equipements!) I was surprised by the difference in sound between the two models (distant in just a couple of years in the making), which I confirmed when in Argentina I was able to add a second Synthi AKS to my setup. For a while I used two Synthi (unforgettable experience) and then I swapped one AKS for the VCS3 Mark II and then that one for the VCS3 Mark I, The Putney. All the Synthi / VCS3 that I used (including a couple more AKSs from other colleagues) are instruments with their own personality, "living beings" full of artistic proposals that invite feedback in such a magical way that I feel they manage to be part of my being, I feel that they are machinic manifestations of my existence as part of a cosmic totality! The piece "El Maestro Se Inspiró" is the title that my bandmates from Klauss jokingly put when one day for a recording session in our La Siesta Del Fauno studios I interconnected my Synthi AKS and VCS3 The Putney and performed a jam of a 15-minute take in which the mutual dialogue between the EMS and myself ran through extremes of extreme dynamics that left me hypnotized.
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”My interest in EMS synths started in the early eighties when I heard Tangerine dream records such as Atem and Rubycon. In 1987 I was lucky to get an AKS and I started exploring it and using it at several live concerts. I love the flexibility of the pin matrix. « Squadrak AKS » is an improvisation with Synthi AKS
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Bae An Anaon – literaly, Bay of the Dead. The ocean's roar. No set boundaries between waters and skies: dark, blue, grey, the taste of chalk. Yet, I couldn't include the gulls in the music. The winged mockery of gulls. There's nothing sinister to this area of the Brittany coast, though. The shipwreckers are long gone, replaced with surfers. Just avoid it on Christmas Eve, when bones cry. And don't overstay at dawn. I hid under a lone dry shrub with the Synthi E – hid carefully, I don't like to show off. The E has the dubious benefit of working on batteries. You better work quickly or carry a large supply of batteries. I let the synthesizer respond to the roar. Battle of the waves. Why, the cheeky little yellow toy wasn't too impressed. It probably felt at home with the clouds' electricity, a +/– joy of sorts. Nothing cheerful like an E in the wild. Back home though I found out it had gifted me with choice sinewy dread. Lots of work went into it then – but this track and the album were refused everywhere, of course. The music bears the obvious influence of André Stordeur.
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« Back in 2005, in a warehouse in Oakland California, before we begin the tour, there was this incredibly talented DIYer, soundguy and musician called Christian that brought the case when he came back in the evening. It was a very unique and rare moment discovering the SynthiA. »
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The first time I saw a Synthi was when Dominique Grimaud bought one ... 10,000 francs in 1974 (approx. 1500 euros). At the time, I was playing keyboard, organ while Dominique was making little noises… The second time was at the Red Festival in Pantin at the slaughterhouses in October 1975; There was a French duo Atom Crystal playing with 2 synths and between them a Tandberg tape recorder for the echo… They were playing sitting on the floor. In 1979 I switched from keyboards to synthesizers. MS 20 MS 50 B.A.R PS 3300… tape echo… In 1981 I bought a second-hand Synthi which was unstable and half-broken… Towards the end of the 80's, I started to really take an interest in synths, I had it brought into shape stability accuracy etc. With the Indus wave of the 90s I started to integrate synths into my music. Today I have 2 totally modified CV / GATE The way I use them today is a far cry from what we did with them in the 70s. The charm of this INSTRUMENT are the sometimes brutal reactions to a small change in volume. The sound of the synth is very thick "Unstable" fluctuating but soft violent charmer in short like love ...
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“I had previously visited Peter Zinovieff in Putney and was able to propose EMS London as one of the manufacturers to be contacted”. RB also contacted Don Buchla, who did not reply at all, so the contract fell to EMS London (perhaps luckily). Through close cooperation with Zinovieff and David Cockerell the Synthi 100 was born, initially as a custom order from RB. “I worked on the Synthi 100 in Belgrade for some 15 years, also using a VCS3, that particularly in live performances. Initially my approach was largely “classical” assemblage using a multi-track tape recorder, though greatly facilitated by the then rather ground-breaking digital sequencer of the Synthi 100. From around 1980 on I also began exploring the territory of complex self-exciting combinations of modules made possible by the uniquely flexible patching system of this machine, exploiting volatile semi-unstable combinations of modules which I (much) later began to call creatures, and combinations of such creatures which I now call zoetic engines. Early examples may be heard in Mechanical Cartoons and Play Me. Essentially I make use of the vast number of patching configurations which the unique patch bay contruction of the Synthi 100 enables to create very unstable and reactive patches (circuits), which I since recently have begun to refer to as “creatures”. They can also be made sensitive to external stimuli; in the piece Play Me I was interacting with them via a microphone, playing the clarinet. In the 80’s both I and Vladan Radovanović were keen to see the Radio Belgrade computerised, as was the trend of the times. As this wasn’t about to happen I took the opportunity to move to Sweden and work at EMS Stockholm (not to be confused with EMS London). So it was computer music and software development for me for some years. With the “modular synth revival” trend of the last decade or so several Synthi 100’s which had fallen into disuse and disrepair were resurrected, and I got the opportunity to resume my involvement with this machine, in both Belgrade and Athens. There I was able to further explore the zoetic engine approach, which I still consider as unique to the Synthi 100. I have admittedly little hands-on experience of any but EMS synthesizers but as far as I can tell no others permit the kind of “forbidden” patching which can give rise to these living organisms. And they are fundamentally impossible on a digital computer. I am currently in the throes of trying to create zoetic engines on the Synthi 100’s in Belgrade, Athens and Ghent, and have them talk to each other, and perhaps with occasional humans.
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The Gabinete de Música Electroacústica de Cuenca was the first public center for teaching, research and diffusion of Electroacoustic Music in Spain, linked to the Professional Conservatory of Music of the Provincial Council of Cuenca. Inaugurated in 1983 it is one of the very few places in the world where one can play the EMS Synthi 100. The figure of Composer Gabriel Brncic-Isaza, alma mater of the teaching and diffusion of Electroacoustic Music in Cuenca, has been fundamental. With Gabriel Brnciç I had the pleasure of organizing and conducting the first specialized courses in Electroacoustic Music in a Professional Conservatory of Music in Spain, with durations of 2 and 4 years of specialization in Electroacoustic Composition, monthly concerts in the Conservatory of Cuenca and later in the Teatro-Auditorio, in all schools, public and private buildings and spaces available or not, in the city of Cuenca. Electroacoustic music became an everyday thing for all the students of the Conservatory and we involved groups of students from all over the world. Numerous composers of international stature requested to be able to compose in Cuenca, and the Diputación Provincial
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about

Synthisis Sonoris is bursting out as a companion to the seventh installment in our I.T.A.T.I.O.M. series dealing with Inventors Talking About Their Instruments Or Modules. Gathering composers playing synthesizers designed by the legendary EMS which changed the face Electronic music back in the 70s… Mythical and typically associated with the British avant-garde highlights in the 70s from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop/White Noise/Delia Derbyshire to Pink Floyd, Hawkwind, Roxy Music/Brian Eno... But also to European composers like Pierre Henry, Bernard Parmegiani, Heldon, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk, André Stordeur… In a few years the VCS3 + Synthi AKS made their marks within the experimental, electroacoustic groups all over the place and the Synthi proved to be one of the best resource for any live, easy to carry and so immediate. Legendary, unparalleled in sound, it gives a feeling of being alive and untamed. Trying it causes severe addiction !!!


In order to make your listening easier to digest I have chosen to divide « Synthisis Sonoris » into 3 sessions.
Here’s the third one:

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released February 4, 2022

Cover Artwork : Guillaume Amen

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Modulisme Marseille, France

Modulisme (translates Modularism) is a media supporting leftfield Electronic music (giving priority to Modular Synthesis but not only). Providing ressources/interviews, a radio program aired via 7 antennas, and above all label-like streaming music for you to listen to… ... more

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