SUZANNE CIANI

To drop the needle on Suzanne Cianis retrospective LP collection Lixiviation is to be suspended in time. Soft tones beckon, synthesizers cascade, all looping gently but persistently like streams of analog rain. These are the sounds that would preface what would come to be called New Age music, that often maligned genre which, in the name of Spiritual Well-Being, led to some of the most insipid sounds ever committed to wax. But this is not your Yoga instructors New Age. As endless arpeggios fold into one another, Ciani conjures future worlds: transparent grids, infinite desert scapes, blinking lights, visions of otherworldly possibility. One thinks of the far out sounds of David Behrman, Franco Battiato and Terry Riley, the imagery of Italian utopianists SUPERSTUDIO, that heightened cultural moment when philosophy, science and mysticism merged for a few peak years. circuit board, follow a certain pattern. Theres the archetypal late 50s/early 60s image of the bookish gentleman in his 40s or 50s, likely bespectacled, undoubtedly in a white Lab coat. The Cosmic Traveler: the long hair who turned on in the early 70s, conjuring the black hit of Space with his 30 plus minute excursions onto the Astral Plane. And of course theres the asymmetrical New Wave dandy, to umbrella the various waves of the era (the brutalist futurism of Cold Wave, the out-and-out refutation that was No Wave, and the Synthesizer as symbol of PostRock Pop, i.e., New Wave). Though this last example did include a feministic strain, womens contributions (Mathematiques Modernes, Antena, et al.) were, as usual, overshadowed. Even today, as synthsdrivenot only the Underground but the Overgroundfrom so-called Hypnagogic Pop to Radio R&B, House, Techno and just about everything else goinghistory is only beginning to reappraise itself. Thankfully, through the benefit of reissues, which in the best hands cast an eye forward as they look back, Ciani and a small but select group of womenthe BBCs Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram, Italian producer Doris Norton, New Yorker Laurie Spiegel, and the more academically minded Eliane Radigue and Pauline Oliverosare getting their just due as essential Electronic pioneers. Ciani is undoubtedly the most upbeat and endearing synth nerd of the lot. Take a look at her appearance on Letterman where, to a stupefied Letterman, she delights in a sound world she might joyously describe as simply wondrous. You get the sense shed be the perfect person to teach children to use synths. Meanwhile, Letterman, eyes big as walnuts, looks like hes just dropped acid. Ciani defined Shortly thereafter, a voice enters the room. Atari video games, a womans kind but authoritative voice announces, matter of factly. A lovely, optimistic assortment of sparkling sounds suggesting an early 80s jingle follows, evoking that moment when the word digital was new and alien. We learn this piece soundtracked a short advert for a Chip facility showing men in spacesuits, introducing the world to what has become the norm: a world animated by computers. As in most realms, the world of Electronic Music, and more specifically, synthesizer-based music whether it be as composer, programmer or instrument builder/inventorhas been typically seen as a mans world: Bob Moog, Stockhausen, Eno,Pierre Henry, Raymond Scott, Manuel Gttsching, Kraftwerk, et al. The archetypes of the synthesizer maven tend to, not unlike a

byAlexis Georgopoulos All images courtesy of Suzanne Ciani Archive

the sounds of Atari and Coca Colaher entirely synth-fabricated sounds of a Coke bottle fizzing in a carbonated mist were realer than realand sprinkled her sound effect wizardry on top of Mecos cheeky, chart-topping disco version of the Star Wars theme. These were iconic sounds of the era and made Ciani the go-to for logotones of the time and earned her five Grammy nominations. But Ciani wasnt simply responsible for the sonics of adverts, impressive though they were. She also had a foot in the Avant Garde. Most often usingBuchla synthesizersCiani, in fact, worked with Don Buchlas synths almost exclusively at the Mills College Center for Contemporary Music these extended pieces had more in common with Gruppo NPS, Luc Ferrari or Vangelis (with whom she would collaborate on 1984s The Velocity of Love). Her 1982 album Seven Waves, recently reissued by Finders Keepers subsidiary Bird upon its 30th anniversary, was a defining moment of early New Age music, before the genre turned to sallow caricature. Other recent reissues, such as Voices for Packaged Souls (Dead Cert), her collaborative sound sculpture with sculptor Harold Paris, originally released in a private press run of 50, illuminate Cianis work in ways that have been up to now overlooked. Taken together, these three recent reissuescollecting pure synth experimentation, brief commercial vignettes and long form, far out synthscapes, create a newly minted portrait of a true innovator for a new generation that will, like her own, find it difficult to resist her charms.

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ANP: You grew up studying classical piano. Did your parents hope youd pursue that as a career? Suzanne Ciani: I grew up in a big Italian family, five girls and one boy...and according to my father, an orthopedic surgeon who was the youngest in his class at Harvard, all a woman needed to know was how to shave a man and polish his shoes.I think that this philosophy of low expectations gave me the freedom to pursue my own dreams and not to feel the pressure to become a doctor or lawyer. Though we do have a lawyer, an architect, an engineer, a visual artist, and a composer amongst the siblings.I was lucky in that we had a beautiful Steinway piano in the living room. My two older sisters were taking lessons and I started playing their lessons on my own.I taught myself to read music by knowing that middle C was under the S of Steinway and figuring out the rest.I quit after one year of studying with the teacher because he would not teach me classical music, just pop standards. So I played on my own for 10 years until high school, when I found a proper teacher at The Longy School of Music in Cambridge.I am grateful for the gift of having my music develop privately and naturally in my younger years.But I had a bit of catching up to do in classical piano technique. ANP: Do you remember first hearing a synthesizer, or a sound you knew didnt come from a traditional acoustic instrument? WasMusique Concrteyour first experience with synthesized sound? SC: My first experience of this sort was while I was a music student at Wellesley College.One evening we visited our brother school, MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and a professor there was using funds from a grant to program a computer to make sound.This was in about 1967.I empathized completely with his excitement at actually producing something audible from this machine and at that moment I knew this idea was part of my destiny. But I didnt run into it again until I went to Berkeley and met Don Buchla, the consummate electronic instrument designer, whose loft was next door

to sculptor Harold Paris.I was studying for a traditional Masters in music composition at U.C. Berkeley, but ended up spending all my time outside of the department, chasing this new dream. Thinking ofMusique Concrte, I did have an early pivotal experience:I had chronic earaches as a child and always had to wear a bathing cap while swimming.One day I couldnt stand it anymore and I ripped off the bathing cap and the pure sound of the water was overwhelming.After the muffled sound, hearing all of the sparkling high end was transformative. I did use someMusique Concrtetechniques on Voices of Packaged Souls, the limited edition LP I recorded in 196970 for Harold Paris show at Galerie Withofs, in Brussels.Working with tape machines and splicing blocks was second nature back then, but my true love was pure electronic sound. ANP: Was it the quality of limitless-ness of what you heard what attracted you?The idea that through amplitude and filters you could make the rustling of leaves, as you once said, sound like something youve never heard? Was it using a language that wasnt bound to traditional notation? SC: It was so many things.It was the quality of sound, how the ears were treated to a sonic spectrum that seemed so much larger than normal acoustic soundsespecially the high end of the spectrum.It was the promise of the unknown, a new frontier to explore that seemed intimate and personal because no one had been there.As a composer, it was the promise of independence, not to be dependent on the political process of getting music performed, knowing that most composers died without ever hearing their compositions.And it was the promise of freedom, working in a place that had no rules and no expectations, but with total control: you could create the composition exactly the way you wanted without depending on other performers and you had constant feedback during the process of composing.It was that a note could go on for days, a timbre could change instantly, notes could be played faster or more slowly than humanly possible and in rhythms with the steadiness of a perfect machine or in patterns

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so complex that it made the academic fascination with complexity seem simplistic. I was always more fascinated with the way notes couldmoveas opposed to a static timbre of sound. ANP: Was your first time playing a synthesizer at Mills College? Is it true you could pay $5 to play a Buchla synthesizer by the hour? SC: Yes.Mills College housed the San Francisco Tape Music Center, which had moved from the city and was funded in part by the Ford Foundation.One could rent time to play a Buchla 100 series, a Moog, or experiment with military surplus parts. I spent many a night there, playing by candlelight. But because I went to work in Don Buchlas factory right after graduate school, I also got to play in his gigantic studio, which had a towering number of modules and a swing hanging from the ceiling where you could take a break and listen to the sonic space. ANP: Your first teacher was Max Matthews, the person to essentially invent digital synthesis. Quaint as it may seem now, his computer version of Bicycle Built For Two was revolutionary. SC: I was very fortunate to take a course at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Labs with both Max Matthews and John Chowning, who was soon to discover the FM techniques that Yamaha made famous.Max had a childlike excitement about his work:his passion and energy were extraordinary and continued unabated until he died just last year.We designed modular tone generators on paper and then fed punched cards to be processed for the PDP-10 computer and, voila, the next day out would come a short musical recording.In other words, the process was not real time. It was all a wonderful education in understanding the fundamentals of sound and separating out the individual parameters that contributed to a sound. ANP: Were you or Max privy to what Delia Derybshire or Daphne Oram were up to at the BBC? I think (Finders Keepers head) Andy Votel referring to you as the Delia Derbyshire of the Atari generation is quite appropriate. SC: Actually, I had never heard of Delia or Daphne until a couple of months agooddly.I am absolutely thrilled to discover them, though, since I have always felt that women are naturally suited to the refinements of electronic music.I love seeing the gracefulness and delicacy of their hands on the machines.I have no idea whether Max was awareand now I cannot ask him, sadly. ANP: They, along with Eliane Radigue, Laurie Spiegel, Doris Norton and a post-Op Wendy Carlosas Votel mentions in hisLixiviationessaymake up the very small group of women in the field. That must have crossed your mind at some point... SC: I dont think about the gender of music very much, unless I am specifically investigating and then I am shocked at the paucity of women.I do think that the electronic medium does allow more opportunity for women, since the politics of traditional performance are maledominated.When I first looked for record label support, it was assumed that I was a singer.In the film world, I am credited with being the first woman to be hired to score a major Hollywood feature, and for that film and my subsequent big films I was always hired by women, a small minority in the film world. ANP: Did you feel that you wanted to incorporate things that the primarily male field was omitting? SC: The male studio engineers in New York City, for example, already had fixed ideas about sound and tried to fit electronics into that history. I preferred working with female engineers: Leslie Mona and Vicki Fabry,

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who seemed to listen with the fearless new ears required.It was also very important to me to reveal the sensuality of electronic sound, a feminine paradigm.My compositions were called Waves, as in my first album,SevenWaves.Not only was I ideologically attracted to the sea, but I felt the energy of a wave to have a very feminine form, building slowly and then releasing, and this became the compositional shape of my pieces. Also, of course, I got to design my own ocean waves that were specific for each piece. I also wanted my music to create a sense of security, safety, and peacefulness and I felt that the steadiness of the machine could provide the perfect subliminal communication of those feelings. ANP: Advertising music, jingles, et cetera, are typically written off by the higher brow but Ive always found the whole idea incredible. Songs+sounds are used to manipulate, and even though were very often aware of it, their power over us is still very effective, which is quite fascinating. Your selling something, yes, but to chase this essence of something, and to achieve this psychological effect is worth examining. SC: I love the subliminal aspect of advertisingthat notion that communication is on unconscious levels. And music and sound are perfect subliminal communicators: I could design a sound that might make you feel thirsty, or cold, or safe, or scared. It was not evil manipulation, but a form of poetry.The sound of a crystal jewel, a crispy potato chip. I do not subscribe to higher brow or lower brow.It is all apples and oranges.Pointless comparisons.I might write a symphonic score or a logo for Columbia Pictures that is three seconds long.Why compare them?I love all good music, whether pop or classical or ethnic. ANP: You created the sound of bubbles for CocaCola. Did you have any ethical dilemmas about doing commercial work or did you see it as a worthy opportunity to explore the instrument? SC: I loved doing commercial work, working in my own artistic bubble.I did refuse to do music for products to which I was morally averse, such as G.I. Joe, a war doll for kids.I was fairly unconscious of the real world of advertising, choosing to see each project as an artistic challenge. I also had a nobler purpose in my own mind, earning money to finance my record projects and I never lost sight of that goal.Once I was able to launch my artistic career sufficiently, I quit advertising. ANP: Paris 1971 meanwhile, or Lixiviation suggest a link to other artists like Ariel Kalma orKlaus Schulze, in the case of the former, and Laurie Spiegel or Terry Riley, in the case of the latter. Your scores for the sculptor Ron Mallory and David Wood gave you the opportunity to score more extended pieces. Was there a particular medium you found particularly alluring to score? Did you prefer one type of work over another? SC: I adored writing for dance, but never found as many opportunities as I wished. The abstract film, Lixiviation, that I scored for Ronald Mallory, was a perfect match for me...creating sound to marry the image and bring it to life.Working with Harold Paris project, Voices of Packaged Souls, was a defining experience for me, exploring the beginnings of sound design, interpreting specific images sonically. The piece called Paris (nothing to do with the sculptor) was a type of composition that was an on-going automatic composition: I would have the Buchla on day and night and the piece was continuous, dependent on subtle interactions of the modules that were defined and yet random, so that the piece was always new.It required constant tweaking to find the right balance of interactions. I once did an installation in the University of California Art Museum with the Buchla generating an ongoing piece. At the time, no one understood where the sound was coming from. They all thought there was some sort of recording being played.

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ANP: When I hear you started doing educational films, I imagine shaggy-haired kids in corduroy flying kites and doing voice-overs about what it feels like to make a kite stay up in the air. SC: The project I did was called Towns and Cities and introduced me to the concept that I could make a living in music! I think that was the first time I was paid. ANP: You did sound effects for the originalStepford Wives? Did you care for any of the soundtrack work that you heard around that time? SC: I was not much of a film buff at that timeI was busy just surviving in New York City. But historically, Ive always loved the scores of Bernard Hermann. ANP: Had you been familiar with Finders Keepers? One of my favorite pieces fromLixiviation, Clean Room, reminds me of some Sound Library music of the era. Did you always work by commission with particular companies or did you ever make recordings for Sound Library labels? SC: It was a great surprise for me to be contacted by B-Music/Finders Keepers Records.I was not familiar with them, but soon realized that they occupy a unique niche. They are very passionate about discovering lost worlds and it has been a privilege to work with them, which happily lead me to discover long-abandoned, though not forgotten, tapes in my vaults. I have always worked by commission.I do vaguely recall in the early 1970s, when I first arrived in Los Angeles, being locked in someones studio with my Buchla to create a syndicated radio ID package for a Philadelphia Radio station. I did background music for good weather, bad weather, heavy traffic, news, etc.But basically I was a gun for hire in the advertising world, where I worked as a mercenary artist to make the money to produce my artistic albums. ANP: Didnt you create some crazy sounds for a Kung Fu Film? SC: That does trigger some vague memory, but too vague to be able to amplify upon! ANP: How did you first link up with Atari? SC: My company in New York,Ciani-Musica, Inc., became the number one hi-tech music production house. The Atari agency was Young & Rubicam and the music director, Hunter Murtaugh, was a big fan and hired us for many major campaigns, including Merrill Lynch and Lincoln Mercury. Atari provided us with one of their games and from that I took the vocabulary of the sounds, recreating them into a track for the TV spots. I also was featured in an educational film Atari made for schools called Computers: Expressway to Tomorrow, in which I demonstrated sound design techniques. I was never very good at playing the games, though. ANP: In your description of the piece Second Breath you say you always referred to a synthesizer as the machine not the synthesizer because it had strange and inappropriate connotations. Can you explain what you meant? SC: The term synthesizer was unfortunate, because it had connotations of synthetic or imitation. Many people thought the purpose of such a machine was to replicate existing acoustic instruments, like flutes or strings, etc.This was definitely nothing I wanted to do.In fact, the musicians union in New York was so wary of synthesizers that they were not allowed in the union, the fear being that real musicians would be replaced and made obsolete.To discourage the use of these evil machines, the union required that synth players be paid double scale and paid again with each overdub.This, of course, benefitted me.Don Buchla had first made me aware of the inappropriateness of the synthesizer term: he never ever called his instruments synthesizers, but electronic music boxes.It was important to establish the instrument as a new and independent possibility and not something derivative. ANP: In 1979, you started recording what would beSeven Wavesand you became one of New Age musics early success stories. Certain elements ofSeven Wavesremind me of Vangelis, who you knew, right? Were you privy to the Cosmic Synth music coming from Germany and Japan and elsewhere in the 1970sIm thinking of Popol Vuh, Cluster, Eno, Deuter, Tangerine Dream, Kitaro and the many smaller label artists. SC: I met Vangelis during the recording of my second album,The Velocity of Love. I met him first in London and then in New York.He overdubbed percussion and CS-80 melodies on three of the cuts.He was larger than life and so amazingly musical. Oh my.And yes, I knew of Tangerine Dream and Kitaro and Tomita and Eno but did not know Popol Vul or Deuter. ANP: Have you caught wind of the renewed interest in this music over the past few years, with increasing numbers of young people making music with synths and sequencers? SC: Yes, Im actually just becoming aware of this and I think it is because there is a new generation of kids that are just beginning to realize that there was an analog world prior to the digital world.Analog was very hands on

and we learned to think of sound in all of its separate parameters, whereas younger musical technophiles have grown up in a preset world and perhaps alter the presets, but rarely, if ever, have the experience of building a sound from scratch. I do think Europe is leading the way in this revival. ANP: I think analog synthesizers appeal to players and listeners on many levels but what one can add to those now is a sense ofcultural memoryone that draws on Classical Minimalism, Cosmic Synth Music, German Synth Pop, John Carpenter films, what have you. There is certainly a trend toward nostalgia sometimes with an ironic glint, sometimes with an earnest fascination with the process and the sound. What do you think of contemporary producers pursuing the sound/approach to synthesis you were working with 30 years ago? SC: I think its wonderful and I hope that this time around the full promise of electronic music is not short-circuited again.I remember that once a black and white keyboard was made part of the instruments, in order to make the machines seem more familiar and musical, the future was lost.And we also suffered the demise of quadraphonic sound, which was perfect for electronic music, but otherwise made little sense. So hopefully this time around spatial control will come back and new interfaces will make playing the machines more organic. But we do need women in this endeavor.Really!Women can bypass the obvious and find the true sensuality of this medium.

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