Suzanne Ciani

Hanna Bächer

Please welcome Suzanne Ciani.

(applause)

Suzanne Ciani

It’s so lovely to be here and to share this absolutely special time with such a special group, a small group of people. I’m very excited to be here. I was supposed to come to be at Red Bull last year. Maybe some of you were supposed to come last year, I don’t know. As you know, the terrorists attack happened in Paris. This is actually my first time at Red Bull. Nice to be here. Thanks.

(applause)

Hanna Bächer

You’ve done way too many things to be framed in a brief intro. I was actually going to start with the story of someone else, and that is the nice gentleman that we see, who we see in the pictures here. Who is that?

Suzanne Ciani

That’s my dear friend. Oh, I’m going to cry just...

Hanna Bächer

I’m going to take over from here if you need a minute. Don’t worry. A few weeks ago, on September 17th of this year, Don Buchla, who is in the picture here, left this earth. He was a very dear friend of Suzanne and he was also maybe the most important encounter that you had in your life.

Suzanne Ciani

I’m sorry.

Hanna Bächer

Don’t be sorry.

Suzanne Ciani

It’s so new for me.

Hanna Bächer

Give it a minute.

Suzanne Ciani

Not to have him... OK, but we go way back. Really, for me, my beginnings of my career were with this person. I had just finished graduate school, a very traditional training. I got a master’s degree in composition. I wasn’t that happy in traditional music. It wasn’t a particularly good place for a woman. Every composer has had difficulty getting their music heard, traditional composers. Even [Gustav] Mahler, if he hadn’t been the conductor of the symphony, he wouldn’t have had the opportunities that he had.

Combined with being female, I looked at the possibilities of a future in traditional music, and it didn’t look good. I was open to something new. As luck would have it, my boyfriend at the time was teaching in the art department. His professor had a studio right next door to Don Buchla. These were big warehouses on the Oakland shorelines. It was an unusual area.

One night he took me over to meet Don Buchla. My life just changed completely because there... I knew about music technology a little bit. This was 1969. There wasn’t that much. When I saw Don, I just knew, when I saw his studio with all the modules, just mountains of modules there, I decided I would work for him. When I finished graduate school, I got a job soldering circuit boards and was fired after the first day. (laughs)

Hanna Bächer

Why?

Suzanne Ciani

I was fired because... Don was a taskmaster. He was a very serious person. When we worked at the table, soldering, we weren’t allowed to talk. The public radio station was on at the background. We could listen to that. We had very strict rules about when we could stop to eat. At the end of the day, they found a cold soldering joint. They said, “Oh, it must be the new girl. She’s out.”

Hanna Bächer

What did you do?

Suzanne Ciani

I said, “You can’t fire me.” I showed up the next day. I just came back. It was quite a struggle. My experience with Don is so real. It’s not some airy-fairy mystical thing. It was rough. I think our relationship, over the almost 50 years that I knew him, had two distinct episodes. One was in the beginning from ‘69 to, oh, after I moved to New York, maybe the first 10, 15 years. Then we had a break.

Then I moved back to California in ‘92, and we became friends. I had already given up playing the Buchla by that time. We became tennis partners. He loved tennis, I loved tennis. We would get together and play once a week. I had no intention of ever playing the Buchla again.

Hanna Bächer

Before we go to how you got back to playing the Buchla, what was the very first model that you yourself laid your hands on and where was that?

Suzanne Ciani

The one that Buchla had in his studio was a 200. There was also a facility called... It was the new housing for the San Francisco Tape Music Center. That was now housed in Mills College. It had no connection, visual connection with the college, other than that it had a place there. I could go there for $5 an hour, but they never ever collected the money. For $5 an hour, you could play a Buchla 100 and a Moog, an early Moog 15, I guess, and surplus electronics, surplus parts.

Hanna Bächer

What kind of institution is that, or has that been, the San Francisco Tape Music Center? Because not everyone might know.

Suzanne Ciani

It was really started... The impetus for Don Buchla was Morton Subotnick. Mort had this idea that he wanted an electronic machine. He found Don Buchla. Thus was born this early voltage-controlled electronic music concept.

By the time I met Don, which is a few years later, he had already progressed enormously in his vision of what this machine would be. I talked to Mort, actually, at a Red Bull interview a year ago. I was surprised to find that he never thought of the Buchla as a performance instrument. He thought of it as something you recorded. You made a nice sound, you put it on tape, you made another sound, you go for dubbed. That’s how Silver Apples [of The Moon] was made. It was really a taped project.

By the time I met Don, I was proselytized with his new vision, which is that he was making a performance instrument in the tradition of musical instruments that you play live. Is that the question you asked me? Where are we? I could go on and on, but I want to stay on track here.

Hanna Bächer

Can we see the second picture, please? [picture on screen] I love this picture because you’re actually using, I think, a tiny telephone patch cable as your hair band.

Suzanne Ciani

Oh, right. That was the year I went to New York City, 1974. In keeping with the concept of performance instruments, you can see that Don did everything. He designed those cases. It came in portable cases. He designed everything, how it was padded, how it fit in. It could travel. Of course it didn’t travel well. I hate to say that, but that was the beginning of the problems that I had, was when I moved to New York. This was 1974 and this was a picture taken for The New York Times.

Hanna Bächer

How long had you played the Buchla when you went to New York? How many years?

Suzanne Ciani

By that time... I started in ‘69, so about five years. I went to New York with just the Buchla. That’s all I had. I went to do a live concert. A friend of mine was a sculptor and he had an opening in an art gallery. He asked me to perform. I went a month ahead of time to New York and I rehearsed for a month. I did the concert, but I never left New York.

I’m telling this story backwards, actually, because from the second I got to New York, I never wanted to leave it. It just electrified me, and so I stayed. I never went back, I had all my things put in storage, and I had just the Buchla, and I lived with that.

Hanna Bächer

Is this the recording that we have on vinyl here, the concert?

Suzanne Ciani

This is pretty close to that time, this recording is from 1975. The first recording, which was done in the art gallery there, was no recording made. My dad made a cassette recording, and I lost it. These, the next two concerts in 1975, there were other ones, but the one at WBAI was recorded rather professionally, but in stereo of course. All of my performances were quadrophonic, and the other one at Phill Niblock’s was recorded just with a mic in the room, you can hear the trucks. But it’s also interesting that you can hear all the switches being moved, because the process of performing the Buchla, you have to do a lot of real-time switching. I would do the WBAI first, because that was the first one, sorry.

Hanna Bächer

Yeah, here it is, it got re-released this year by Finders Keepers.

(music: Suzanne Ciani – “Concert At WBAI Free Music Store” / applause)

Suzanne Ciani

Thank you.

Hanna Bächer

I’m wondering at that time, how long did it take you, from an idea, to hear a sound? How long did it take you to get to a point where you had to patch the synthesizer in a way that you could play it like that?

Suzanne Ciani

The approach, in this release, especially in the archival release... There is a booklet that goes with it, because I got a grant right after I did this, and the national endowment. They asked me to write a paper, and I would never have done this, had I not been given this grant. And basically this paper outlines how to play the Buchla. It has the diagrams for the spatial control, and it has the patch set up, and all the techniques. There are many techniques that I distilled from my years of performing on that instrument. I still use them today, but it’s a slightly different approach, because the instrument is different today. This instrument had no memory, but you could store the sequencer pitches, so there were four rows of 16 pitches. I had something called the Multiple Arbitrary Function Generator, which they didn’t really make an update of that one. That was called a MARF, and now they have the DARF, which is the Dual Arbitrary Function Generator, and it’s not as good as the MARF, but I’m getting sidetracked, what was the question?

Hanna Bächer

Basically there are two versions of the instrument that Susan played over the years. There’s a 200, and now she’s playing a 208, but we’re talking about the times of the 200, and you couldn’t really save things. Also, before you went to New York, you did a summer course in computer music, right, with John Chowning?

Suzanne Ciani

Yes.

Hanna Bächer

During that time, I think it’s difficult for people to imagine nowadays, that there was actually a time where you had to compute music. You had to put in numbers, then let it process for a few hours.

Suzanne Ciani

Yeah, overnight.

Hanna Bächer

Overnight, how did that work?

Suzanne Ciani

You kids, you just don’t know what that’s like. You used punch cards, and you’ve heard of that, right? Punch cards. You would design these pieces, you’d draw out all the oscillators, and all the routing and all that, and put the numbers in. One time, I did this whole composition, I was so excited, I went in the next day to pick up the tape, which was like gargantuan, and I had forgotten to specify a volume. The whole thing computed, but it had no volume, the piece was in there, you just couldn’t hear it. I learned a lot doing the computer music, and it was such a privilege to work with Max Mathews. He’s just a saint. We’re at a time right now, where we’re really seeing the passing of some of the great cornerstones of this music technology. In my lifetime, I’m much older than you are, but I have seen the beginnings, and now we’re starting to lose those people that started it.

Hanna Bächer

Max Mathews and John Chowning were both teaching at Stanford at that time, and I think John Chowning is most known for development of FM synthesis, etc. Just that you have some…

Suzanne Ciani

Frequency modulation, he licensed it to Yamaha and made a lot of money for the university, Stanford.

Hanna Bächer

At this time, when many of these inventions first appeared in your life, how did you imagine the future?

Suzanne Ciani

I thought everybody would have one of these in minutes. I really did, and I was very patient, because nobody knew what was going on. If I played the Buchla, nobody even knew that the sound was coming from the machine. It was so heartbreaking in a way, the communication gap, and I always took the time to explain, because I felt responsible that I was going to help all this to happen. It was just never going to happen then, it wasn’t time to happen, but now it’s happening.

Hanna Bächer

I was going to say, in this room, sort of, everyone has something, one machine that has something to do with the Buchla 200. I think there’s a pretty big chance we are 100% here. But many years passed between that. As you said, you moved to New York, and the first few years were quite a struggle to survive there, because all you had was a Buchla, and all you did was music.

Suzanne Ciani

Right, it became clear to me, because I was living in Soho at a time before it was Soho, and at one point I was sleeping on the floor of Philip Glass’s studio, and... There were a lot of artists there and actually a lot of them would be going to Berlin. Berlin was very hot, even back then. The artists had something to sell. They had drawings. They had paintings. They had things. We didn’t have anything to sell because you couldn’t. There were no CDs then. A normal person couldn’t make an LP. You had to have a record deal to get an LP. There was nothing that we could monetize except maybe performing. That was the only option. I tried to get a record deal. I went every place with my Buchla and they said “Why don’t you sing? Why don’t you play the guitar? What’s wrong with you?”

Even the concerts were hard. I had a date booked at Lincoln Center. I said, “Well I need four speakers.” I said, “I can only play in quadraphonic.” They said, “Well we can’t do that.” I said, “Well then I can’t play,” and that was the end of that. I don’t know if you wanted to hear all of this story but I decided to change the theater, so I started a corporation called the Electronic Center for New Music. They were about to rebuild Avery Fisher Hall and I thought if I could get all these techno-audio engineering people on my board, which I did, we would design a new theater that could accommodate electronic music. I went to Lincoln Center. I had my board and I had all my people and I said, “This is what we need to do,” and they said, “Who are you? You’re not rich. You’re not famous. You’re not Leonard Bernstein.” I said, “Oh you need rich and famous? OK. I’ll be back.”

Hanna Bächer

Can we watch the first video please?

(video: GE Beeping Dishwasher Commercial)

And that’s how you got rich and famous.

Suzanne Ciani

Yeah. Let me just tell you because you’ll understand. I mean, there was no synchronization of picture and tape machine in those days. There was no SMPTE timecode. There was no lock. We were working with a two-inch machine. I’m going to tell you about the old days. The video recorders were these lumbersome 3/4" pneumatic cassette machines and you had to train yourself to start them manually, precisely, so much ahead of time so that they would actually start at the same time. Every single one of those beeps was timed to picture. You know? They gave me a picture, I had to make the beeps go with it. It was a huge, herculean job because every time we had to check a beep we had to go through this primitive, manual starting of these machines.

Hanna Bächer

Was it easier for you to get your more experimental ideas through in the ad world than in the music world at that time?

Suzanne Ciani

The music world, especially the recording world, was definitely closed. They look backwards. They say, “This is the hit we have. Can we get another one like that?” They want what they already have. They’re not looking to break through really, not those big record companies. And advertising is like, “Oh my god, let’s be different. Let’s be on the edge. Let’s do something. We don’t care if we understand it, we want something new. We want to be the first.” It was perfect for me to break through in advertising.

Hanna Bächer

You did get ignored though a few times, for example, by a gentleman called Billy Davis.

Suzanne Ciani

Right. This is another one of my stubborn stories. Yeah, I was knocking on doors. I was hungry. This was a great motivation. I had my Buchla, I had a list of the top 20 advertising agencies, and I had a calendar. I would write down on the calendar when I called, and they would always say, “Call back in two weeks.” So I would call back in two weeks and they would say, “Call back in two weeks.” I had this long list and every once in a while they’d say, “OK, come on in.” So I had an appointment with Billy Davis, the head of music at the largest advertising agency in the world.

Hanna Bächer

And a veteran of Motown.

Suzanne Ciani

Yes, a veteran of Motown. Amazing guy. He brought Motown to Madison Avenue. He did all the Coca-Cola music and more. He was amazing. Anyway, he stood me up once, he stood me up twice, and then he stood me up the third time and I said, “Wait a minute.” I was in his office and they said he wasn’t there, and I said, “Well where is he?” They told me where he was and I went over to the studio and I said, “You had an appointment with me,” and he said, “Who are you?” This is the story, though. At that very moment they were playing a Coca-Cola commercial and they had a hole in it. It was a radio spot. He said, “Well what do you do?” I said, “I play the Buchla.” “What’s that?” “Well I make sounds.” “Oh, OK.”

Then he shows me this opening. He said, “Can you do something in there?” I said “Yes, of course.” He said, “What do you need?” I said, “I need my Buchla.” He said, “Go get it.” I went and got the Buchla and what happened?

(video: Coca-Cola commercial)

I made this little sound called “the pop and pour,” and they used it in every commercial all over the world. So I hit the... [makes jackpot arm move]. All of this meant that I could launch my recording career because I, by that time, figured out that the record companies weren’t going to be financing my records.

Hanna Bächer

There was one, sort of, other milestone of those years, one other sound-design milestone, at least in my taste. Can we please watch the next video?

(video: Omni Magazine feature)

Not surprisingly Bally Entertainment advertised this as a sexy, new pinball game.

Suzanne Ciani

I had no idea how many young boys were getting excited by that game. (laughs)

Hanna Bächer

Those machines are still around. There’s actually one in Montréal in a pinball parlor.

Suzanne Ciani

Yes, I’ve heard. I have to go see it.

Hanna Bächer

Did you ever get one?

Suzanne Ciani

I did, I got one but I never had room for it. You know, I don’t have one.

Hanna Bächer

At that time you were doing ads and sound design for machines such as this one, but were you involved in playing on other people’s music?

Suzanne Ciani

Other people’s music?

Hanna Bächer

Did people call you up and ask you to do strange...

Suzanne Ciani

Oh, I did a lot of sessions. Yeah I mean, when I first got to New York I did session work, so I was a gun for hire. I did a lot of CTI jazz records, I did Meco’s Star Wars disco version. I did things for the movies Fame, The Stepford Wives. Then I saw that people didn’t really know how to use electronics effectively because I was always being called in after tracks had been laid down. They wanted me to add something to it. Well you could add a certain thing but you couldn’t be rhythmically, the core. I knew we had to start with the electronics. I started my own company basically so I could do it all, do the whole production. I knew how to integrate it better. You know, you’d be hired to add something and there would be no space or there wouldn’t be the right opportunity.

Hanna Bächer

Just looking up you had this amazing quote, trademark quote saying, “Suzanne Ciani, supplying synthesized seasoning,” I love that.

Suzanne Ciani

OK, right, it was seasoning at first and then it became from the ground up, the structure.

Hanna Bächer

You were talking about the Star Wars disco theme, I’d like to play a few seconds of that.

Suzanne Ciani

OK.

(music: Meco – “Title Theme” / applause)

The recording sounds very bassy, yeah, OK.

Hanna Bächer

Recording sounds very bassy and Suzanne just told me it’s the wrong speed, it’s a WAV file. I don’t know how it could possibly...

Suzanne Ciani

I know.

Hanna Bächer

My computer’s older...

Suzanne Ciani

It sped up, yeah, OK. Well anyway, that was a fun project.

Hanna Bächer

What was your experience when it comes to how people were trying to incorporate the synthesizer in their compositions? What were they expecting, knowing electronics too little? The composers that you worked with.

Suzanne Ciani

Well, you know the whole thing with... the technology kind of took a left turn. When I came to New York and I had the Buchla, I didn’t use the keyboard. It opened up things in a new way of sound design. Then, all these instruments started to come out that had keyboards. It changed the perception of electronic music to something that was just a timbre that you played on a keyboard and that you might replace or augment a traditional instrument. Maybe you’d be part of the string section or you’d be a flute or maybe even an odd sounding flute. It was upsetting to me because it really narrowed the purview of what was possible with electronics. It just kept going in that direction. It became more and more keyboard oriented. For me, electronics... Because I’m a Buchla [player], I started with the Buchla. It was never about the timbre or the sound really, it was about the way the sound could move, how you could control it. It wasn’t like, “Oh what a great sound.” It was, “No, what a great arc of motion.” You know, a sound that starts here and then it ends up up here and then it spins around the room, it’s a motion.

It was a different approach to the possibilities. You know, it got complicated because the unions thought that electronic music was replacing musicians. That was a dead end, that was a dangerous thing. Actually, it worked for me. I don’t know if any of you care about this, but in order to punish people for using the synthesizer, we didn’t call it a synthesizer but electronic music. The union said, “Well you have to pay double scale.” They didn’t want you to hire a synthesist. Every time they overdub, you have to pay them again. By the rules of the union, if I went in to do a session and somebody asked me to play three lines, I made what six people would make. It worked for me. (laughs)

Hanna Bächer

You just said that you didn’t call it the synthesizer: was that because you rejected the idea of the machine synthesizing what an instrument would do?

Suzanne Ciani

Yes.

Hanna Bächer

What did Don Buchla think about that?

Suzanne Ciani

Well, that was his concept. You know, I was born of Don Buchla’s ideas. He thought the keyboard was an inappropriate interface. Even though I grew up as a pianist, when I started to play the Buchla, I didn’t touch a keyboard for ten years. I didn’t want anything to do with it. The other thing, he’d never want to use the word “synthesizer,” he didn’t know what to call it. He’d call it the electric music box, other wise you’d say electronic music instrument.

Hanna Bächer

At the same time there were other instrument developers who did use keyboards, for example Moog, you worked with Moog synthesizers or instruments as well didn’t you?

Suzanne Ciani

Actually, no, I didn’t. The Minimoog was a huge hit at that time in New York. It was basically that bass sound you heard on everything and the filter was wonderful. I didn’t start working with Moog until a few years ago. You know, they invited me to the first Moogfest. I said I would go because I wanted to represent Don Buchla. I played this thing called a piano bar, which is something that Don invented, it was a MIDI interface, you put this thing on top of a traditional piano and it senses the pitch and the volume and translates it into MIDI. Moog manufactured that. I played that at the first Moogfest and then at the last Moogfest they invited me to do something special for Don. Anyway, they’d become friends. I mean in the old days it was this polarization, Moog was in the east and Buchla was in the west. There was this warfare going on.

As far as I can tell, over the years, all of that has dissolved. There aren’t any adamant parties anymore. In the beginning there were, and so now everybody’s friends. That’s great.

Hanna Bächer

I would like to show another clip, that shows you using, the third synthesizer, actually one that Dave Smith developed, the Prophet-5. Can we please watch the next video?

(video: Suzanne Ciani on The David Letterman Show / applause)

Hanna Bächer

You’ve been a guest at the David Letterman morning show at NBC in, I think, 1980, and when I watch the recording, the video of that, I realize two things. A) how new this was for him, and B) him being almost insecure, surprised, or, you know, just not used to standing next to a woman who is doing technology, and who knew technology a lot better than him. One thing we haven’t talked about so far today is how was that for you, being the only woman in the room with the machines?

Suzanne Ciani

Well, you know, I was lucky that I was doing something that nobody understood. You know? That definitely gave me the edge. Nobody could argue with it, and nobody could interfere. In that way, I was lucky because, I think if you are a woman, and if you want to move forward, it’s harder to be noticed if you’re in a pool of men doing the same thing. I think it worked for me as a woman because I didn’t have any competition. There weren’t even any guys doing this, really. Finding something unique.

Hanna Bächer

Did it change in the 20 years before that, or ten years before that, from the ’60s when you were at Berkeley, the late ’60s, to the David Letterman show. Did it change? Was it always the same for you, to be the woman with the machines? Or did it get easier over time?

Suzanne Ciani

Certain things I’ve noticed vis-a-vis that topic of women, and that is that, one area, I got a feature film in 1980. I was considered the first woman to be hired to score a major Hollywood feature. Another woman was not hired to do a major Hollywood feature until 1994. The opportunities, the fact that I had this little edge by being unusual, gave me visibility, but even that wasn’t enough to change the gears of the music business in any way. We’re still in the process of changing those gears a little bit.

You know, I had wanted to be an engineer. Nobody would hire... When I started out, I always had female engineers. I loved women engineers. It’s hard to say you like one gender over another, but honestly, in electronic music, which was different then, the men were coming from an already entrenched approach to sound. They were working in pop music or standard music. They could tweak a bass, they could EQ a drum set. They had all those go-to solutions. But what I was doing had no go-to solution. It was like, "OK, what are we hearing right now? How does it sit in the track? What do we need to do right now with this sound that has no precedent?" The women that I worked with were not already stuck in something. I have to say that I always got a great result from the female engineers.

Hanna Bächer

One of your female engineers was, you have to help me with her last name, Leslie...

Suzanne Ciani

Leslie Mona-Mathis, yeah.

Hanna Bächer

I want to see one last tiny bit of an interview, of a video. It’s Fifth Wave recording session, part three, please.

(video: Fifth Wave Recording Session, Part 3 / applause)

Hanna Bächer

Leslie was one of the engineers working in your studio for the recording of your very first actual solo record in 1982 called Seven Waves.

Suzanne Ciani

Yes, yes.

Hanna Bächer

That you self-financed. How come?

Suzanne Ciani

Well, it took two years to do that album. As I said, I looked for a record deal, and I couldn’t get one. It was very expensive then to record. We didn’t have computers, we didn’t have home studios. That was a home studio. That home studio, I got because I did the film score and I used the money from the film score to build my home studio. Most of Seven Waves was done in outside studios. I would block out a studio for a weekend, and it would cost thousands of dollars. We’re in a different time now. The instruments were hugely expensive. I had one instrument, the synclavier, that was over $2,000 dollars. Ten megabytes of memory for the synclavier cost $50,000.

You guys are in another... I’m in that world with you now, so I’m very, very happy to be here. The studios were really expensive, and the project, you’d spend a hundred thousand dollars recording an album. I wanted it to be the top, so when NICAM memory came in, we had to go to the studio with the NICAM. They had EMT plates that sounded the best. There were things that cost money, and I didn’t want that to be a deciding factor, so I... Yeah, yeah.

Hanna Bächer

Working in the ad world to do that, basically.

Suzanne Ciani

Yeah. Not only did the ad world give me money, it gave me a lot of experience, because in those days it was like a renaissance. We worked in the top studios with the top talent. You could get Steve Gadd on drums, Michael Brecker, the Brecker brothers, Judson two eight eight hundred. You called one number and you could book any musician, any singer. A lot of the singers became pop singers. You had an amazing talent pool. You had the best recording facilities, and you got a lot of great experience in the studio. The weird thing was that even though I worked with all these great musicians in advertising or jingles, whatever, I didn’t use them on my personal albums. Just a very select few, like Elliott [Randall]... the guitar player. Oh gosh.

Hanna Bächer

The guitar player Elliot?

Suzanne Ciani

Who lives...

Hanna Bächer

I don’t know his last name either.

Suzanne Ciani

Oh god, you probably don’t know either. Anyway, every once in a while, I would put one of them on the album, yep.

Hanna Bächer

Why was that? Why didn’t you use them?

Suzanne Ciani

Because it was art, in a way. Even though I felt that I worked as an artist in my commercial work, because I had a lot of independence, freedom. I did go into a bubble, and I did what I wanted to do, but I made this distinction about: I didn’t want my music to be coming through the machinery of pop music.

Hanna Bächer

The machinery that it kind of got released in was actually not really pop music, but the very new genre. You became famous in, I guess, new age.

Suzanne Ciani

Right. Somebody told me new age is making a comeback now. Could that be? Is it really? Oh my god.

Audience Member

I’ve had [inaudible].

Suzanne Ciani

You did?

Audience Member

[inaudible]

Suzanne Ciani

Yeah, yeah, don’t drive with it, yeah. (laughs)

Hanna Bächer

It’s maybe thanks to you that it’s making a comeback.

Suzanne Ciani

Oh my.

Hanna Bächer

Did you like it at that time? Did you like to be under this umbrella, new age?

Suzanne Ciani

The term new age didn’t come in my experience until my third album. The first two, Seven Waves and The Velocity of Love, had no category. Then Neverland, the third album, this category appeared, new age. They put me in it, and it was good news and bad news. It was good news because now there was a place to find it, but it was bad news because... I don’t want to poison your mind at all, but it was very controversial the first time around, new age, because it became a catch-all. Nobody really knew what it was at first. It became a catch-all for all instrumental music, and some of it... It just went the gamut of spa music to sophisticated instrumental music, and nobody under this enormous umbrella could agree as to what, really, it was.

To me, I just divorced myself from the controversy. I said “You know, I was making this music before new age. I’m making it after new age. I don’t care what you call it.”

Audience Member

I just wanted to say I think that for me, or people my age, a lot of people around me, musicians, listen to new age. I think maybe we’re mixing new age and ambient as a whole, like this healing music thing.

Suzanne Ciani

The odd thing was that Seven Waves, for me, was a healing music record, OK? I noticed in electronics that you had this perfect rhythm that I thought gave one comfort and predictability. Not only could you have a nice, regular rhythm, but it could be very, very slow. Humans couldn’t play slow perfectly, so the whole beauty of the machine, to me, was that it would give you this safe place to be. It created a world of sensuality, also, something physical, something that felt good.

Hanna Bächer

Maybe ambient was just under the new age umbrella for a certain kind of time. That was just everything, like you said, everything was new age, but I think we should listen to one track so everyone gets an idea.

(music: Suzanne Ciani - "The Velocity Of Love" / applause)

Suzanne Ciani

Thank you.

Hanna Bächer

You got nominated for five Grammys for this kind of music.

Suzanne Ciani

Yeah. That was, by the way, the first time that I added an acoustic instrument to the electronics, that one song. That was the last song I did for the second album and I added piano.

Hanna Bächer

Because at this time you stopped playing the Buchla 200. Why was that?

Suzanne Ciani

I had an intervention. I had a nervous breakdown basically, because I had moved to New York and the Buchla is fragile. It would break and absolutely nobody could fix it. Don even came to New York once and we had the head of the Audio Engineering Society and we had Don’s versions of his schematics, which nobody could understand. It was just beyond – I’m a little helpless as an electronic musician because I’m not an engineer. I didn’t design the inside. I’m responsible for the outside.

I think in this field that it is a collaborative process. You have to focus on the side that you want to put all your energy into. I do see this work as involving a partnership, and Don as I said was somewhat difficult with me in those early days. I would send the machine back to be fixed and then he would ship it to New York and it would come back even more broken than when it went because of the shipping.

There was no solution. A friend said, “You’ve got to start playing other instruments.” I said. “No, no, no, I won’t.” People started giving me instruments and buying me instruments and saying do that, and so I did make a transition, and then I started working with Roland and Yamaha. And Yamaha sponsored me for many years with tons of equipment for live performance. I did move to other instruments, but of course it was different. Well, it’s always different, right, because the machine is going to dictate what it is, the parameters of how you work. Playing a Yamaha, they had some nice designs but it wasn’t a Buchla. It wasn’t an integrated performance system.

Hanna Bächer

I can’t possibly imagine how that must have felt. You spent how many years? 10 years with this one instrument and then it’s gone and there’s no way to get another one. It’s just like...

Suzanne Ciani

Yeah it was traumatic.

Hanna Bächer

It’s as if you’re a painter and someone takes your...

Suzanne Ciani

Violin away or your painting whatever, right? Yeah, it was very traumatic and that’s why I wasn’t anxious to get back into it. Don, as I said we played tennis for years and then he called one day and he said, “Look, if you’re ever thinking of going back.” Oh, I tried to get the 200 fixed, it had broken down and it couldn’t be fixed, OK?

Hanna Bächer

I think it’s even in a museum in Canada right?

Suzanne Ciani

Yes, it’s in a museum in Canada. Anyway, Don said, “Look if you ever are thinking of getting a Buchla again,” he said, “Now is the time to do it because I’m about to sell the company.” I said, “Well maybe we can make a deal,” and we did. We made a deal. I won’t tell you what it was because it’s really very funny. Now I have to tell you. (laughs) Am I really going to tell you?

Hanna Bächer

I think so.

Suzanne Ciani

Oh my god, OK. Well, Don’s car broke down and he had a real trashy heap of a car, and I had a beautiful Audi A6. I decided that I didn’t want that car, I wanted a more environmentally conscious car. I wanted to buy a diesel, which I thought was a smart car, that was before the scandal, OK. I said, “Don, I have an A6 and maybe we can do a trade,” and so we did. He got the beautiful Audi and I got the Buchla plus some other things. The 200e I still have and it looks great. My car I took care of, like perfectly, right? I love those machines. I took such good care of it. The last time I saw my Audi A6 at Don’s it was covered in mold. The mirrors were broken off. Forget it, but anyway. Don’t tell anybody else that that’s how I got it.

Hanna Bächer

Basically there were what, like, 15 years where you did not play a Buchla between the 200s...

Suzanne Ciani

Right, exactly.

Hanna Bächer

Were deteriorating?

Suzanne Ciani

Yes.

Hanna Bächer

Then getting the 200e. That was after you moved back from New York to the West Coast and I would like to watch a bit of video number two please.

(video: Sunergy documentary / applause)

You moved back from New York to the West Coast and you moved to a place called Bolinas.

Suzanne Ciani

Mm-hmm.

Hanna Bächer

I think one of the most known stories about Bolinas is that there are no street signs leading to it. Is that true?

Suzanne Ciani

It’s famous for wanting to be unknown is what I say. There’s no sign. They don’t want people to find it so they take down the street signs and they took it down for so many years that they just stopped putting it up. Now people have GPSes so they can get there.

Hanna Bächer

Is it a village or a small town?

Suzanne Ciani

It’s a small town an hour outside of San Francisco right on the coast.

Hanna Bächer

In this video you have collaborated with a woman called Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. How did you two meet?

Suzanne Ciani

She lived in the same small town. It was really kind of amazing. We have these community dinners where once a month somebody volunteers to cook and everybody comes to somebody’s home. You bring your own plate and your fork and your glass and your drink. You have a community dinner. After dinner, I’m sitting on the floor and Kaitlyn came up – I didn’t know who she was. She didn’t know who I was.

We started talking and I said, “Well what do you do?” She said, “Well I play the Buchla,” and I said, “Really, oh.” I live in this... it’s very remote and I’m always looking for an assistant, but it’s hard to find anybody there. I was so excited and said maybe we could work together and I was getting ready for a tour with the guys from Finders Keepers. She came over and she was my assistant for a while and then she came up with a project.

She said there’s a special thing called FRKWYS and they do younger artists, older artists collaborations and so we did that together in my studio and that’s where we were.

Hanna Bächer

You just mentioned the guys from Finders Keepers which is a UK-based label with a lot of re-issues and they contacted you one day right? Where did they find you? How did that call happen or that email?

Suzanne Ciani

OK, I credit, I don’t know... credit, blame maybe, Finders Keepers for bringing me back into this current world of electronic music that I didn’t know was going on. What they did, Andy Votel contacted me and I didn’t know who he was and I didn’t pay any attention. This went on for a year, two years.

Finally, he sent me a bunch of records and I thought they were the weirdest things I’d ever heard. I didn’t get it, and then he said, “Look, just go into your archives, get some old tapes.” I thought, “Well you know, I really should.” You know they always say that 30 years, 35 years is like the maximum for a recorded analog tape because it deteriorates. I thought, "This is the time, if I want to preserve these tapes I should." I started transferring tapes. They had to be baked and so forth. I sent a few things to Andy and I said, “I don’t know why anybody would want to hear this stuff, so if you want to put it out, fine.”

I didn’t know who he was, he was in Manchester and I thought it was obscure. All of a sudden I’m on national radio and all this stuff is happening. I find out that there’s a revolution going on in electronic music that I didn’t know about. As I say, I was under a rock and Andy released all these things. This was a compilation of commercial things and early electronic stuff and then he did the Buchla concerts. It’s all his fault.

Hanna Bächer

I think we should at this point open up to questions, I’m just going to play a bit of a 7" that I think you also released.

(*music: Suzanne Ciani - "Liberator" / applause *)

Suzanne Ciani

I never heard that version actually. That was originally a commercial and I guess they edited it to make it into...

Hanna Bächer

For Atari.

Suzanne Ciani

Yeah, it was a commercial for Atari, yeah.

Hanna Bächer

New age fans and Atari fans out here.

Suzanne Ciani

Right. (laughs)

Audience Member

Hi.

Suzanne Ciani

Hi.

Audience Member

I read an interview, you gave Philip Glass synth lessons?

Suzanne Ciani

Yes, I did. He was hopeless. Absolutely hopeless. I said, “Philip, your music is made for sequencers.” His friends, his musicians were always going crazy counting, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2, 1-2-3, trying to play those patterns. I thought, this is a no brainer, I have my synth in your studio, let’s just do it. He was very studious and we had regular times and he would show up and it just didn’t, couldn’t work. He just wasn’t going to get it.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Suzanne Ciani

It was a loss in a way, yeah.

Audience Member

Hi.

Suzanne Chiani

Hi.

Audience Member

Hi, first I’d like to say that I’m so happy to be with you in the same space right now.

Suzanne Ciani

Thank you.

Audience Member

I guess when the sound from the machine, when you play the first song, it’ll be really, really innovative and people called it, maybe it was the sound from the future. Maybe people called it, it could be the sound from the future, right?

Suzanne Ciani

The picture?

Audience Member

From the future.

Suzanne Ciani

Oh from the future, oh yes, yes.

Audience Member

I guess so. And then now suddenly, some people try to make some sound like wearable sound like SubPac or like for example, like Björk trying to move to the space to the virtual reality now and in my opinion, one day maybe it’s too rational. Maybe one day the human musician will not be needed anymore, just AI or just...a computer is going to make music, instead of a human or whatever. Anyway, I’m curious about how you think about, how do you predict the future of sound from now.

Suzanne Ciani

I think a lot of my ideas come from a long time ago. We had a way of thinking back then that was really futuristic and some of those things happened and some didn’t. I think it’s fine if machines make music all by themselves. That’s okay, we’re going to design the machines. We have input, but I think what I first saw back then was more interactive electronics with sound. Environmental sound, where you’re sitting here in this environment: everything to me was always spacial. The sound fills the space evenly, right? The walls are actually sound producers. A new system of speakers, like a poly plane, where you’re coating the surface and the surface becomes a speaker. It’s not pinpointed in any way. I could see where people would just interact with the sound. You’d each have your sequencer pitch that you could tune. We could all make music together by adjusting our part of the total thing. This was an idea I had with furniture a long time ago.

I think some of the new interfaces are exciting, the graphic interfaces where it’s gesture oriented. I think that’s a wonderful area. I’m aware that I’m playing an ancient design in a way. I have patch cords that I have to set up, it takes an hour just to put in the patch cords. I have a lot of issues. I don’t know if this is what you’re talking about, but I think in the future we need higher levels of design. You know, like airplanes are designed not to fail. If you had an airplane that crashed every three weeks, it just wouldn’t work. Whereas the synth I play crashes all the time. The machines, there’s this magical balance between reliability and magic interaction, but the engineers have to give us the reliability so that in the future... it’s just that my particular pet peeve right now is that the machine is not reliable. I don’t know if you have that issue. Do you have that issue? No you don’t care. (laughs)

Audience Member

Actually, I have another question.

Suzanne Ciani

OK.

Audience Member

Sometimes I’m curious about like, do you think sound could be really audible forever? Like sometimes I feel like sound could be not audible someday, like, could be just data or I don’t know, maybe it’s too idea, “ideable...”

Suzanne Ciani

Well that’s like my computer piece that had no volume. I mean, I think they have sound, you have to have some volume or you could just imagine it. I think, where are you from?

Audience Member

South Korea.

Suzanne Ciani

Wow, OK. Do you play?

Audience Member

Yeah, yeah I play with you today, during your playing, but I’m going to play.

Suzanne Ciani

What’s your name?

Audience Member

My name’s MIIIN.

Suzanne Ciani

Oh, nice.

Audience Member

I’m going to play the same time during your playing.

Suzanne Ciani

Oh.

Audience

My playing is destroying the place.

Suzanne Ciani

It’s silent. (laughs)

Audience Member

No, no, my plan is destroy the art space, so I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so excited, I’m sorry.

Suzanne Ciani

You know, I think I’m going to give a silent concert tonight. I like this concept.

Audience Member

Really nice to meet you.

Suzanne Ciani

Nice to meet you too.

Audience Member

Hi, first of all thanks for being here and basically thanks for everything you ever did in terms of the development of electronic music. I was just wondering if you’re trying to keep up with the development of electronic music, the current music scene? What do you think of the new genres that emerge all the time? The ones that focus on sound design in its most extreme forms, like dubstep for example or some shit – some things like this. Sorry.

(laughter)

Suzanne Ciani

That’s why I’m here. I want to hear about all this stuff. I do want to learn about all this stuff. You know, I’ll be here for a few days, then I’m going to be standing a month at Berklee College of Music this year. I’m in the my absorption period. Honestly, no, I haven’t been following. I mean, I’ve had to by request do a lot of mixtapes. I didn’t even know what a mixtape was. When I did my first one, it’s like, “Oh, OK.” I have been exploring and it’s a wonderful process, because one thing leads to another thing and it’s organic. I cannot say that I’m an expert at all in what’s going on right now. I am in the process of learning so anything you want to turn me onto it’s fine. If there’s something you think I should know, let me know, OK? OK, thanks.

Audience Member

OK, I remember now. My question was, what do you think of modern electronic music instruments? It’s much, much easier than the Buchla that you’ve been playing all these years. I think you’ve answered the question when you answered MIIIN’s question... if you can elaborate more on that. Whether or not you have one that you like or love, or more than one.

Suzanne Ciani

OK, my reincarnation in this world... I think what I’m interested in is live performance. I look at instruments vis-a-vis their applicability to interactive live playing. I think this is a sub-set, a sub-part of the big world of electronic music. I’m interested in not live mixing or using pre-recorded sounds, which is a viable approach, it’s just not the one I’m in. I think I’m interested in the machine that generates the sound. I’m interested in the spacial control of sound. I’m interested in imaginary sonic spaces where we don’t – even the early Buchla had a voltage-controlled reverb. You could have the reverb come and go. You could change the dimension of the space. You cannot do that now. You know, I’d like to take the things that I love about live performance and somehow manifest those in a new instrument. It has to have feedback, the lights, that tell you what’s going on. It has to have reliability so that you don’t spend your first three hours tuning it.

It’s a complex world because what happened even with Buchla going from analog to the digital world, it was a big bump in the road. A lot of his designs were separate from the technology. He didn’t design, he didn’t say, “Well what can this technology do? And that’s what I want it to do.” He said, “What do I want to do and how can I get the technology to do it?” He designs from the outside in. A lot of, it’s tricky because a lot of the digital technology didn’t work well in an analog flow.

Audience Member

Hi.

Suzanne Ciani

Hi.

Audience Member

You’re so cool. I was wondering...

Suzanne Ciani

I was fried when I first came in here and I’m sure my eye makeup has just been...

Hanna Bächer

You look great. Beautiful as ever.

Audience Member

Yeah, you look really hot. Have you heard of this woman who makes electronic music through plants?

Suzanne Ciani

Well, just now.

Audience Member

Yeah she’s really cool, I think you’d find her quite interesting because she’s doing a similar thing with pioneering with analog hardware. She connects all these electro-transmitters to these different plants. She has a room full of plants and the plants will select the note and then play it through whatever analog synth she uses. They actually respond to touch. She’ll go over and start stroking a leaf and it’ll change the melody.

Suzanne Ciani

Oh my God.

Audience Member

It’s so cool.

Suzanne Ciani

How beautiful.

Audience Member

I’ll show it to you afterwards.

Suzanne Ciani

Yeah I want to see that.

Audience Member

Her name is escaping me at the moment but she’s otherworldly, she’s super cool. I’ll definitely show that to you later.

Suzanne Ciani

That’s great, thank you.

Audience Member

Good evening.

Suzanne Ciani

Good evening. Is it evening?

Audience Member

I guess so. Regarding your collaboration with Ms. Aurelia Smith, how easy was it to converse, how much was verbal communication beforehand and how much was just purely musical? How did you understand each other?

Suzanne Ciani

Well the odd thing was that we had as a starting point the same sequences that I used on this [holds up a record]. In that paper, I wrote out four sequences, and I’m using those tonight as well. That was our starting point and that was really all we had agreed on. Other than that, it was like, “Well, who’s going to drive? Whose clock is in charge?” We did this over three days. It was all live for a few hours in the afternoon. We didn’t really talk. I mean I had, because I live there with that picture window and the sun rises every morning outside that window and I had been working on a sunrise piece, that was our only discussion, which is, maybe this is the time to do the piece about the sun. She’s very intuitive and it was very easy to work with her. Of course, she’d already worked in my studio for a few months as an assistant. I think we had some common awareness.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Suzanne Ciani

Yeah, thank you, thank you.

Audience Member

Hi, just one more, have you ever been approached or have you tried approaching someone to possibly rebuild the Buchla that was broken?

Suzanne Ciani

Yes.

Audience Member

Did it work? Did it...

Suzanne Ciani

Well, you know, I was just talking with Hanna about how hard it is to communicate with engineers because to me, it’s not their fault, it’s not like I’m saying they’re not receptive or whatever. It’s that maybe I don’t communicate. In my mind, everything seems too obvious. It’s like, “Well, you’ve got to have this, you’ve got to have that.” It just isn’t sticking, so what I’ve decided to do is make a big drawing, big [makes a circle in the air], and just put all the parts that I want on this big drawing and then point to it. I think unless it gets concrete, the conversation just dissipates in the air and nothing happens. They’re always looking for some specific thing, you know. If you give them five problems, they’ll hook onto one. I don’t know. Yes, I’ve talked to a lot of engineers and I’m still looking, yeah.

Hanna Bächer

Can I say that facilitating the communication between artists and engineers is one of the many reasons we’re doing this?

Suzanne Ciani

Really? Oh my God.

Hanna Bächer

All of us learn from each other. Thank you Suzanne Ciani.

(applause)

Suzanne Ciani

Thank you.