To afford her first Buchla synthesizer, Suzanne Ciani took a job on the assembly line at Buchla and Associates, soldering the instruments together for three dollars an hour. She had come to the San Francisco Bay Area for a master's in composition at Berkeley, met the inventor Don Buchla, and fallen for his keyboardless modular machine, an instrument misunderstood by most of the music world. When the finished synthesizers shipped out, she later said, she felt as though she were losing children.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, Ciani built a career in sound that reached millions of people, but her name was rarely at the forefront. She created the Coca-Cola pop-and-pour sound, gave the Xenon pinball machine its voice (the first female voice in a pinball game), and became the first woman to score a major Hollywood film with The Incredible Shrinking Woman. She also made her own records, founding the Seventh Wave label and earning five Grammy nominations for Best New Age Album. Throughout, she kept faith with quadraphonic sound, treating the placement of sound in space as central to composition.
Her new album, CIANI/ORKEST, sets that lifelong commitment on the largest stage of her career. Recorded live at the Amsterdam Dance Event in 2022 and released on Atmospheric and AKP Recordings, it pairs her Buchla with the fifty-piece Metropole Orkest under the conductor Simon Dobson, in a program of new work written for the meeting. Ciani has always insisted the Buchla is "a compositional instrument, not so much an orchestral instrument," and hearing fifty players take up its logic is the kind of experiment she has spent decades making possible. The record arrives in a crowded year that also includes Concrète Waves, a collaboration with the British producer Actress, and her score for John Wilson's documentary The History of Concrete.
Lawrence Peryer recently hosted Suzanne Ciani on The Tonearm Podcast. He spoke with Ciani about the making of CIANI/ORKEST and what changes when a solitary performer becomes one instrument among fifty. Their conversation also covers her quadraphonic practice and the nature imagery beneath it, the return of analog modular synthesis to a generation of younger players, and why, at eighty, after a lifetime of holding total control, she has started saying yes.
You can listen to the entire conversation in the audio player below. The transcript has been edited for length, clarity, and flow.
Lawrence: I saw you perform a few years ago here in Seattle. It was part of one of those series you do where you perform in churches.
Suzanne: Oh yeah, 'Reflections.'
Lawrence: It's such a wonderful way to experience a presentation of electronic music, really something. From your perspective, how does a room or a place influence and inspire you?
Suzanne: Well, one thing is just the functionality of the room. I play in quadraphonic. I've noticed that some of the larger cathedrals were originally designed to create an echoing effect, to glorify an ethereal kind of presence. So in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, I had a six-second decay time. I have to mold my sound to the reality of the space. In fact, I don't use any reverb at all in some of the cathedrals.
The truth is that when I'm playing, all I can see is the instrument. I know that there are light shows going on, and all these magnificent hundred-foot-high projections, but I don't get to see that. So I see it afterward, in the videos. That's great. But otherwise, I'm kind of just focusing in on what I do. So I do make an exception, however, in those concerts, because the promoter specifically wants me to include something from my past, from Seven Waves. I did include, along with the live Buchla, some previous recordings or tracks, because I had the multitracks from Seven Waves. It was part of my archival project to get all of those transferred, so I could weave in little elements from Seven Waves.
Lawrence: The venue was packed when I saw you in Seattle. Were you always aware that there was an audience for you, who would come out for you and see you live?
Suzanne: Absolutely not. I started performing live back in the late sixties and seventies. I did have some curated audiences, people in the business, that kind of thing. But the public? No. There was no understanding of what this was. I grew accustomed, actually, to not having an audience, because they didn't have a listening for it. So for me now, I'm aware that there is an audience, because the kids are interested in performing and playing on live analog modular. Nothing could make me happier than to have a listening that I can play into, where they know what I'm doing.
I'm always surprised—some of the audiences are getting very big. In fact, one of them is so big coming up that it's really impossible to set up the quadraphonic in an appropriate way. But I'm going to give it a try—we'll see what happens. I mean, if I were playing at the Sphere in Las Vegas, it would work, because that's a customized audio spatial environment. But the way we set up venues nowadays is just to bring a bunch of stuff in and set it up, especially if it's outdoors and there's no reflection of the sound. I don't really want to play in those big spaces, because I don't think it's appropriate. I think we need better infrastructure to accommodate this type of performance.
Lawrence: Have you seen any performances at the Sphere?
Suzanne: Yes, I made it a point to go. I had to do my research—this is my thing. And it was magnificent. It was The Eagles.
Lawrence: I saw the Dead there.
Suzanne: Oh, you did? Was it great?
Lawrence: It was pretty phenomenal. I appreciate the clarity of sound without the volume having to be too loud. There's no distortion there. It's kind of ridiculous, actually.
Suzanne: I really have a pet peeve about volume. I just went to a concert Monday night. All the concerts that I go to, it's kind of a defensive thing—they just jack up the volume so loud that it's painful. And what is the point of doing that?
Lawrence: It's a proxy for emotion, I think, or something.
Suzanne: Exactly. It's got some kind of a filler making up for what's missing.
Lawrence: There was a little bit of a delta in time between the recording of the CIANI/ORKEST record, or performances, and it actually becoming a released record. Did you have an ongoing relationship with that process, or did you move away from these recordings and then sort of rediscover them three or four years later?
Suzanne: Well, I have my own record label, Atmospheric, and Atmospheric is basically a quadraphonic label, so I do quad vinyl. My first release was my comeback Buchla concert in 2016. I can codify the sound into a stereo-compatible recording, but it can also be decoded into quadraphonic, and that's my commitment—to do quadraphonic. So I was interested in doing this album because it was quad. I processed the orchestra through my spatial Buchla.
But it was impossible to get it going. There were just too many people involved. We had the video from the government in Amsterdam. We had the orchestra, and nobody knew who was in charge. It was just a people problem, really. So I did give up. Kamran [album co-producer and MIT Spatial Sound Lab researcher] came in, and he has the patience of a saint. I don't know how he does it—maybe because he's not as closely connected with it. Maybe he has less frustration. So I let him carry the ball, and he carried the ball all the way to the touchdown. So it's great.
Lawrence: You've referred to the Buchla as being sort of orchestral in nature. Now you're hearing an orchestra perform your work, which is often a very solitary thing for you. I would love to hear you talk about that experience.
Suzanne: When I'm playing with this orchestra, I'm really just one more instrument. It's a compositional instrument, so I have a lot more say about what's going to happen, in general, with the music. But my job is to take a little bit of a backseat, so that the orchestra has space to do its function. For me, I'm used to being on board and interactive every second. I'm playing, I'm moving—my job really is to keep the thing alive and going. On the other hand, I have to say, the experience of being on stage was completely overwhelming. The decibel level of acoustic sound was transformative. I loved it. I just adored it. It was truly, truly amazing.
This really was a collaborative project. I had started the concept four years earlier, when I was teaching at Berklee College of Music, and they had merged with the Boston Conservatory. They had jazz performers and live musicians, along with the technology department. And so I thought, what a perfect opportunity to combine worlds, these different kinds of instruments. I started a project that was orchestra and Buchla, and we had a lot of problems to solve to integrate that—because, for one thing, there's conducting, and then there's the improvisational nature of the Buchla. One thing is married to the printed page—but not completely, because modern contemporary musicians do know how to improvise, and you can hear that in the ORKEST recording. There are moments where the trumpet takes off, the guitar takes off, and I take off. There are improvisational openings that are right there. So that's something you do not find in a traditional orchestra.
I am grateful for the sense of what ORKEST is. I don't think we have another orchestra like that in the United States. I go into the San Francisco Conservatory, and I pay attention to the now-combining of music technology with traditional instruments. That's a mandate now. Everybody wants to do that. Even at Berklee College of Music, where they had a head start, you could not enter the school as an electronic musician. You had to play an acoustic instrument. It's only within the last two years that that has changed, that there is some credibility now with this new instrument. And that's going to open up. I'm very excited about this time in our musical culture, because we're seeing—oh my God—analog modular have a second chance.
Lawrence: Whatever the interface you're using, whether it's the touch interface or dials and knobs, an orchestra is still working from scores and rehearsals. I'm curious about the blending of those worlds.
Suzanne: I don't use MIDI, though I've used it. I did studio albums before there was MIDI, when you couldn't interlock anything or synchronize anything, and you did it by hand. So I used a Korg drum machine, a little tiny drum machine. When you're on the road, you want small, you want light. So this little tiny drum machine—I could feed the quad into that, and it could output a click, and they followed me. I was in charge of the tempo.
The conductor, Simon Dobson, was brilliant. He's young, resilient, and open to taking it on. I mean, he's a classical conductor with tattoos all up his arms, so you knew that something was going on there. And we had a wonderful feedback system. We all had headphones on, and he could talk to me. He could say, "Hey, wait a minute, you need to do this, you need to do that." So we had communication. When we did it at Berklee, we didn't have that, and we had a system of cards. He would hold up a card with a number on it, and it would be like, when are we going to do the next thing? But this was much more functional.
Lawrence: I'm curious about the role of trust in a project like this. Is trust part of it for you?
Suzanne: Let's just say I have no fear. I don't go there. Really, fear is debilitating. And I think the arrangers were absolutely brilliant. They astonished me. They went way beyond what I would have imagined. In this case, the heavy lifting was divided, and I think it produced an incredible result just because of that. They were given an electronic starting point, and they all picked up the same kind of sensibility to that. I think it was helped by the fact that the same arranger did the opening and the closing, so it had nice bookends. I think the energy of the performance had a beautiful shape.
My compositional form is the wave. I've always been inspired by waves, on many, many levels. One of them is that I've always loved the energy system of build and release. And that's what you have here. You listen to this album, and it has that kind of structure.
Lawrence: I'm intrigued by the notion of narrative in instrumental music—how a composer or an instrumentalist can invoke narrative without words. We might be talking a little bit less about explicit narrative here, but there's certainly a journey.
Suzanne: It is. A lot of people get visual responses. I don't think about the visual. I do think about the story, and the energy, and the origin. For me, I come out of the ocean. That's a starting point, and then it grows. You do something, and it gets more and more free. This is a very classical idea, where you had theme A, theme B, then you had the development—where you could complicate things and take them out of their keys—and then you came back at the end to familiar territory, and maybe you repeated something and gave a sense of ending. And so that kind of storytelling—I do naturally follow that kind of energy.
Lawrence: This idea of the water, waves, and nature is fundamental to your work, as is your embrace of quad. And I'm curious: do those two things relate to each other?
Suzanne: Well, nature is pretty spatial. We don't compress nature into two pinpoints in front of us. It is immersive.
Lawrence: At the risk of prying open your head and peering inside—what is the work you're doing? Are you channeling nature? Are you in dialogue with it? Are you attempting to recreate it?
Suzanne: Nature is just my starting point. After that, I'm about freedom, and the Buchla gives me that. It's just such a joy to interact with, and it gives back. People say, "Oh, well, do you know what's going to happen? Is it all a surprise?" Yes, you know what's going to happen. But still, you can take the same ingredients for your salad dressing, and it's different every time, and sometimes it's great. That's what it is. I think of it as cooking.
So I see things from that direction. I am a woman. I don't know if that means anything at all, but I'm comfortable with a lot of things that I didn't find outside of that comfort zone. For instance, I've always been comfortable with very slow sound. The machine loves to repeat, loves to make a beat, loves to do dance music, loves to pulse—but it can also go very slowly, more slowly than a human can go, and keep a dependable rhythm.
My first album, Seven Waves, was all about making a safe space. It was immersive, in the sense that I wanted you to be in it and experience the safety zone. Why was it safe? It was safe because it was slow, and the slow was dependable.
Lawrence: You've developed opportunities to work with people from very different contexts, such as in your project with Actress. I'm really interested in that meeting of the minds that happens for you.
Suzanne: I remember going into the commercial world in New York City, right after graduate school. I had been finally trained as a classical composer, and I met musicians, producers, and people in the recording studios. I had one person I worked with—he could not read or write music. He could walk into a room, and a rhythm section locked. And I learned, from that moment on, that this is a language that has many sources.
I know that music comes from so many different places, and that they're all valid. I couldn't collaborate for years and years and years. For years, I kept trying to collaborate. I couldn't. I needed to be fully in charge. I had a very specific thing that I wanted to do, and I had to do it. But I could never submit myself to somebody else's ideas about what I should be doing. So it wasn't until I got into my later years, now, where—I'm in my last hurrah here. I'm eighty years old now, and it's time to have a little freedom and fun, and just see what happens out there.
Lawrence: I can't help but wonder if that need for control, if you will, is a reaction to the commercial work—where you don't get to call all the shots about the finished product.
Suzanne: I hate to disappoint you, but I had total control in advertising. Total control, because they didn't know what I was doing. There was no language for it, and they were mostly afraid. I'd come into the studio with this big, complicated machine, the Buchla. I worked as an artist in commercial work. My statement about this was: I am going to do what I do, and if you don't like it, feel free to go someplace else. And I meant that. It wasn't an angry statement. It wasn't a defensive statement. The way I work creatively is that I have to have total freedom, or I can't do it. And I think that's true about creativity. If I need somebody to do something for me, my first job is to give them space.
Suzanne Ciani in 1973. Photos by Richard Beggs.
Lawrence: Tell me about The History of Concrete.
Suzanne: Isn't it funny that concrete keeps coming up in my life? I had Waves, then I had Concrete Waves, then I got Concrete.
Lawrence: It's like this reduction, and you're finally here, cast in concrete.
Suzanne: It is very bizarre, and very logical, on some level. So, I got a call—an important call. It was from this very important director who wanted me to participate in his protégé's work. John Wilson. They wanted it right away, and I didn't have time. And so I said, "I can send you lots of music. I have a huge library." That's how it started. Then I went to Sundance and saw the premiere. And now I'm going to do something in New York at the end of the month, at John's little studio. It holds about forty people, but we're going to play the album with the film that was made at the time of the recording. So that's going to be fun. I love John Wilson. I have to be honest, I didn't know who he was before, but as soon as I spoke with his people, I went and watched the whole series of How to with John Wilson, and I adored it. I just love that independent spirit.
Lawrence: It's been a big time of work and output for you. We opened the call talking about you traveling and being on the road. Is the urgency related to what you said before—that it's just the time in your life to say yes to things?
Suzanne: Yeah, I am busy, but I don't try to be busy. For instance, I don't have an agent. I only deal with what comes toward me. I don't try to make work, but I do receive. And maybe my next step is to stop receiving—I don't know. So far, so good. They take good care of me when I'm on the road. It's difficult, but not as difficult as it could be if I didn't have all the support. For me, packing up a booklet at the end of the night—a hundred cables—takes a little time, but I usually get somebody to help me, some young aspiring analog musician, and they do a great job. So my fans are very supportive.
Lawrence: I would have to think it's very exciting for someone not only to have the opportunity to play that role for you, but to be around the instrument. I know the excitement of holding a nice guitar, or sitting at a nice keyboard—they're not simply inanimate objects.
Suzanne: Well, that's also part of my mission—to speak the word of the Buchla. Because Buchla did the very first one, maybe by a few minutes before Bob Moog. But Buchla was stubborn, and he stayed true to the instrument's authentic nature. He didn't put a keyboard on it. And he was, as I say, the Leonardo da Vinci of analog musical instrument design.
In this second round that we're experiencing now —this renaissance of interest—most of the Eurorack stuff is inspired by its origin in Germany, and it didn't get the Buchla influence. So I'm trying to bring out the beauty of this instrument and in ongoing instrument design, hoping that people will incorporate some of the really unmatched, brilliant ideas that Don had—one of them being quadraphonic sound.
Carolyn Zaldivar Snow
Michael Donaldson
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