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viewing 1 To 13 of 13 items
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LP
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FKR 118LP
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The very first Buchla synthesizer performance by revolutionary composer Suzanne Ciani finally makes its fifty-year journey from its switch-on New York art gallery to its long deserved and discerning global phonographic audience. With this previously unheard vinyl pressing, Finders Keepers Records present an archival project of "art music" that not only redefines musical history but lays genuine claim to the overused buzzwords such as pioneering, maverick, experimental, groundbreaking and esoteric, while questioning social politics and the evolution of music technology as we have come to understand it. To describe Italian-American composer Suzanne Ciani's resurrected Buchla Concert records as genuine gamechangers would be a gross understatement. These records represent a musical revolution, an artistic revelation, a scientific benchmark and a trophy in the cabinet of counterculture creativity. This sonic installation album, alongside her recently liberated WBAI/Phill Niblock 1975 sessions (FKR 082X-LP), are triumphant yardsticks in the synthesizer space race and the untold story of the first woman on the proverbial musical moon. While pondering the early accolades attached to these golden era New York recordings it's daunting to learn that these records were in fact not even records at all. What exists on this disc now was a manifesto and a one-time gateway to a new world, which somehow was only partially pushed ajar. Captured here is a genuine live act exploring new territories with a fully performable music instrument. If the unfamiliar, modernistic, melodic pulses, tones and harmonics found on these 1970s artistic gallery collaborations/live presentations (then soon to be followed by academic grant applications and educational demonstrations) had been placed in a phonographic context alongside the widely marketed work of Morton Subotnick, Walter Carlos, or Tomita, then the name Suzanne Ciani and her infectious influence would have already radically changed the shape, sound and gender of our record. With the light of Buchla and Ciani's initial flame Finders Keepers continues the journey through the vaults of this increasingly celebrated music legacy, illuminating these "non-records" that evaded the limelight for almost half a century.
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FKR 082X-LP
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Finders Keepers presents these incredible early Buchla synthesizer concerts/demonstrations providing a distinctive feminine alternative to The Silver Apples Of The Moon if they had ever been presented in phonographic form. This record is a triumphant yardstick in the synthesizer space race and the untold story of the first woman on the proverbial moon. If the unfamiliar, modernistic, melodic, pulses, tones and harmonics found on this 1975 live presentation/grant application/educational demonstration had been placed in a phonographic context alongside the promoted work of Morton Subotnick, Walter Carlos, or Tomita then the name Suzanne Ciani and her influence would have already radically changed the shape, sound and gender of record collections. Suzanne was a self-imposed twenty-year-old employee of the Buchla modular synthesizer company, San Francisco's neck and neck contender to New York's Moog. Suzanne Ciani, as one of the very few female composers on the frontline (and also providing the back line) did not lose faith. These "concerts" are the epitome of rare music technology historic documents, performed by a real musician whose skills and academic education in classical composition already outweighed her male synthesizer contemporaries of twice her age. In denouncing her own precocious polymathmatic past in a bid to persuade the world to sing from a new hymn sheet, Suzanne Ciani created a bi-product of never before heard music that would render the pigeon holes "ambient" and "futuristic" utterly inadequate. Providing nothing short of an entirely different feminine take on the experimental "records" of Morton Subotnick and proving to a small, judgmental audience and jury the true versatility of one of the most radical and idiosyncratic musical instruments of the 20th century. These recordings have not been heard since then. The importance of these genuinely lost pieces of electronic music's puzzle almost eclipses the glaring detail of Suzanne's gender as a distinct minority in an almost exclusively male dominated, faceless, coldly scientific landscape. With the light of Buchla and Ciani's initial flame Finders Keepers continues to take a torch through the vaults of this lesser-celebrated music legacy shining a beam on these "non-records" that evaded the limelight for almost half a century.
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WE 003LP
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Black vinyl. Suzanne Ciani's Improvisation On Four Sequences somehow represents the complete history of electronic music, as the enthusiastic audience at Week-End Fest 2021 were lucky enough to experience. From the awakening of American avant-garde music at the end of the 1960s, right through to the development of the electronic sound of the club scene in L.A. and New York. But above all it is the dialogue between artist and machine, which simply ends when the concert is over, that comes across. Laconicism, precision, sound sensitivity and the weight of a tradition that Ciani was instrumental in founding all come together. It is spectacular precisely because it is so unexciting.
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7"
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FKSP 020EP
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Transparent bumper blue 7". Greg Kmiec's Xenon pinball machine was released in 1980 and marked a significant milestone in pinball technology and design. The expansion of microchip technology would provide new opportunities for sound designer and synth pioneer Suzanne Ciani, allowing for basic oscillator control and a wider scope for sampling capacity which could facilitate the higher frequencies of a female human voice and entirely reshape the concept of the machine in the process. By using state of the art Synclavier synthesizer technology and an invaluable experience in film scoring and record production Suzanne would devise a complete minimal music score for the machine, then dissect the piece into separate fragments that would be triggered throughout the game play adding an extra creative dimension in player inter-activity (potentially turning the participant into their own musical arranger). By incorporating her own infamous voice box (which had been the focus of a seminal David Letterman Show feature) Suzanne's combination of a harmonizer and a vocoder also provided the first-ever female identity to a pinball machine which in conjunction with the games ergonomic design and Paul Faris' figurative graphics (echoing the aesthetic of Rene Laloux and Roland Topor's La Planète Sauvage) Xenon was able to add a degree of subconscious sensuality to its performance, a feature previously unchartered in arcade development. This disc presents the full extent of Suzanne Ciani's groundbreaking musical effects for Xenon, in their isolated form, for the first time ever heard outside of the confines of the machine which recently earned the composer her own induction to the Pinball Expo Hall Of Fame.
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LAPSUS 025LP
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Suzanne Ciani is a true electronic music pioneer. The five Grammy nominated Italian-American neoclassical composer is unquestionably one of the greatest minds that contemporary music has ever witnessed. After an incredible career spanning forty years, Ciani's accomplishments have become a benchmark when discussing the origins of musical synthesis. For more than four decades she developed a body of work that transcends the music industry, composing for film, video games, and famous advertising campaigns that have impacted popular culture. On December 14, 2019, after six years of sound experimentation, Lapsus Festival bid farewell to Barcelona's Centre for Contemporary Culture. Its final event was entitled "A Sonic Womb" and was dedicated to the musical roots of the synthesizer, with Suzanne Ciani headlining on the night. Ciani performed an exclusive show accompanied by her modular Buchla 200e synthesizer and enveloped in a specially designed multi-channel sound environment by Intorno Labs. It was a sonic voyage to the very heart of her beloved machine and a tribute to improvisation through an instrument that is said to possess its own soul. Suzanne described the night as "an improvisation that I began using in the '70s and continue to use now as raw material. Each performance based on this material has its own expression and one could liken it to jazz." Lapsus Records present A Sonic Womb: Live Buchla Performance at Lapsus, a unique live recording of this extra special concert.
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FKR 106LP
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Finders Keepers' continued and unwaning commitment to preserving the archives of composer Suzanne Ciani pays off in an avalanche of dividends with this latest master tape discovery, placing further markers in the historical development of electronic music and cinematic composition. Developed at a lesser-documented axis combining Ciani's key disciplines as a revolutionary synthesist and an accomplished pianist, these early works from 1973 capture a rare glimpse of one of the world's most important electronic music figures embarking on the early throes of a fruitful career as a film composer and sound designer with this rare and previously unheard documentary music illustrating the first-ever skiers' decent from the peak of the tallest mountain in Alaska. Capturing innocence and optimism in its composition, but never less than masterful in its realization, Denali takes what would later become the yin and yang in Ciani's versatile musical personality and provides unrivalled vistas from both side of the mountain, scaling a treacherous and fine creative line. The music on this record was also commissioned two years before Suzanne's first Buchla concerts in 1974 and 1975, which were accompanied by her seminal National Endowment Paper, and would reveal Suzanne's proud commitment to the developed Buchla instrument. After hearing this record, it will come as little surprise that the track known as "Ski Song" would later be re-appropriated (and rerecorded) on Ciani's globally critically acclaimed debut album Seven Waves (EGGS 015CD). It stands as testimony to the composer's determination and inventive nature that this single track, which would later make its way on to every future music best-seller list in the country, was originally composed on just piano and the modular synth model which she had helped to assemble on Buchla's production line ten years before her Tokyo debut. "Denali was composed using just Buchla and piano," explains Suzanne in 2020. "It was recorded at Rainbow Recording, which is the studio I found and shared with recording engineer Richard Beggs, who then sold it to Francis Ford Coppola after I fell in love and quickly moved to LA," she laments. Instead, Suzanne would in a short time find her filmic feet in Hollywood (providing sound design for Michael Small's aforementioned The Stepford Wives soundtrack) which would later lead to her winning the accolade of first female film composer to single-handedly record a major motion picture with The Incredible Shrinking Woman in 1982. But it was ten years earlier with Denali that the ball had started rolling alongside the film reel sprockets at Rainbow Recordings.
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FKR 099LP
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As a genuine vanguard of electronic music composition at the forefront of the modular synthesizer revolution in the late 1960s, Suzanne Ciani's forward-thinking approach to new music would rarely look to the past for inspiration, which makes this unheard composition from 1969 a rare exception to the collective futurist vision of Ciani and synthesizer designer Don Buchla. In choosing to adapt the controversial prose of French poet Charles Baudelaire, Suzanne would join the ranks of ongoing generations of pioneering musicians like Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Serge Gainsbourg, Etron Fou Leloublan, Celtic Frost, and Marc Almond (not forgetting Star Trek's William Shatner!), all equally inspired by the 19th century writer's works of "modernité" (modernity), a self-coined term dedicated to capturing the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, best exemplified in Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers Of Evil). In her varied career that would combine art gallery installations, major film soundtrackings, and commissions for Atari, Suzanne Ciani's earliest experiments remain some of her most challenging, beguiling, and timeless. Flowers Of Evil ticks all the above boxes and flicks switches that would power-up a new uncharted universe of her own musical modernité. For the many enthusiasts that have already drawn the parallels between Baudelaire's writings and experimental/electronic music (a relationship rivalled only by the likes of J. G. Ballard and Aldous Huxley) some might instantly recognize an unconscious sistership between this recording and another 1969 electronic adaptation of Flowers Of Evil by celebrated female electronic composer Ruth White. An interesting distinction of White's excellent version of Flowers Of Evil (released via Limelight records) is that its dark tone generation and vocal manipulation was created with a Moog synthesizer, the commercially triumphant rival to Suzanne and Don's Buchla Systems. The fact that Ciani's version was never intended for commercial release is also poetically reflective of the nature of Ciani and Buchla's alternative perspective. The choice to present this extract from Flowers Of Evil in its intended French language further distances Ciani's faithful reaction from some of its better-known variations. Having attempted to voice the poem herself, the multilingual Italian-American composer's French accent did not meet her own standards, resulting in the request for a fellow unnamed French student who lived on campus at Mills College in Oakland to accurately verbalize the section of Baudelaire's collection entitled Élévation.
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FKR 094LP
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As faithful guardians of the Ciani Musica Inc. studio vault, Finders Keepers twist the key and return to their collaborative series of previously unreleased music from one of the most important and influential composers in multi-disciplinary electronic music, Suzanne Ciani. This electronic soundtrack for an operatic, ecological, scholastic, science fiction theater production for children of all ages not only further reveals Suzanne's vibrant and versatile skills as an experimental musician and narrative sound designer, but also highlights her European heritage -- working to the script of Milanese librettist Gian Carlo Menotti and a cast of forward-thinking fellow Italian-American creatives (including Giorgio Armani and Fiorucci in the wardrobe department). Originally written and performed in 1968, and gaining worldwide acclaim throughout the 1970s, Gian Carlo Menotti would update and revise his play for the turn of the '80s which called for a new approach to the music and sound effects -- all of which would make their world premiere in New York high school theaters in April of 1980. Suzanne on the original: "The original production had been in 1968 and I felt that the electronic music component could be more playful and less abrasive than the original production." For Help, Help The Globolinks!, Ciani would give Menotti's well-traveled aliens a brand new voice and with reinvention she communicated with a young audience keen to hear the genuine sounds of the future while retaining melodicism and personality. Unlike many successful electronic composers, Suzanne managed to evade the obvious typecasting of her music through the medium of shlock sci-fi cinema; within the realms of opera and education Suzanne found her perfect channel -- scratching her other cosmic cinematic itches with android music in The Stepford Wives and as "the first female composer to score a major Hollywood movie" with The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981). Furnishing a plot of an ecological alien intervention worthy of a Magma youth starter pack and realigning early pioneering electronic operas such as Karl-Birger Blomdahl's Aniara or Remi Gassman's Electronics (CACK 004B-LP), this virtually undocumented work by the hardest working woman in VCO business is finally preserved after just a handful of exclusive theatrical airings over 35 years ago. Ciani's combined roles as an abstract artist and an astute technician are in equal measures here, a rare duplicity which is essential to The Globolinks!.
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CD
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EGGS 015CD
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2012 release. A reissue of Suzanne Ciani's Seven Waves, originally released in 1982. Following Finders Keepers' first time compendium of Suzanne Ciani's vintage electronic private music, custom made commercials and sound effects with Lixiviation (FKR 053CD/LP), and providing a brilliant companion piece to the recently deleted limited edition handmade edition of her ultra-rare 1970 art house installation record Voice Of Packaged Souls, released via the Demdike Stare/Finders Keepers Dead Cert company in 2012, the sonic sisterhood at Bird Records now present a specially packaged 30th anniversary edition of the record that "The Delia Derbyshire Of The Atari Generation" regards as her finest hour with this internationally exalted commercial debut Seven Waves from 1982. Ciani on Seven Waves: "Originally released exactly 30 years ago, Seven Waves was my first commercial album. It took two years to complete and was first released in Japan in 1982. Seven Waves is special for me because it expresses my love for and fascination with early electronic instruments. With this album I blended my classical-romantic sense for melodies with the astounding possibilities offered by electronics. Because most of the instruments on Seven Waves no longer exist, this recording is a historic footprint in the evolution of music, unique to its time yet still valid today." With a portfolio that boasts music from the Xenon pinball machine, the sounds for the Meco Star Wars theme, the Atari TV commercials, and the electronic sound effects in the original Stepford Wives film (amongst many others), the mutant electronic-music CV of Suzanne Ciani is proof that in a 1970s commercial world of boys toys, monopolized by male-dominated advertising industry, a woman's touch was the essential secret ingredient to successful sonic seduction. Recently, and rapidly, enjoying a new resurgence amongst fans of all streams of electronic, experimental and neo-tantrik music, Suzanne Ciani collaborates with the Finders Keepers/Bird family to present a new generation with the record, seldom celebrated this side of the Atlantic, that truly turned her career from behind-the-scenes library composer to a leading light in modern American electronica, spearheading the musical new-age movement, and drawing indelible parallels with krautrock, early techno, and electronic soundtracks. Features nine bonus tracks in the form of Voice Of Packaged Souls, the art house project album released on vinyl on Dead Cert in 2012; Available here for the first time ever on CD.
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LP
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FKR 053LP
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LP version. 2017 repress. The American Delia Derbyshire of the Atari generation. With a sonic portfolio that boasts commissions for the Xenon classic pinball machine, the sounds for the Meco Star Wars theme, the Atari TV commercials, and the electronic sound effects in the original Stepford Wives film (1975), amongst many others, the mutant electronic music CV of Suzanne Ciani is proof that in a 1970s commercial world of boys toys, monopolized by a male dominated media industry, a woman's touch was the essential secret ingredient to successful sonic seduction. A classically trained musician, with an MA in music composition, this American-Italian pianist was first introduced to the synthesizer via her connections in the art world when abstract sculptor and collaborator Harold Paris introduced Suzanne to synthesizer designer Don Buchla who created the Buchla Synthesizer, the instrument that would come to define Ciani's synthetic sound. Cutting her teeth providing self-initiated electronic music projects for art galleries, experimental film directors, pop record producers, and proto-video nasties, Suzanne soon located to New York where she quickly became the first point of call for electronic music services in both the underground experimental fields and the commercial advertising worlds alike. Counting names like Vangelis and Harald Bode amongst her close friends, Suzanne and her Ciani Musica company became the testing ground for virtually any type of new developments in electronic and computerized music amassing an expansive vault of commercially unexposed electronic experiments which have remained untouched for over 30 years... until now. Finders Keepers Records present a new creative archive based relationship with Suzanne Ciani, who, as one of the very few female composers in the field (save Chicago's Laurie Spiegel, Italy's Doris Norton, and a post-op Walter Wendy Carlos) turned a hugely significant wheel behind-the-screens of many early computerized music modules throughout the 1980s, dating back to her formative years studying at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Labs in the early '70s. Suzanne Ciani's detailed and academic approach to music and electronics coupled with an impeccable sense of timing and melody (and a good sense of humor) shines throughout this new collection of previously unreleased recordings. Lixiviation complies and re-contextualizes both secret music and commercial experiments of Suzanne Ciani made for microcosmic time slots and never previously documented on vinyl or CD.
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7"
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FKSP 011EP
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RSD 2017 release. Single-sided "aquatic clear" 7". Includes a copy of the original press release as well as a press cutting from the time. Limited edition of 1000. As the first and only label dedicated to liberating the private, non-commercial artifacts from Suzanne Ciani's groundbreaking Ciani Musica studio vault, Finders Keepers Records presents the first release of an incredible cryogenically suspended slice of precious, precocious, immersive fledgling synthesis. Ironically well removed from the intention of phonographic application in its original inception, this anti-pop wash of marine biology modular synth sound-design was originally proposed by a very young Ciani for exclusive infinite-loop airings in a giant mid-American shopping mall aquarium in 1977. Potentially conjuring ambient scenes from the consumerist satire Dawn of the Dead while sonically ushering in a genuine desire for total musical science reevaluation and revolution via a decidedly mainstream portal, the Fish Music project is a striking, eerie example of how Ciani's "Subversion With A Smile" approach led to a long career of breaking boundaries in formal music technology, film scoring, the advertising industry, and gender equality -- all of which has continued to fuel her passion and channel her life-lust and artistic appetite, much to the benefit of future ambitious trajectories of music. Owing much to the memory of genuine synthesizer maverick Don Buchla, this conceptual release is very much the product of artistic America at its progressive halcyon, but with its illustrious and idiosyncratic composition also communicates subtle undertones of Ciani's feminine Italian origins, which seldom reside outside of the efforts of Roman library composers like Casa, Tomassi, Raskovich, and siblings Antonio and Maria Teresa Luciani. File under... water.
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CD
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FKR 053CD
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2017 repress. The American Delia Derbyshire of the Atari generation. With a sonic portfolio that boasts commissions for the Xenon classic pinball machine, the sounds for the Meco Star Wars theme, the Atari TV commercials, and the electronic sound effects in the original Stepford Wives film (1975), amongst many others, the mutant electronic music CV of Suzanne Ciani is proof that in a 1970s commercial world of boys toys, monopolized by a male dominated media industry, a woman's touch was the essential secret ingredient to successful sonic seduction. A classically trained musician, with an MA in music composition, this American-Italian pianist was first introduced to the synthesizer via her connections in the art world when abstract sculptor and collaborator Harold Paris introduced Suzanne to synthesizer designer Don Buchla who created the Buchla Synthesizer, the instrument that would come to define Ciani's synthetic sound. Cutting her teeth providing self-initiated electronic music projects for art galleries, experimental film directors, pop record producers, and proto-video nasties, Suzanne soon located to New York where she quickly became the first point of call for electronic music services in both the underground experimental fields and the commercial advertising worlds alike. Counting names like Vangelis and Harald Bode amongst her close friends, Suzanne and her Ciani Musica company became the testing ground for virtually any type of new developments in electronic and computerized music amassing an expansive vault of commercially unexposed electronic experiments which have remained untouched for over 30 years... until now. Finders Keepers Records present a new creative archive based relationship with Suzanne Ciani, who, as one of the very few female composers in the field (save Chicago's Laurie Spiegel, Italy's Doris Norton, and a post-op Walter Wendy Carlos) turned a hugely significant wheel behind-the-screens of many early computerized music modules throughout the 1980s, dating back to her formative years studying at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Labs in the early '70s. Suzanne Ciani's detailed and academic approach to music and electronics coupled with an impeccable sense of timing and melody (and a good sense of humor) shines throughout this new collection of previously unreleased recordings. Lixiviation complies and re-contextualizes both secret music and commercial experiments of Suzanne Ciani made for microcosmic time slots and never previously documented on vinyl or CD.
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FKR 082LP
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[sold out, will be replaced by new version FKR 082X-LP] The lost synth manifesto that could have changed the course of electronic music history by the first lady of modular synth history, Suzanne Ciani. Buchla Concerts 1975 is an archival project that not only redefines musical history but boasts genuine claim to such overused buzzwords as pioneering, maverick, experimental, groundbreaking, and esoteric, while questioning social politics and the evolution of music technology as we've come to understand it. To describe this record as a game-changer is an understatement. This record represents a musical revolution, a scientific benchmark, and a trophy in the cabinet of counterculture creativity. This record is a triumphant yardstick in the synthesizer space race and the untold story of the first woman on the proverbial moon. While pondering the early accolades of this record it's daunting to learn that this record was in fact not a record at all . . . it was a manifesto and a gateway to a new world that somehow never quite opened. In 1975, Suzanne Ciani was a 29-year-old employee of the Buchla modular synthesizer company, San Francisco's neck-and-neck contender with New York's Moog. If the unfamiliar, modernistic, melodic pulses, tones, and harmonics found on this 1975 live presentation/grant application/educational demonstration had been placed in a phonographic context, they would have provided nothing short of an entirely different, feminine take on the experimental records of Morton Subotnick and proved to a small, judgmental audience and jury the true versatility of one of the most radical and idiosyncratic musical instruments of the 20th century. In denouncing her own precocious, polymathematic past in a bid to persuade the world to sing from a new hymn sheet, Suzanne Ciani created a byproduct of never-before-heard music that would render the pigeonholes "ambient" and "futuristic" utterly inadequate. These recordings have not been heard since then. Needless to say, this record, finally commanding the archival format of choice, was not the last "first" that this hugely important composer would gift to society and the future, in a wide range of exciting, evolving creative disciplines in the worlds of synth design, advertising, and film composition. You have found a holy grail of electronic music and a female musical pioneer who was too proactive to take the trophies. You can't write history when you are too busy making it. With fresh ink in the bottomless well, let's start at the beginning. Again. You are invited.
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