Modular Elegance from Suzanne Ciani: "those days my calling was to be on that front edge of technology"

It is fascinating to think at how many dimensions must an artist have to face its public as well as industry inertia while being one of the pioneers of electronic music.

Suzanne Ciani’s sound design can be heard in hundreds of sonic identities from Atari and Coca-Cola to Columbia Pictures, AT&T, NBC, ABC, Pepsi and General Electric. A true living story of two major facets of music as we know it today: the classicist structuralist approach and the sequential avant-garde. Call it today generative music, spectralism or modular synthesizer music, is the yin and yang circle of the black and white interaction.

A fantastic musician with a very human story, a serious sound computing and synthesis background, an entrepreneurial life, being able to go beyond the convenience and convention of the classical keyboard which she mastered gracefully in her classical piano compositions and performances, and in historical synthesizers such as Prophet V or Synclavier II. In spite of her piano background she pioneered a new way of approaching sounds and music with knobs and modulations, with lights and control voltages. Music in waves and a life in waves:

”There is something eternal about the rhythmic aspect of one wave following another. I came to appreciate that same symmetry in oscillating sound waves when I was first exploring electronic music.” (The Creative Service Company)

“Although I had been a pianist, I found that when I seriously got involved in the Buchla synthesizer it did not interest me whatsoever to play keyboard in connection with the synthesizer, because there seemed more to it than just keyboard. The keyboard is basically a one-on-one device - one action produces one response. You’re not limited to that in the synthesizer. When you get in the habit of controlling any number of events, the keyboard seems too one-dimensional.” (Ciani 1979, Contemporary Keyboard, 34)

She is indeed considered together with Erica Siday and Raymond Scott a pioneer of the commercial electronic sound. As Stockhausen would describe it later, this was the first wave of experiments with news sounds, “the music from outer space”:

"The first revolution occurred from 1952/53 as musique concrète, electronic tape music, and space music, entailing composition with transformers, generators, modulators, magnetophones, etc; the integration of all concrete and abstract (synthetic) sound possibilities (also all noises), and the controlled projection of sound in space" (Stockhausen 1989b, 127, reprinted in Schwartz, Childs, and Fox 1998, 374)

Suzanne Ciani

“Although I had been a pianist, I found that when I seriously got involved in the Buchla synthesizer it did not interest me whatsoever to play keyboard in connection with the synthesizer, because there seemed more to it than just keyboard. The keyboard is basically a one-on-one device - one action produces one response. You’re not limited to that in the synthesizer. When you get in the habit of controlling any number of events, the keyboard seems too one-dimensional.” (Ciani 1979, Contemporary Keyboard, 34)

“The Avant-garde in the family room: American advertising and the domestication of electronic music in the 1960s and 1970s” by Timothy D. Taylor, he cites Robert Moog on the problematic of electronic medium as an instrument and its sound penetrating the societies in the pioneering years of electronic music:

“The listening public first became aware […] of the electronic medium subliminally, through radio and TV commercials.”

The new “musical language” as Eric Siday calls it, the electronic music popularized first by the Barron couple in the iconic “Forbidden Planet”, it had been given artificial, preliminary names in media and the daily journals: “music from Mars”, “music from outer space”, “push-button music”, “the science-fiction sound”.

These were descriptions of the newly produced music that challenged the classical instrument sounds and composition in a word that strange meant as well psychedelia and exoticism. In the BBC studios the music of Daphne Oram and her experiments with tape would be left aside and unnoticed: the classicist conventions and inertia were large.

Raymond Scott’s approach on exposing electronic compositions was of using audio logos: the “new plastic sounds” and “electronic abstractions”. The article cited also introduces the work of Suzanne Ciani naming her a “poet of sound”.

She had a deep understanding of her odd-looking instrument at that time, an 8,500$ artifact that she had to work for side by side for 3$ and hour with the inspiring Don Buchla, a former NASA engineer. Donald Buchla used cutting edge electronic technology and an innovative approach on the modules he created which later will be branded finally as the Buchla instrument. The electronic music lived inside the instrument and was less structural but always voltage controlled, altered in various ways by various electronic signals and paths: the control voltages.

The Buchla would become the message:

“I got to interpret what I saw poetically in sound. So if it was a commercial for a fur coat, I made [what was] to me the sound of a fur coat. If it was a key chain, I made the sound of a key chain… I looked at these things and saw a different dimension in them. It wasn’t just music, it was some kind of poetic interpretation of the visual that was also included. So there were notes, but there was sound also.” (Ciani 2014, Oxford Sound Studies, 401)

“I had to create a being. I had to create a personality, a character. I gave life to this thing. When they had this thing, ( n.edit. the General Electric dishwasher) it was just a machine with lights on it. And by the time it was done, you wanted to hug it.” (Ciani 2014, Oxford Sound Studies, 403)

Suzanne Ciani

“I had to create a being. I had to create a personality, a character. I gave life to this thing. When they had this thing, ( n.edit. the General Electric dishwasher) it was just a machine with lights on it. And by the time it was done, you wanted to hug it.” (Ciani 2014, Oxford Sound Studies, 403)

Was really the “massage” effect leading to an undestanding of the “medium” and does music need a vehicle?

“I’d walk into a studio without a keyboard and they’d go, you know, like they didn’t know what to do, how to use it, how to write.” (Ciani 2014, Oxford Sound Studies, 401)

“And these producers who didn’t kow how to talk, nobody had the vocabulary for describing sound, he’d say, “No, no, go back, go back to where you where. “So I’d move the knob back and he’d say, “No, no! It’s not the same” because there were so many interactions - there were maybe fifty knobs contributing to one sound. The guy used to hit my hands - whenever he liker it [and] I’d move it, he’d say, “Stop! Don’t touch that, don’t you touch another knob!” (Ciani 2014, Oxford Sound Studies, 402)

“And, of course, my Buchla synthesizer - one of the things that I loved about it was it had this feedback system of lights. So how you know what’s going on in the machine is that the lights tell you. If something is triggered, the light goes one. If the envelope is decaying, the light fades. If the random voltage is fast, the light oscillates quickly. If the sequencer stage is on, the light is up that stage, and so on and so forth. So I was very used to this dialogue with a language of lights.”(Ciani 2014, Oxford Sound Studies, 403)

This blending and altogether paradigm switch between classical instruments and new is definitely the projection on the Wendy Carlos’ “Switched-on Bach” title from 1968, a “switched-on” classical music record that sold admirably, becoming one of the pop records of the electronic music at that time, a classicist musical structure built with electrons and circuits.

IM: What do you think that we define as music today? There are so many approaches, ears listening; however people are still saying: “OK, it's not music!”, “that's music!”, “it's ‘better’ music!”.

Although a simple question, a simple term it’s actually very complex: what we do perceive as music?

SC: I agree with you.

It is very complex and I don't think that as a judgment; we can say there is good music, music we like, and there's bad music, music we don't like, but what I noticed today is that there are a lot of uses of music, some of them being philosophical.

The way of John Cage, you didn't sit down to listen to his music in a traditional way: he was making you listen in a new way!

And I think good music or music that I like to call music, it engages our ears, our emotions, our intellect and we can listen in different ways.

Maybe I want to hear just the passion of Rachmaninoff and be swept away, but then maybe I want to hear something that's abstract and not sensual and not emotional, but it is organized sound, it's sound that's been intentionally connected in some way: to speak!

IM: How would you explore a sound nowadays? What's your approach composing and playing the Buchla instrument?

I've heard you with Andy Votel’s Neotantric, then with Rob Aubrey Low, amazing modular synthesizers setups; at the same time you've been giving a lot of humanity and feminine touch to your records: harmonies but also evolutions, feedbacks and elegant orchestrations and progressions of electronic music.

SC: I've gone back and forth: when I was very little I was involved in classical music. Then, I discovered the Buchla and for 10 years played only the Buchla and no keyboard, no piano. I went back into more, I combined this, what I learned in the Buchla, I have synthesized it with my classical background and that's where "Seven Waves" came from.

It was both worlds together: electronic and traditional, melodic. Then, over the years I became more and more acoustic.

There was a time when I said "You know, I can't, my ears are not satisfied with acoustic sound, I need electronic because you get used to the very high range and the very low range and just the sonic quality of this sound".

But they're both infinite worlds and when I went back to acoustic music, I founded it very satisfying. I just loved the new odds and the subtlety that was there! Now I'm back in electronic music and this time around, the instrument, the 200e, which is what I'm playing now, is very different from the 200 that I played in the 60's and 70's. 

In some ways there is a subtle difference because a lot of the modules look the same. They’ll be a filter, they'll be an oscillator; but the oscillators have different personalities, the sequencers are not the same. The one thing you have that's different is a little memory in it so if you set up a bunch of sequences you can store it and for performing...

IM: That' s actually very handy.

SC: It's handy and I don't want to get too technical because part of the issues with the new instrument is that is difficult to tune.

To tune an analog instrument, say one oscillator receiving three or four different inputs - one from the keyboard, the touchplate - I don't mean traditional keyboard - the touchplate for transposing, one from a sequencer, one from a multiple arbitrary function generator. All these things have to be calibrated so when they meet in the oscillator, they all work together.

IM: To specify: the calibration works on voltages and not MIDI.

SC: I don't use MIDI. My life would be simpler maybe with MIDI but I don't like it.

They all have to work together because you have only one range calibration in the oscillator. You say: this is how much this voltage is coming in, and so, prior to that you have to accommodate. It's almost impossible, to tell you the truth (laughs).

What came to my mind when you asked that question was that, what I'm doing now, I think more of as jazz and less as classical composition.

Traditional jazz will be based on some melodic statement that's there as the raw material for the evolution of the sound. And the same way I use these sequences that I've chosen and they're the same sequences I used in the 70's, so that hasn't changed, the same sets of pitches I'm using, and then I improvise.

Suzanne Ciani:

“What came to my mind when you asked that question was that, what I'm doing now, I think more of as jazz and less as classical composition.

Traditional jazz will be based on some melodic statement that's there as the raw material for the evolution of the sound. And the same way I use these sequences that I've chosen and they're the same sequences I used in the 70's, so that hasn't changed, the same sets of pitches I'm using, and then I improvise.”

IM: That's exactly how you refer about jazz music: it's obviously a component of improvisation, which is really the jazz and a melodic theme developed.

In terms of sequencers and function generators, how do you use them?

There's a lot of entropy, randomness; or on contrary, you’re keeping them in a certain sequence or cascading them, or both, a mixture?

SC: I use the Multiple Arbitrary Function Generator or the Morph, and I take four sequences and I feed them into the external inputs of the Morph; then I have access at any moment, by moving a level to the different sequences.

I can combine them 3 dimensionally. The sequences can go linearly, or they can jump and so I process the sequences in a way that you don't even recognize it. I can change the octave  transposition of any note, I can randomly affect the wave shape so that you get it's like an optical illusion: it's an oral illusion.

When you make certain things pop out, you're ear redefines the sequence: supposing I have one sequence moving along and three notes are happening in the base, four notes are happening in the middle and five notes are happening in the top. At different times your ear starts to connect the notes in each range, and you don't hear it, as a single row of pitches.

And randomness is so important because randomness is the magic fairy dust that gives a thing life. It's very powerful because it's not repetitive and when you dealing with a sequence you get repetitive.

I don't randomize the pitches but I randomize the filter, the wave shape, the envelope, the octave range.

I.M: What was your experience of moving from traditional black and white keyboard to Buchla, which, from the very first design and Morton’s sayings, was meant to transcend and go beyond the classical means of interaction?

What was on a personal way your interaction of it, obviously having a great background in classical music?

That's really hard to train for years: accumulating experience, being in certain school of thought, an energy as well, harmonies, how was moving to wires?

SC: Exactly! You have to understand that I was working for Don Buchla so I was in his studio and from the very beginning I had access to a huge array of instruments, modules. I quickly adopted his vision that it was not about the black and white keyboard, which I said is an inappropriate interface because it was mechanical, and what we did with the touchplate is that you'll hit one key and instead of one thing happening, 20 things happened!

It was a different way of thinking, you didn't think of the keyboard as: “Ok, now I'm gonna do one thing and get one result!”.

That was the power of the Buchla, that you could control sound in a much more powerful way! The other thing that went with Buchla was that the actual sound, or the quality of the sound, the timbre was a byproduct of “the movement”. People have this fascination with timbre: “it can sound like this”, “it can sound like a flute”, “listen to that wonderful base sound”, but the Buchla, it was about “the movement” of the sound.

It was about the sound moving in space and the sound moving with a lot of controls, in other words, I didn't have a base sound that I loved because the sound would go from base to crystal! In a second, less than a second.

We were dealing more with the movement of the sound from low to high range, moving around the room, the timbre moving, everything was moving.

Suzanne Ciani

“It was about the sound moving in space and the sound moving with a lot of controls, in other words, I didn't have a base sound that I loved because the sound would go from base to crystal! In a second, less than a second.

We were dealing more with the movement of the sound from low to high range, moving around the room, the timbre moving, everything was moving.”

Because he had control voltage inputs for everything! You could change the envelope with the control voltage, the shape of the envelope, you could change the center frequency, you could change the bandwidth, you could change not just the pitch, you could change the spatial movement.

IM: With the vision of Morton, the work of Don Buchla, there is an interesting thing that happen.

From we know, Morton has hired first Donald to actually design the Buchla. And then Donald employed  you. (Suzzane laughs) There is almost a triangle of relationships that became friendships of honorable engineering!

What was you experience of a young woman, bringing a rich musical background and coming to this engineering universe? Being faced to Morton’s ideas which are many times very futuristic, thinking the ways forward, “what would happen in 100 years?” and so on. What was your experience?

SC: Here is the big distinction between my outlook vis-a-vis Buchla and Mort's.

When Mort met Don Buchla, it was really the beginning of an idea. I came in four, five years later and Don Buchla had already crystallized his own vision that had nothing to do with Morton; this is something I found out recently.

When I met Don, he was making a performance instrument. To Mort Subotnick it was never a performance instrument, he saw electronic music as something that you recorded. He made a sound he recorded it, he made another sound and he overdubbed and he built up the music that way; nothing wrong with that.

The Buchla, especially for me, is the one sacred electronic instrument that is not about recording, it's about performing because that was Don's vision: he wanted to make an instrument that would live in the family of human instruments.

And I think he succeeded more than anybody I know, he succeeded in making - I mean there are many performance instruments, the theremin and all that - but the Buchla is kind of like the big difference between a grand piano and a flute. The theremin is like a flute; It's not a flute but it's a single voice. And the orchestra and the piano gave voice to a bigger world of sound.

What it was like for me? it wasn't easy, especially because Mort had already been there and Don Buchla's attention was very much connected to that world; I always felt that I couldn't get the support that I needed that first time around.

Don and I were not exactly friends, we became friends when I moved back to Berkley in 1992 and we reconnected. And became tennis partners; we played a lot of tennis.

And I wasn't about to go back to the Buchla. That happened, took me by surprise, about five years ago because Don said: "if you ever thought of playing the Buchla again now is the time”. But he didn't tell me that he was about to sell his business and so he made me an offer for the new instrument.

IM: For the 200e?

SC: Yes.

IM: And that's the Audi story being exchanged. The hole engineering messiness, the different way of taking care of the car.

SC: That's the paradigm, right there, male and female, you know (laughing).

IM: That too, but it's  really a gentleness if you want, the difference between the engineer and the artist.

SC: (laughs) Right, right!

IM: You were focused on sound design for quite a few years, Andy Votel made a compilation of your work at Finders Keepers Records. It's quite a good thing that a lot of the dusty things, tapes and recordings are getting released in many ways.

There was always an entrepreneurship spirit with you: in the 90's created a Seventh Wave label, the “Coca-Cola Pop and Pour” success before.

How do you see yourself evolving, there is obviously musicality and production, but there is also living as an artist as well?

Suzanne Ciani:

“In fact, I believe there is space to make the distinction, that my audience can expand and not be offended: that the electronic people won't be offended by my romantic music; the romantic music people will learn that there's something out there and be careful, “Don't buy it if you don't like electronic!”.”

SC: It's been a transitional time for me because as I've gone back.

As I really engaged the Buchla and when Andi's records came out, it was difficult from my normal audience as my fans loved my romantic music. And so they would think: "Oh, there is a new Ciani album!", they’ll be all excited and then they hear this noise and say "what? what's this? this is terrible" and I got very scared and didn't promote any electronic music.

I said to Andi - he was doing a concert in LA - I said: "Don't put my name up because people, they’ll come, thinking they're gonna hear Suzanne Ciani and they gonna throw tomatoes at me!". Over the last five years what I've found out was that the audience, my audience, is more varied than I thought.

In fact, I believe there is space to make the distinction, that my audience can expand and not be offended: that the electronic people won't be offended by my romantic music; the romantic music people will learn that there's something out there and be careful, “Don't buy it if you don't like electronic!”.

IM: I think you only have two recordings with Finders Keepers, if my understanding is correct. You have the compilation and then you have the Buchla concerts.

SC: That's correct. But other things are starting to come out because I'm doing live performances, so for instance Moog has released some things just online. I did a demo, and now I did a concert and they just put that up, a live performance that I did at Moogfest.

IM: Are all your concerts in quadraphonic?

SC: Yes, they're all quadraphonic but we did a stereo reduction. I don't know about releasing the quad stuff, I'm not sure people want that or have the ability to play it.

IM: Yes, I think that's pretty difficult, most of the mastering is stereo, systems are stereo, is very hard to work it out, maybe to clique to put it in quadraphonic for normal listeners who consume musical artefacts.

You’ve mentioned the romantic music and they're a lot of reference to sailing, to dreaming, using the word “neverland” in many of the records. “Infinity” as well. How these have a place in your life and how is your romantic world, really?

SC: My romantic world really is a safe place. It's a place where you can be without any fear and it's a form of perfection in a way, that maybe we don't see in our daily life, it's a virtual world, it's a world that's created that you can be in.

Music is a very tridimensional, emotional, absorbing experience, it's comprehensive, it can really take you in. And so, it's a world, it's a place.

When I made the recording of "Seven Waves" I worked very hard on making sure that I loved it, that I didn't had excuses about it!

IM: I think you also spent a lot of money on to (Suzanne laughs).

SC: I spent a lot of money (laughs). Yeah, money helps (laughs).

IM: I think the story the funding came from Coca Cola.

SC: Yes, exactly (laughs).

IM: That was really engaging and really ambitious to spend that much on a record.

SC: In those days technology was expensive and my calling really was to be on that front edge of technology.

IM: That's really nice.

There is something related to Europeans. So, you lived in Boston for a while...

SC: I grew up there near Boston; my dad was Italian, my mom was German and English but the Italian was very dominant culturally. So, I grew up with all Italian values.

IM: "Seven Waves" came as a collaboration between large labels, RCA. What’s the story behind producing “Seven Waves”?

How do you see independent music, independent labels and all this identity that can possibly or maybe, I don't know exactly, maybe exist inside the small labels, small organizations with impact on communities?

SC: From the beginning I didn't want to sign a traditional record deal. So when I did a deal with Atlantic, I did a deal with JVC, I did a deal with RCA and I never signed over the rights because I felt like a mother, you know, with her children.

For my third album "Neverland", I signed a deal with Peter Bauman from Tangerine Dream, he had moved to the States and he was a friend and he said: "just do this, I'll make sure you get all your music back, don't worry", and that was not true, I didn't get my music “back”.

I have five masters that are owned by Sony and I went independent in 1994 and it's absolutely the only way to be. Now I see that record deals have changed a little bit and they are not as exploitative because they split 50-50 now, you know. On a traditional deal you are lucky if you get 15%.

IM: I know, is 90 to 10 sometimes.

SC: Yes. It's not a good thing but the worst thing is that you lose your rights. You should only license! These big record labels own everything and that's not right. It doesn't happen in other businesses but it does happen in music I think. Musicians were taken advantage of, they didn't have good lawyers and they signed deals that gave away their work. And you should never give away your work because this is your legacy.

You do this work and you have to live on it for your whole life and there are, from when I started to now there are so many income streams that nobody foresaw! There is all this internet and digital income streams and performance and feature performer and sound exchange. You don't know what the value is of something when you do it.

And in the old days when it was so expensive to record and you had no choice! When I started I couldn't make a record without a record label. We didn't know how to press vinyl. We didn't have recording studios in our homes, it was very expensive and complex.

In those days it made sense that you needed partnership with a big record label because you couldn't make the product, you couldn't make CDs, there were no CDs.

IM: So they were owning the hole...

SC: Everything... the younger production...

IM: ...They owned the printing press...

SC: They owned the printing press, exactly.

You needed to have them and we were sometimes forced, really forced into those deals but now I don't understand. I see a lot of young artists working in a partnership with labels and that's probably a good thing and it should always be a license because the label is there to disappear in five years anyway.

Suzanne Ciani:

“When I was in a studio, you didn't speak unless you were spoken to. If somebody said "Suzanne, what do you think about that bass line" then you could say something, but you never said "hey, I don't think that base line is very good". That's one thing.

If you're in a dynamic with a mentor: to be respectful of the mentor and to ask permission. If you're gonna use a name, if you're gonna approach a company, say a speaker company, if you're looking for an endorsement or whatever, you just don't use it, because this is what happened. I had long relationships with many companies and assumptions are made when somebody uses your name.”

IM: There is a nice story that happened with Kaitlyn that led to “Sunergy”, released at RVNG records, you being a approached by Matt Werth.

The story is fantastic from the point of your community because it happened in the area that you live: people engaging socially and then cooking (Suzanne laughs) and then “What do you do?.. I do music as well”. It’s very human!

I mean you certainly have an honorable experience now, how was your collaboration with Kaitlyn? Not only from the musician perspective but also as a new friend that you made in the area that you lived in.

It's really interesting, it's almost like a movie scene story, because you don't really get it so often in real life.

SC: When I met Kaitlyn, she was like 28 years old, very young, and I felt like a mentor. I wanted to encourage her and I did a lot of things when I hired her to work in my studio to get me ready for the tour with Andy.

IM: Was it the tour when you also played...

SC: In Krakow.

I'm a one person show, so I'm very, very busy. I've got publishing, licensing, all these things going on and I'm one person and I'm trying to do the Buchla and the piano and the recording and...

Where I live is very remote and I can't find help. I once had a German fellow that lived there who worked with me. But it's weird to find somebody. Now my assistant is young girl who comes all the way from San Francisco, so she can't come everyday, she comes once a week. So Kaitlyn was right there in town and she could come over.

I introduce her to Buchla, I took her to some advance that I was part of, and then it backfired a little bit because I went from feeling like I was a mentor to feeling like I was a parent; and I am like a parent, really, because (laughs) we're such different generations.

The reason we did this project was that she was moving and I hadn't been enthusiastic about doing it and finally I looked and said: "If we're gonna do it, we should do it". “It is good”, we had that certain energy, I mean she had wanted to do this for almost a year or whatever; so there was that energy in it that this was going to be it, we were gonna do that.

IM: It’s also the link to the Ocean, I think you said that you were living near to the ocean.

SC: All my music is linked to the ocean. My "Seven waves" and....

IM: There's always a wave, there's always the sea, there's always the infinite wave really.

SC: And it is linked to the sun because we recorded this in my studio; every morning the sun would come up and look bright on the ocean, you saw the picture, right?

The sun comes up right in my eyes every morning and I always wanted to write that. And I would get up and go over to the piano and nothing would happen: I'm used to that, there's some pieces that take years.

But at a certain point I realized that I was dealing with an electronic composition and not a traditional one because the sun is so slow and so powerful that to sustain that energy you can't do that with a piano. So I just come to the realization that my sunrise was gonna be electronic and this relationship started and I was shy about having that be our project, so instead calling it “Sunrise” we called it “Sunergy”, which was a planned word, sunergy, synergy and the sun, energy, energy of the sun.

IM: Nice one. What would be your advice for young generations of musicians? What went good and what went wrong and what was your solution to that in your life, your career as a musician and even as a person if you want to share it.

SC: What goes good and what goes wrong? I think when you have a mentor or when you're aligning yourself with somebody, you have to realize that a mentor spent a lifetime creating. They're a brand if you will, and that you can't just use somebodies name, you really have to ask permission to do that.

My generation, we were brought up to be very differential: if you were in a studio, you didn't speak unless somebody asked you.

It didn't matter that you had an opinion, you recognized the energy system of that place. When I was in a studio, you didn't speak unless you were spoken to. If somebody said "Suzanne, what do you think about that bass line" then you could say something, but you never said "hey, I don't think that base line is very good". That's one thing.

If you're in a dynamic with a mentor: to be respectful of the mentor and to ask permission. If you're gonna use a name, if you're gonna approach a company, say a speaker company, if you're looking for an endorsement or whatever, you just don't use it, because this is what happened. I had long relationships with many companies and assumptions are made when somebody uses your name.

The other thing is: never give up your publishing. Somebody said that to me when I was young: “Don’t give up your publishing!” and I didn't even know what that meant.

But it's the most valuable part of your creation and it's the cleanest part of the business. You can make money performing but the long term income from your work it's gonna be through publishing.

IM: And there's other component as an artist, the need to always redefine himself, be alive, expressive in different ways.

SC: That happens automatically, you know, if you are awake...

IM: There were many cases of artist that they just started to sit comfortably in a self-indulgence.

For yourself it comes naturally, but isn't that related to Buchla, and the way Buchla actually, as an artefact, enables creativity and creation?

SC: If I look back at my history I've reinvented many times. But I didn't think of it as reinventing, maybe, it's a response, it's a feeback loop.

You get an energy and you feed of that energy and you go for that, it's an organic process. All I'm saying is that I never planned to go back to electronic music, I didn't sit down and say "wow, that’s what I’m gonna do" (laughs). It was scary, it was scary, I didn't wanted to happen and it happened. And I'm just like "ok, this is happening" (laughs).