Synth Pioneer Suzanne Ciani Discusses Her Career and the Evolution of Electronic Music

It’s impossible to have grown up in the U.S. — or really anywhere in the developed world — and not heard Suzanne Ciani’s electronic music compositions and sound design. Most famously, she’s the creator of the “pop and pour” sound used in Coca-Cola commercials throughout the world. She’s also the composer of the intro music that plays before Columbia Pictures movies. Another fun fact you may be less familiar with: She became the first woman heard in a pinball machine when she leant her vocoder-recorded voice to the game Xenon in 1979, as well as composing its minimalist synth soundtrack.

Ciani first became fascinated with electronic music while she was getting her master’s degree in composition at the University of California, Berkeley in the late 1960s. There, she met Don Buchla, creator of the Buchla synthesizer, and began renting out Buchla and Moog synthesizers at the tape music center at the nearby Mills College, where visitors could use the studio for just $5. “We need more of these facilities,” she says. “Kids are spending so much money now on gear. I understand that addiction to hardware.”

What she personally finds addictive about electronic music is that it’s “very variable,” she says, explaining that she’s constantly getting sent new instruments to try out. “It’s modular, so you put together your own customized instrument, and right now, there are thousands of modules to choose from, and it’s a bit overwhelming and a bit exciting,” she says. “When you play the piano, you wake up and the piano is there — it’s like, ‘oh, the piano.’ With electronic music, you wake up and there’s something new you have to investigate. You have to learn it. It’s always changing.”

“Always changing” appropriately describes Ciani’s career. Since 1970, she’s put out 15 studio albums and six live albums, some devoted to synthesizer and others with piano. The most recent, Improvisation on Four Sequences, is a recording of a live Buchla Quadraphonic performance in Geneva, Switzerland from January’s Festival Antigel. In it, you can hear the wide array of synthesizer sounds Ciani is known for, from the high-pitched and energetic to the slow and ominous-sounding.

“It’s a strange time to release because one is the pandemic, and two, it’s our social revolution, which is wonderful — it’s about time,” she says. “But I think that human connection is really what music is about, and we need that. We need it now. We’ve always needed it, but now I think it’s very comforting, and I think that in a way for me, I feel more comfortable now with something … that opens up a new language for us, and I think electronics does that.”

She also recently released “Music as Living Matter,” a hypnotizing and dynamic four-minute composition using a new type of analog synthesizer called the Moog Subharmonicon. Based on composer and music theorist Joseph Schillinger’s concepts, it features spoken quotes from the thinker, such as “music makes one believe that it’s alive because it moves and acts like living matter.” Visual artist Scott Kiernan created a video to visually represent the ideas the song expresses, with colorful vibrating geometric shapes.

“When we function as artists, we’re actually creating life — in a way, it’s an imitation of life,” Ciani explains. “Great art lives on. It has a life separate from the creator.”

The progression of electronic music as a genre has been as ever-changing over the span of Ciani’s lifetime as her career itself. Since the advent of electronic music in the ’60s, she’s seen movement away from physical instruments to computer compositions and then back to the analog synthesizer, which she views as advantageous because it provides real-time sound feedback as you play it.

“The kids said, ‘Hey, enough with all these digital menus and this computer interface — I want to touch it. I want to get feedback from the instrument itself,'” she says. “Kids want LPs; the kids want cassettes — what is all that about? Well, fundamentally, it’s about deconstructing the belief that technology marches forward and is always better, and that’s not true. It’s a sales pitch, and now we know we have a choice. There are so many different technologies, and some of them are better than others for certain things.”

During Ciani’s career — which presented many obstacles for her as a woman in an industry that was even more male-dominated when she began — she’s witnessed the women’s movement similarly come full-circle. “’68 was a huge women’s liberation moment – we peaked there, we got someplace, and then it fell,” she says. “And the next generation of women forgot. They didn’t even know they had been given certain rights that they assumed were always going to be there. And so then, the next generation came in, and those rights were being threatened again, and so they developed the energy systems — and every time we get to the crux of this wave, we get a little further along.”

The way she’s approached sexism in her own career has been through sheer stubbornness — refusing to listen to anyone who has tried to undermine her success. “I would just be like a little robot: If I hit that wall, I’d go someplace else,” she says. “If you have self-confidence, nobody’s going to get you down.”

In fact, for Ciani, playing the synthesizer is a form of self-liberation. “This is a liberating instrument,” she says. “It’s like Jackson Pollock on the canvas. You still have a canvas, but you’re not constrained.”

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Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith Details New LP and Caribou Tour

Photo Credit: Chantal Anderson

(Editor’s Note: Since the publication of this piece venues have shuttered and tours have been canceled due to the Coronavirus pandemic, including the Caribou tour mentioned below. They are working on rescheduling those dates, but a lot is up in the air! Here are some ways you can help support musicians and related industries during the crisis).

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith is excited. When she heads out on tour opening for Caribou, beginning March 16 in Hamilton, Ontario, the L.A.-based electronic composer will perform with the Buchla Lightning wand, which will control a box of sounds near her that she spent “months and months” programming. “For a while, I was trying to come up with ways to not look like a dweeby wizard while I was using it,” she says by phone.

When it comes to synths, though, Smith is a bit of a wizard. Working with an assortment of gear that changes from album to album – modular synths and rare, vintage instruments are often a part of the process – she creates layered, emotional electronic music that conjures images of nature and cities, isolation and crowds. She can take listeners on journeys through space and time, weaving the history of synthesizer music through pieces that otherwise sound contemporary. She’s essentially building imaginative worlds through music.

Self-taught in piano and classically trained in guitar, Smith had initially envisioned a different musical path. “I studied sound engineering and learned how to write for orchestras,” she says. After finishing school, though, Smith hit a creative hurdle. She didn’t have access to orchestras and classical guitar, but, she adds, that style “wasn’t the sound that was supposed to be expressing the music that I was feeling internally.” She was ready to change career plans when fate intervened. Smith’s then-neighbor showed her his collection of Buchla synthesizers and eventually lent her one. She took it back to her cabin on Orcas Island in Washington, where she grew up and was living at the time, and spent a year teaching herself how to make make music with it.

“The moment I said, ‘okay, I give up,’ the pressure was gone,” she says. “I started to explore music every day in such a slow, experimental way that I had no expectations of anything. It felt like the opposite music process from what I was doing before, where I had all this pressure on myself to build these songs and create this architecture out of music.” Smith would listen to a single tone for hours and began to connect it to what she learned in school, figuring out how to share the sound that was made by the instrument. “It became really effortless,” she says of making music. “The pressure wasn’t on me to create these things. It was more about me sharing what I hear.”

Since then, her creativity abounded through singles, EPs, full-length albums and other projects. Smith collaborated with the pioneering composer Suzanne Ciani in 2016. She launched the multidisciplinary arts company Touchtheplants, though which she released Listening, the first in a series of pocket-sized books, which comes with a deck of cards featuring listening exercises. Last year, she re-released one of her earlier synth albums, Tides: Music for Mediation and Yoga, which she originally created when her mom, a yoga teacher, asked her to make a soundtrack for class. Smith has also led guided meditation events.

Her influences have come from various disciplines and she says that her “biggest muse” is dance. “I would feel that [dancers] were communicating something that I was feeling inside that no one else could communicate,” she says. “I still feel that way.”

On the road with Caribou, a wave of Smith’s Buchla wand will summon songs from her forthcoming LP The Mosaic of Transformation, set for a May 15 release via Ghostly International. She says that it’s also a chance to test out some of the live elements for a later solo tour, but the initial idea for the project came to Smith at least five years ago. “I wanted to make an opera, just in the sense that there are recurring themes and recurring characters with sounds that come in and out throughout the album,” she says.

She was also inspired by electricity and learning about the spine and the nervous system, as evidenced by the LP’s ten-minute-plus lead single, “Expanding Electricity.”

The album came together, in part, because of a residency Smith had at National Music Centre in Calgary. She was able to work with their collection of rare instruments. “They would send me a PDF of their collection and every day, I would tell the engineer there which instruments I wanted to play with and they would set up a room with all the instruments and then leave me to record in there,” she says. “It was very heavenly.”

Smith often relies on residencies at cultural institutions to gain access to the instruments that she uses on her recordings. “For a very small amount of time, I tried to collect rare synthesizers,” she explains, “and the responsibility of keeping them in good condition is so overwhelming that I decided to just use residencies.”

Having access to the Music Centre’s collection opened up possibilities for Smith in terms of composing, but when it came time to record, Smith had to improvise once again. “I was going to record it with a real orchestra and I had all the parts written out and ready for it,” she explains, “but I couldn’t get the funding together, so I processed orchestral samples along with the synthesizers.” However, she points out, if she does have the opportunity to perform with an orchestra or ensemble in the future, she already has their parts written.

“I change my whole live set up each album,” Smith says. In some instances, she had a vision for the live performance before she began recording. Other times, she has thought about the performance of the work while she was making it.

“[Transformation] is pretty different from any live experience I’ve done before,” she says. She’s been working on ways to incorporate performance art into her sets and making “extensions” of the songs rather than simply recreating the album.

As for the wizard connotations, Smith says, “Now, I’m just embracing it, that that’s what I’m going to look like. It’s fun.”