Tag: Moog

FeM Synth Lab Los Angeles Makes Expensive Gear Accessible to Marginalized Genders & BIPOC

FeM Synth Lab’s Art of Synthesis Workshop, a collaboration with Femme House and Moog, in January 2020. Photo: Lex Ryan

Have you ever wanted to borrow a synthesizer for a few weeks, just to see if it’s the right one for you? In Los Angeles, FeM Synth Lab offers just that, with a focus on making otherwise prohibitively expensive synths available to people of marginalized genders.

Three years ago, Natalie Robehmed founded FeM Synth Lab with two people she met through Women’s Center for Creative Work. The new group held their first workshop in 2017. From there, the project expanded to monthly meet-ups where people of various skill levels could learn new techniques and familiarize themselves with various gear. 

Sabrina Ketel, who had been teaching herself Ableton, saw a notice of that first event on Facebook. “Everybody’s just really willing to help each other learn or help each other experiment and just share what they know,” she says of her first impressions of the group. A little over a year ago, Ketel came on board to help Robehmed run the group. 

A synthesizer lending library is something that had been on their minds for a while. While the COVID-19 pandemic forced many to put ideas on hold, it actually pushed FeM Synth Lab to make theirs a reality. After a few years of in-person workshops, FeM Synth Lab wanted to provide a useful, hands-on experience for people at a time when they couldn’t get together in person. They also had some gear available to make that happen. 

“We had access to some instruments that were just sitting there,” says Robehmed. The project came together in collaboration with Felisha Ledesma, who founded the program Resource Residency and helped launch Portland’s Synth Library. 

Though people may have had more time on their hands to work on creative projects this year, the multitude of financial blows that Americans have endured also makes music equipment potentially more inaccessible. “Our aim is 100% to make it affordable and accessible to learn how to produce electronic music by giving access to all these instruments,” says Robehmed. They ask for a deposit when you check out a piece of equipment – anything from $1 to $20 – but you get it back when you return your piece (there’s an option to donate the deposit, but that’s completely up to the user). 

Robehmed and Ketel are the only two people running the library, so it’s open one week out of the month. They typically open for orders on a Monday and the first two days are the BIPOC Priority Restock. Everyone else places reservations beginning on Wednesday of that week. “Our aim is to bring more people into electronic music, and into music production, who aren’t white, cis, and male,” says Robehmed. The BIPOC priority window for orders is part of the mission and Robehmed says that it has worked well. The following Sunday, everyone can check out the gear that they’ve reserved at Women’s Center for Creative Work’s office in Highland Park in a pandemic-safe way. All of the equipment is sanitized as well. “I spend most of the drop off days sanitizing gear,” says Ketel.

In the few months since it opened, FeM Synth Lab’s lending library has already gained a following. Farre Nixon has checked out multiple synths from the library. She’s a longtime fan of electronic music had been wanting to experiment with synths and production for a while. “I had no idea where to start,” she says. Then she started pricing synths. “It’s just so insanely prohibitive,” says Nixon, an architect who finished school last year. 

Nixon moved to Los Angeles in early March and found out about FeM Synth Lab through a friend. When the library opened, she checked out the Moog DFAM (Drummer from Another Mother). A couple other Moogs, a Make Noise piece and a Korg followed. “It’s amazing because you can actually really feel the difference between each of these machines,” she says. 

Now that she has tried out a few different synths, Nixon has an idea of what she will want to buy for herself in the future. “That’s given me a ton of direction,” she says. “I feel like now I’m able to turn a dream into a small, growing reality.” Plus, through the FeM Synth Lab, she’s gotten to know other people in her new city. “I’m building community,” she says, “and I feel like that’s the most important thing.”

A lot of the synths FeM Synth Lab has on hand were donated by musicians, mostly people in the Los Angeles area. Resource Residency donated a few Moogs. They’ve also worked with a couple different companies, notably Make Noise and 4MS, who have donated to FeM Synth Lab. You can even check out modular synths as well. “They’re the final frontier of inaccessibility,” says Robehmed. Through the partnership with 4MS, they have two rows of modules for users to play with. “That’s an amazing, beginner way to learn, or a great place to start because you can just experiment and it’s not too daunting,” says Robehmed. “It’s not an entire wall.” 

They have effects pedals, mixers and interfaces too, but Ketel notes that they want to beef up the inventory of accessories. “We’d love to get monitors up there,” she says, “Stuff that will help you set up your studio, because that’s also something that can be really expensive to do.” FeM Synth Lab does accept both monetary and gear donations. They’re also looking to building up enough of a stockpile in the library so that people can check out more than one item at a time.

Robehmed mentions that Women’s Center for Creative Work has a motto: We’re a process, not a product. “I think about that all the time,” she says, “especially with regards to this project. It’s not perfect. It’s going to be iterative. We’re going to learn and grow and add.” For now, FeM Synth Lab remains open during that process, allowing future synth whizzes to grow alongside its expanding Lending Library.

Follow FeM Synth Lab on Instagram for ongoing updates.

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.”

Follow Suzanne Ciani on Facebook for ongoing updates.