It's 1979...
I had already been an organist for a few years, but of course that's only cos I really wanted a synth. I finally got one, a Korg MS-20. TBH I didn't really know what to do with the thing. It was full of holes which needed cables to connect them together. I never could quite figure out what all these holes did. I still can't :-D
So, by either recording stuff straight to my trusty Akai budget R2R with the ping-pong delay on, bouncing back from a cassette deck to add live tracks, or by using 2 decks and adding the delay through a basic send-return, I was able to create music. 3 examples of this are included for you, the first of which was done the day I got the MS-20, making it my earliest synth piece. These recordings ain't up to much and haven't aged particularly well and are truly gnarly. I was surprised they existed at all but there ya go.
I got a Roland SH101 on loan from college, a Roland Juno 60 borrowed from a friend, my own Juno 6, a Korg KPR 77 drum machine, a spring reverb unit and a rudimentary mixer. With all this present at some or all stages throughout, I made the music known as Linear Functions. The earliest recording of which was Indian Conundrum, in 1982. The last was May in 1984.
Linear Functions.
A certain "Big Bob" had entered the frame. He thought this shit was amazing and wanted to make a cassette album from it. I didn't, so didn't want to use my real name. Out came Linear Functions by a "Chris McKuen". This would be Version 1 of it, minus May, Ethereal Dawn, (In Remembrance of) Summers Past, 4'20 and Metal Dance.
Version 2 with its revised tracklist happened due to Replicant in 1993 generating interest in the earlier offering.
All the Linear Functions tracks are included for you here, from both versions. I haven't put much focus into cleaning every last bit of hiss, repairing gnarly bits etc. not when dudes spend such time and money trying to make their new recordings sound like this! No, this really sounds like this because it really is that ancient, like its composer! Did patch up the worst drop-outs however and give it an extensive remastering.
Here it is presented it for you in Dolby Atmos, binaural stereo which gives space to each component, creates a lovely wide sound field and sounds great on headphones right up to a home theatre system.
Incidentally, if you open up the 16bit Whole File on its own page you'll see it has a video. It's not a video but and audio only .mp4 also of the whole album, but that .mp4 is a 5.1 multichannel file. You might even be able to coax it into a 5.1 playback if you've got the right setup and a degree in dark matter physics.
Bonus items include .pdf presentation, desktop wallpapers and a .txt file you can use for indexing tracks to CD.
Aerial Visions.
I think this was an early piece, again from 1982, before drum machine & SH101 or Juno 6. So the bass was LFO on MS-20 with everything else being played manually.
Vid:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3ATsVAVTCE
Seventh Dimension.
Another SH101 sequence I’m sure of it. That's all I can remember. Bass was was manual on the MS-20. To be honest I remember badly! I know this and Aerial Visions were done just a few days apart. The hi-hat effect was me playing it on one hand, panning it on the other and subsequently giving myself cramp!
May
The last track produced in this time period. It was 1984. SH101 sequence with a little bit of KPR77 hi hat, MS-20 bass drone, Juno chords. News samples overdubbed along with SH101 lead solo.
Metal Dance.
Certainly a later recording, end of 1983 I think. Solo on MS-20 and extensive use of that synth throughout. Extensive use of everything else too by the sounds of it. Sounds like me after a few too many Carlsberg Special Brews. I believe I was trying to build a can pyramid at the time.
Ethereal Dawn.
Well this track's probably illegal by today's terms. Nicking samples wasn't quite the thing back then, since you only ever heard those on Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Trevor Horn productions and other such posh stuff. The fact that I nicked an entire Gregorian chant and got clean away with it is quite something in its own right.
(In Remembrance of) Summers Past,
to give it it's full title, is the first version of what was later to be Summers Past on my Terraformer album. Recordings not aged too well, so apologies for how gnarly it gets. But now you can hear more within the piece, I noticed that I'd been playing along to a click-track and left the click still in! You can hear it a little.
4'20.
More like 4'19 now :-) Some kind of freaky electronic rock'n'roll like Metal Dance. That was me though; either electronic meant electronic, or sometimes it meant just rocking out like an inebriated teenager! It wasn't as if I was doing music then with the intention of letting a ton of people hear it. Good fun :-)
Indian Conundrum.
This has to be Juno 60 arp with me doubling up manually on Juno 6, over the top of Juno 6 chords/bass note & Juno 60 high sitar-like arp. Solo on one of the Junos. It was the first day I used the Juno 60 if I remember. 3rd quarter 1982.
Chase.
Original version of The Chase, a track recorded during the Replicant sessions. I remember it was very frosty day along a disused local backroad with me holding a portable stereo cassette recorder under my right shoulder, stereo mic in my left hand, running along to get the running sounds on this. Then I went home and recorded the rest.
The Gathering.
When I was a kid we had a power station about a mile away and with it warming up the Trent river there we used to get great thunderstorms. There was an airport on the top of the shallow valley and whenever a thunderstorm was brewing, if a plane was running its engines there the drone would bounce off the low cloud cover and carry most impressively down to us at the bottom. Since then I always associated a coming storm with an ominous drone!
Serendipity.
As with "Chase" it appears that I was able to program drum machines in those days. These days I just can't be arsed. This melodic piece points towards later styles of mine. As with Chase however, it also shows that if there's one thing I really ought to have paid more attention to, it was my errors, bad notes etc. Having said that I can recall spending inordinate amounts of time repeating these takes trying to get one which sounded clean enough. I would have no choice but to leave in a few shitty bits because I couldn't correct them or edit them out.
Passing Images.
I know this was done roughly at the same time as Serendipity. The string lead was MS-20 through a Boss flanger pedal and a load of tape echo, after which it sounded very full.
Beyond The Event Horizon.
I always liked this piece because of its atmosphere. I always hated this piece because the high arp line sounds glitchy and full of tape dropout. It was actually like that when I recorded it and it was due to one of my R2R spools not being wound tight enough. So It kept slipping and jumping. Nevertheless, I decided to keep the take because it was the best I could achieve with it that day.
Sayonara.
I'm sure this was done around the same time as Indian Conundrum, making it one of the earliest of the Linear Functions pieces. In fact, given that it's just Juno 6 and MS-20 it might actually be the earliest but I'm not so certain about that. The piece was later re-done for my Replicant album in 1992/3.
Second Approach (3 excerpts).
This is where shit gets shitty. In spite of its title, Second Approach was my first ever set of recordings, which featured me on my brand new Korg MS-20 and occasionally on my Yamaha Electone organ. In fact the first excerpt is the very first recording I ever made with the MS-20. My first ever synth piece. You can hear from the other two excerpts how things were to progress from thereon. There was really no decent remaining sound source for these recordings and in fact if it wasn't for someone I went to college with still having an original cassette copy, I would have considered the recordings lost.
SO...
The gear list, as I can recall it...
Yamaha Electone organ, can't remember which one!
Korg MS-20
Roland Juno 6
Roland Juno 60 (loaned)
Roland SH-101 (loaned)
Roland SH-101 (another one) (loaned)
Korg KPR77 drum machine
Akai GX400D reel-2-reel
2 x cassettes decks (Technics and Panasonic if I recall)
Spring reverb, don't know whose!
Well, whether this makes me one of the original "synth pioneers" I can't say. I rarely get credited with anything, let alone that. It certainly highlights that i've been around a jolly long time and that, as far as I'm aware, I'm not about to croak just yet. We synth oldbies tend to zip off to "other cosmic addresses" rather more readily than most. If I had plans to join them there, I would let you know ;-)
![Rusty Hodge [SomaFM] thumbnail](https://f4.bcbits.com/img/0007263241_42.jpg)
