It may seem incredible now, but there was a time when the synthesizer was a novel sound object worthy of scholarly study. During the ‘80s these magnificent tools became synonymous with plastic consumer culture. Their luster tarnished by appearances on MTV. Eventually relegated to the dustbin of chintz, they were pushed to the back of the mix, padding the gaps between the guitarist and the vocalist instead of allowing it space to breath in the foreground. The collective embarrassment that the industry felt over the synthesizer's spacey, electronic hum could not be satisfied by this demotion to pure functionality, and it was pushed further and further into the background until it disappeared entirely in the wake of Nevermind. If synths are given center stage at all nowadays, it’s because the singer needs something to do with their hands while performing. In instances where a guitar would be too distracting, you just slide a board under their figures, and voilà(!) all that nervous fidgeting turns into sound.
These dire straits were not always so narrow, though. In the 1970s many academics were interested in unlocking the hidden potential of the synthesizer, with a great number of works being produced following various esoteric interests in the instrument's potential with a disinterested in the reproducibility that pop music demands. Enter the Buchla 200 Series! While Moog and other synthesizer brands were courting commercial application, its creator Don Buchla sought to create an instrument that would harness the echoes of the cosmos. Buchla systems are now highly coveted and generally not available to the public as a result. This is why Chicago sound artist Brett Naucke had to travel to the Elektronmusikstudion (EMS), an experimental sound studio in Stockholm, just to have access to one. The result of his journey is EMS Hallucinations, a dream-like aural odyssey that positions Naucke in the cockpit of early sounds pioneers and attempts to retrace the jetstreams they rode, if not literally, then psycho-acoustically.
Of course, there is no point in replicating the sounds and experiences of previous sound architects. Instead, Naucke was looking to understand how his current sensibilities in dance and electronic music inform his understanding of, and interactions with, the instruments designed without such applications in mind. A kind of archeological study, where the researcher is the subject, attempting to comprehend their present by forcing chain-reactions within their past. This may be the closest humanity ever actually comes to time travel.
The first track is a studio experiment conducted using only the Buchla 200. The result is an incredibly crisp sounding interstellar time warp, that will give you flashbacks to the soundscapes of sci-fi epics of a by-gone era. The second track is slightly more beat focused, augmenting the studio output of the Buchla with a Serge system giving it a mesmerizingly trancy quality that becomes more pervasive as the track progresses. The final two tracks on the album “Hallucinations IV” and “Hallucinations II” are reimaginings of segments of the first track, with additional beats spliced throughout, an experiment that collapses the histories of studio experimentation and dance music into a singular, unitary whole. Even as a work that is esoteric in conception, I found EMS Hallucinations to be highly accessible and enjoyable as any electronic music I’ve encountered this year. It doesn’t hurt that the air of scholasticism around the project has piqued by music nerd sensibilities and launched them hurdling towards the hyperspace of the mind.
Grab a copy of EMS Hallucinations from American Dreams Records here.