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Benge: “EMS VCS 3”
From the album Twenty Systems (2007)
The synthesizer, along with the microphone and the electric guitar, is one of the most important technologies of sound to emerge in the 20th century; and yet the history of this fabulously powerful device, the pipe organ of the electronic age, has yet to be written. Even an excellent book such as Trevor Pinch’s Analog Days— though admittedly focusing on “first wave” analog machines— contributes inadvertantly to the unhappy tendency of one brand of synthesizer, the Moog, to stand in for the entire technology.
Thus an effort such as Twenty Systems by Benge (the stage name of Matt Edwards) is especially welcome. This album presents brief sonic portraits of twenty different synthesizers, analog and digital, spanning the years 1968 to 1987. The disc is packaged with a gorgeous booklet featuring photographs and descriptions of the various machines.
The style of the music is can be described as minimalist, not in the Philip Glass sense of endlessly repeated tonal fragments, but rather in exploring the sound of each machine by means of a highly concentrated set of musical gestures. Though some of the tracks are a bit too soporific for my taste, some are quite gorgeous, and all of the tracks are composed in such a way as to let the unique timbral character of the instruments shine through.
This track showcases the fabled VCS 3, produced by Electronic Music Studios of London in 1969.
Played 34 time(s).
July 07, 2009, 11:50am
