Joseph Paradiso's Massive Modular Synthesizer

Joseph Paradiso is professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he is co-director of the “Things That Think” workgroup. Paradiso is trained as a physicist and electrical engineer, but in his spare time he has built one of the world’s largest modular synthesizer configurations, a creation known simply as “Massive Modular Synth.” 

In the age of computer music triumphant, the towering banks of modular synthesizer units often seen in histories of electronic music are typically portrayed as relics of a technologically obsolete era. But these physically clunky devices continue to exercise a powerful allure on experimentally minded musicians, as shown by the recent resurgence of interest in custom-built analog components.

Paradiso, who has been building his own synthesizers since 1974, approaches his instrument not as a means of creating static “sounds” to be played by means of a keyboard or other kind of interface, but rather as a sophisticated form of “hands-on” composition:

I don’t play this rig any more as a keyboard instrument. My main use for it now is to make gigantic sound installations with huge patches that I continue building over several hours, until I run out of patch cords. The process is perhaps closer to sculpture than music, where one starts with a small “seed” patch that expresses a simple musical process that is progressively augmented and refined as the patch builds. It is a large, complex feedback system, with signals that control the modules fed back to their inputs through a massive network of digital and analog processing . The resulting sounds are mainly autonomous, babbling and droning on for hours and days, as each patch achieves a distinctive groove or atmosphere without really repeating.

This approach strongly resembles the so-called “cybernetic music” of the German composer (and Acousmata favorite) Roland Kayn (1933-2011). The act of wiring the components together becomes itself a form of composition, expressed not in musical acts or notation, but rather in the distinctly technological language of oscillators, filters, sequencers and logic gates. Although some of the components of Paradiso’s synthesizer are digital, there is no computer involved, and Paradiso sees his instrument as a testament to the aesthetic values of tangibility, ephemerality, and unpredictability possessed by analog electronics.

November 26, 2011, 1:51pm

Steve Porcaro of Toto tweaks the band’s massive Polyfusion syntheszier “Damius” (1982). From Mark Vail’s Vintage Synthesizers, p. 155.

September 09, 2011, 10:58am

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Sun Ra: “Space Probe” (excerpt)

From the album Space Probe (1970)

In 1968, the visionary afro-futurist musician and bandleader Sun Ra moved his Arkestra from New York to Philadelphia, where the band took up residence in the Germantown neighborhood in the northern part of the city. “To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth,” he later recalled, “and that was Philadelphia, which was death’s headquarters.”

But despite his initial disdain for what he called the “city of brotherly shove,” Sun Ra eventually made himself at home in Philadelphia, and became a fixture at the city’s libraries, record stores, and radio stations. He lived in Philadelphia until his death in 1993, and the Arkestra remains based in Philly to this day, led currently by saxophonist Marshall Allen.

Space Probe was among the first Philadelphia releases on Sun Ra’s own Saturn label. Like many of his recordings from this period, it was put out in limited numbers and available only at performances. The title track is an 18-minute odyssey of synthesized pyschedelia created on a prototype Minimoog. (The thick, layered sound was probably created by multi-track recording the synth, which was monophonic.) This was Sun Ra’s first recorded work with the Moog, an instrument that would become a regular part of his setup. It is a stunningly experimental piece of music whose throbbing electronic ecstasies bear a remarkable affinity to Henri Pousseur’s 8 Études Paraboliques of 1972. (Was the Belgian composer inspired by Sun Ra, perhaps having heard him during the Arkestra’s 1970 European tour? Anything’s possible.)

John Szwed’s biography of Sun Ra, Space is the Place, provides a taste of the Arkestra’s performances circa 1970:

“At Gino’s Empty Foxhole, the basement of a church [St. Mary’s episcopal] on the edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus in Philadelphia, he used lighting combined with industrial fans to create solar storms that sent the musicians’ capes billowing as if the Arkestra was in flight. Then Sun Ra disappeared into his own cape, his face outlined against the windblown fabric, and, while a space chord howled, he tore a hole in the cape and poked his head through, as if he were ripping an opening in space itself. To members of the audience who came prepared by hallucinogens and stimulants—as they did more and more often nowadays—the spectacle was magnified beyond belief.” 

May 05, 2011, 3:34pm

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

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 Ben 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.

July 07, 2009, 11:50am