Ah, the master. It’s really easy to piss off a man in a baseball cap and/or holding a BFA in composition by saying Suzanne Ciani is a better Buchla player than Morton Subotnick, but look at her do it! We really are lucky that SC was drawn back to the synthesizer after years crunching away at the piano’s dizzying arithmetic. She edged closer to Western melody for so many years that she devoted her talents to it exclusively, only to be yanked back by banana cables’ short drag. Another way to put it is that her music has such lucid compositional intent, rare in all-synthesizer work.
Suzanne Ciani’s only contemporary recording that has been released so far is a fantastic collaboration with Kaitlin Aurelia Smith, and if you enjoy the video above you should absolutely check out live recordings of hers from 1975 released a couple of years ago. But if you want the most heavenly Ciani, listen to Seven Waves and Velocity of Love back to back, on loop, all day.
—Host