Organic Intelligence XLIV: World-Building-For-One AKA DIY Synth Music for Getting Off-Planet

In this month’s antidote to the algorithm, Jennifer Lucy Allan guides us through a selection of transportive releases from DIY synth voyagers of the near past    

Floating in a netherworld of bedroom synths and home duped cassettes, the artists in this list exist in a nebulous sub genre of my own creation, one defined as much by quality of execution and mood as by style. Largely lo-fi, ephemeral, and hard to pin down in many ways, I recommend taking your own route through this music. It should be a solo mission; a choose-your-own-adventure through an infinity of bedroom synth music, via a universe of defunct blogs like Mutant Sounds; old Wordpress catalogues of electronic music; magazines on tape like INKEY$, bootlegs CD-Rs on Creel Pone, important waypoints marked by jaunts into the catalogues of tape labels like Colin Potter’s ICR.

Much of this music was originally on tape, made in a period around the 1970s and 1980s when it became feasible to have a synth in the spare room and conjure galaxies on which to travel the spaceways after work. It’s a specific type of electronic music I can best describe in the negative – not ambient, but not getting anywhere near dance music either. Sometimes it feels like music for when Tangerine Dream seems too expensive and cerebral. It exists in a Venn Diagram with the Berlin school of electronics that flourished around Klaus Schulze and his ilk, as well as early DIY new age material like the music collected on Light In The Attic’s I Am The Center box set. Crucially, the zone I’m trying to articulate here doesn’t feel like it has a specific psychic function or spiritual dimension like Wilburn Burchette’s Music Of The Godhead or Important’s recent box set of Meredith Young-Sower’s (Opens in a new window)Meditation music, although both of them fit with the theme texturally speaking.

One easy way to tell where you are is to check whether there is someone’s home address on the label, or a list of synths used are listed on the cassette labels – the closer to the middle of this universe you are, the more likely an equipment list is to appear. For the most part I don’t know much about who these people are; I have no idea about their place in the world or their politics. The only person about whom there is much information is Venezuelan musician Oksana Linde (pictured above), who has been unearthed by Buh Records more recently. As with so much self-released music pre-internet, I am indebted to those who have spent their time seeking out the good stuff and uploading it to YouTube, without these patient souls, these gentle and sloshy oceans of sound would be forever lost.  

Rick Crane – ‘If The Saucers Should Land In The Jungle’
(ICR)

Setting the dial spacewards from his house somewhere in Bury St Edmunds in the mid-80s, Rick Crane’s Kolyma makes me wonder at just how much good music might have been made in provincial British towns during that period. The tape hiss gives this charm, something limited in the synths which might be lost if this music was reworked into a Villeneuve glossiness. The titles suggest a science-fiction narrative, the arpeggios unfold as a soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist.  

George Garside – ‘Echoes In Parallax’
(Self released)

Garside self-released two albums on cassette, before putting out music on Colin Potter’s ICR. The former tends to be more dreamy. The ICR outing has a bit more grit and quality to it and is probably better, all things said, but there is something so gentle and kindly about his tapes, I find it soothing when stuck in fragile states of mind.    

Cord Of Life – ‘Beyond An Empty Dream’

(Self released)

Imaginary Journeys To Sunset has a simple kind of optimism about it. It is occasionally cheesy dream music, with flights, frontiers and lunar bases in the track titles. All I know is that Cord Of Life (Opens in a new window) are two lads called David Bennett and Andy H, who self-released two tapes out of Cannock in Staffordshire, which must be one of the least cosmic places in the UK. How this ever made it out and survived the ravages of time I have no idea, some soul posted it to Mutant Sounds as a 128kbps rip back in 2008.    

Clara Mondshine – ‘Amazonenharfe’ (Harp Of The Amazons)

One from the Berlin school on Klaus Schulze’s influential Innovative Communication label, Clara Mondshine is the moniker of a writer, musician and promoter named Walter Bachauer, who died relatively young in 1989. Luna Africana was the first – but also the best – record he released with Schulze, in 1981. It opens with dinky rhythms plink-plonking through a sequencer, segueing into floating atmospherics and more chugging rhythms sprinkled with vague non-Western influences. This track is the closing piece, and is by far the most accomplished, wafting into these charming clouds of sound.    

Oksana Linde – ‘Mundos flotantes’ 
(Buh Records)

This forthcoming release of Linde’s is what prompted this collection, as it reminded me of the UK lineage for this home synth music I had been excavating in idle moments. The pieces on this album were made between 1986 and 1994, at her home studio in San Antonio de Los Altos, Venezuela, with this track composed for a festival concert in 1991. It has the sense in which the synths are a tool for travel; for reaching into the upper atmosphere or the depths of our own imaginations.  

Moon Reflecting – ‘Drunk On Divine Moonshine’
(Goaty Tapes)

More earthy and grounded in its soothing lo-fi pulses, this release sounds like it could have been made any time between now and 1979. It arrived with me out of the blue and I’ve stuck to it gladly. It is reminder that this scene is still growing, in backrooms and garages, people still plugging away at pulses and arpeggios on their synths in their leisure time, and Goaty Tapes is one of a clutch of go-to labels putting out more from now and back then.