I wanted something
portable to play in a band, so my parents bought me a Juno 106. I
was 15. The knobs were labeled “oscillator” and “envelope,”
and I never got much of a handle on what those things meant. I stuck
to preprogrammed piano and organ sounds. I went to blues jams and
set the keyboard on top of the piano, so I could play either one. It
was Austin, Texas in the 80's, a good time and place for music, but I
didn't know any better than to play blues. Later I switched to the
bass guitar and forgot about keyboards entirely. When it came down
to it, I played a lot of synthesizers, but I was never a synthesizer
player. When it came down to it, I wasn't much interested in
inventing sounds that way. I didn't have that thing in me.
There are
synthesizers all over this album of hers, and the synthesizers only
rarely attempt to imitate acoustic instruments. Mostly the
synthesizers sound like synthesizers. Thick fat beeping buzzing Juno
60s, Prophet 5s, Memorymoogs, and Oberheim sequencers, in action,
signaling, morse code, electronic pulse. The guitar are polished
smooth and slathered in chorus, and the drums are pressed flat,
reasonable simulations of guitars and drums. But the synths sounds
exactly like synths.
Those synths can
sound dated now, but then it was a roomfull of guys with the latest
technology in their hands. They moved oscillators and envelopes
until they got something they were going for, something I never had
that much fun doing. Maybe I missed something there. It must have
felt like the present and the future happening simultaneously,
transmitting beeping morse code messages from right now into
tomorrow. Sounds nice.
