Synthesist

In summer 1979, Harald Grosskopf-- a drummer who lived in Berlin and had appeared on recordings by Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel, Cosmic Jokers, and others-- holed up in the apartment of a friend in Krefeld, Germany, to record his debut solo album. In the flat he had a Minimoog, a primitive sequencer, an 8-track reel-to-reel recorder, and a lot of time alone. Over the course of several weeks, Grosskopf wrote and recorded the material that wound up on Synthesist, which was eventually released on the venerable Hamburg-based kosmische imprint Sky. RVNG has reissued the album, which is held in high esteem among early synth enthusiasts but is not widely known, along with an additional disc of re-workings by some of the record's admirers (Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro, Arp, etc.) Between the original record and the new versions, Synthesist offers an endlessly listenable introduction to Grosskopf's music that also serves a fascinating window into the sound of a specific time and place. In the liner notes to the set, Grosskopf writes of how maintaining the Minimoog in the apartment was a nightmare, and that the pitch would go flat or sharp depending on warm and cold it was in the space. He eventually figured out that if he placed a 60-watt light bulb near the synth, he could regulate the temperature enough to keep the instrument sounding good. This image-- of new breakthroughs in sound-making technology having difficulty being used because of the of their surroundings-- is a nice snapshot of where music technology was in the days of analog electronics. These were the sounds of the future, but they still existed in the physical world, where things like air temperature mattered. Sounds hadn't yet been broken down into 1s and 0s, where they could be endlessly manipulated without degradation. So Grosskopf's future music was confronting the same problems that had vexed instrumentalists for centuries-- how to keep the damn things in tune. The music on Synthesist hovers in an intriguing middle ground between instrumental synth-pop in the vein of early Kraftwerk and more free-form space-drone explorations popularized by Schulze and Tangerine Dream. The tracks are mostly compact and tend to hum along to a pop-friendly electronic pulse, but they aren't tied into any sort of verse/chorus structure. Because of this, the music has a floating, airy quality, always in motion but untethered by song, which puts even more focus on the glorious analog textures.