What synthesizers did you start out with?
I started in '78, and my first synth was a Roland SH-3A. I soon bought an [ARP Instruments] 2600, which I guess they call it semi-modular, but you patched it too. It had the basic signal flow set, but I could override it with patches. In early photos, you'll see that my classic setup in the '80s was the ARP 2600 with three ARP Sequencers mounted together above it. I had some other little modules that came from guys that were making them at the time. And then it was the [Moog] Micromoog, ARP String Ensemble, and later I brought in the Oberheim polyphonic synths. I was living in Culver City, [California,] and Oberheim was in Santa Monica at the time. I knew a lot of guys designing there, so I was playing prototypes of the Oberheim Xpander with no graphics on it! There was Sequential [Circuits] and E-mu Systems up north [in San Francisco and Santa Cruz], and Korg and the Japanese synths were coming in, but Santa Monica was ground zero at that time for me and synth development. Marcus Ryle was designing a lot with Oberheim, and then went on to found Line 6. There was also 360 Systems and JL Cooper Electronics. It was really a feeling of being at the core of that.
Polyphonic synthesizers were not available when you first started playing, right?
They were not. The ARP String Ensemble was the [Eminent BV] Solina String Ensemble from Holland. You could play chords on it, but it was more in the vein of organ technology. I was drawn to that at the very beginning, because I heard a lot of the European and German school, like Klaus Schulze and Tangerine Dream, playing these beautiful chords on Farfisa [organs] and some early string synthesizers. That's where we were getting the polyphonic component to the music at that early time. With the ARP 2600 and its three oscillators, I would tune it to a chord and then I would play the chord with one finger.
[laughs] Right.
Those early days of the one finger chord live on here now; so many of the new synths now have chord memory and you can load up as many notes as you can cluster up on a chord, using both hands; then you hit "hold" and have a ten-note chord that you can then do amazing work with. That all started in the early days, through the limitations of polyphonic and having a three-voice monophonic synth that I would then play through tunings like that.
I remember seeing synthesists use little lead weights to put on keys to hold down notes.
Well, that's the early hold button there. My frequent collaborator, Robert Rich, would use fishing weights, and we'd all have our own little special icons that had enough weight to hold the plastic keys down.
I've used masking tape, but then it lets go accidentally!
I also was in the tape school as well. Or matchbooks that you could stick between the black and white keys. If you look at Klaus Schultz's Moondawn album, as we did as young aspirants of the music, we would study it with a magnifying glass and see on the back cover that there were certainly weights on some of the keys. That was the universal "hold button" that we would all do on the early analog keyboards.
Something physical and simple.
Yeah. With modern synths I see hold buttons, but occasionally I think, "Where's the hold button?" You can get a modular world going now with the sophistication of the polyphonic synths, like the [ASM] Hydrasynth, where they've got modular aspects built into them now. It's quite powerful and amazing. I have a few of the Hydrasynths, and I'm quite fond of the little Hydrasynth Explorer; it's like a baby Xpander. Glen Darcey, who designed it, worked a lot with the Xpander and wove in those components where you can have matrix patching and go way beyond. It's a great synth for the sound: It has portability, sophistication, and the ability to put it in the hands of lots of people.
You were accumulating keyboards, a mixing board, and effects. One of the first things I discovered was that synths need some type of ambience – a reverb or delay – to add texture and space.
As I started to pull the carpet back to see what was happening, reading interviews, and through my own immersion in the early days, the mixing board immediately became essential. To me, the mixing board is still the most important instrument of all that I have. My main studio console these days – that has all the synths and hardware effects filling every channel – is a Soundcraft GB8 with 40 channels. I have been using various Soundcraft boards since the mid-'80s. I started with the Series 200, then to Delta, Ghost, and a Series 6000, modified by Tim Spencer of True Systems [Tape Op #72]. The board and effects are essentially an extension to the synth itself. I still take out the 32 channel Soundcraft LX7ii; that's my easel that I mix and perform with. In the very beginning, I had a Sunn Magna mixer, from 1977, that was designed by Greg Mackie. As the synthesizers were evolving, so were the portable, hands-on mixers with lots of channels and pre and post sends. Pre and post sends are big in how I work, so I can pull sounds back deeper in the reverb or delays. The Roland Space Echo [tape delay/reverb] was an essential tool in the early days. The [Yamaha] Rev 7 was the first coveted digital reverb that I put my hands on. At that the time, the holy grail was a Lexicon. Eventually the Lexicon PCM70 would arrive around the creation of "Dreamtime Return" in 1987. Before that I would do certain final mixes in pro studios that had the Lexicon 224 or 480.
The early synthesizers weren't cheap. How did you make that work for you, to be able to make a living and get by?
I came from a working-class family, and we didn't have any money. But I was taught early that if you want it, you go out and work for it. At that point, I was working some factory job, and I took out a 25 percent interest loan. I had to have an analog synth! Eventually, I would draw some instruments to me, because people would see how passionate I was and that I didn't have the money. I had a guy loan me two EMS Synthi A, the classic British synth. But, ultimately, my first big step into the void of it all was the ARP 2600, ARP Sequencer, [Moog] Micromoog, and ARP String Ensemble. I bought it all. That was probably $4,000 or $5,000 back then, with 25% interest!
Ouch.
Nothing says, "I'm going to get serious about this" than having that looming over you. [laughter] But none of that got in my way. I realized that I had to have the tools. I wasn't cut of the cloth to go to an academic world and work in a controlled environment with people telling me how to do this or that. I went for one and a half days at a local electronic course at a junior college, and I walked out. I said, "I'll still be here when I'm 35 years old, waiting to get my 'keys to the car' to drive it around."
Breakthroughs happen by simply immersing oneself in the work.
No question. Yeah.
I know you were living in a small house in Culver City, and it was taken over as a whole studio.
And, yes, my studio space is where I was five minutes ago before we got online here. I've always had Timerooms. That's what I call the studio; that's where I enter into this realm of time and then time becomes nothing at that point. I'm in the flow. Now it's actually the Timehouse. I have a freestanding, separate house I share with my wife, Linda Kohanov, and we have a studio there as well. The Timehouse sits high on a ridge and looks out about 75 miles. Every room is a different studio. There are essentially three studios set up that are always up and running. They're like easels for a visual painter or a sculptor. I'll have the modular in one room, and that might be patched up and running for two weeks or longer. That's where it's evolving and I'm recording it as it's unfolding and evolving. Those early days in Culver City were continuations of how I started in San Diego. I migrated to L.A. and got immersed in the electronic scene there as I was meeting a lot of the folks that were at the beginning of building all the great gear with Oberheim. I was doing lots of concerts in L.A. I played at the Troubadour in '79, and [owner] Doug Weston reluctantly let us play as a three-synthesizer trio on a Sunday afternoon as an experiment. There was a lot of that going on, where we were breaking through into a world that hadn't thought of a band being three guys with synths. Through all of 2023, I was hosting a series in Tucson on the first Tuesday of the month called Ambient Lounge in a cool jazz club, Century Room, in downtown Tucson at the Hotel Congress. We had ambient electronic experimental music going in a club where you would normally hear traditional jazz. It's a sacred space for listening, which is perfect for this music. I'm taking out a refined system that I could have had 10 or 20 years ago. It's a 16-channel mixing board, Lexicon reverbs, and Eventide processing. No laptops, no computers; just hands-on shaping, carving, and responding immediately. That's my approach to it. At the same time, I'll see someone doing amazing stuff on a laptop, and I have respect for that as well.
Have you tried working only in a laptop or a DAW format for performances or recording?
Absolutely. I looked at soft synths and how to weave that in. I lost interest pretty quickly. For me, the hardware gear has something so visceral and so absolutely subtle in the feel. Number one is the sound from the components used in its creation. Even if it's plastic and metal, and it's a synth with knobs and all that, there's always something often elegant and beautiful in the way that they've chosen the right potentiometers. There's this sensual feel that I get used to. Having grown up with Oberheim, it set the standard with that quality of build. I recently got my hands on the new Oberheim OB-X8. It's fantastic. They brought all the essence of the core of that up to right now. The sound of it is unbelievably huge if you want it to be, or it can be delicate. But again, there's something visceral about the hardware and I don't get that feeling with DAWs and soft synths. It could be just my own imaginary perception of latency constantly within this gear. It's got to feel right. And that's where the music and the emotion and the subtlety is born from. I'm not thinking, "Wow, this sounds almost like the 2600." I've got to have my hands on the magic.
Yeah. And the randomness of an ARP 2600.
Yeah. At certain times I would use [Native Instruments] Absynth. That was more of its own thing; it wasn't trying to emulate something. I could find abstraction or emotional sounds out of there that aren't trying to model something else.
You certainly recall how hard it was to learn about synths in the late '70s and even '80s. The first time I heard a sequencer, I thought, "How's that person playing that pattern over and over so fast?"
Yeah, we could get off this interview and type in anything we're talking about and have a Wikipedia page for reference. That's how the early albums had a religious quality, where we would study them. That's where I learned about the ARP 2600 and ARP Sequencer, and how those pieces sound.
A sequencer as a standalone, analog-based unit that would do steps and patterns is something our younger readers might not even know about or understand these days.
Yeah, the analog step sequencer has been around since the dawn of analog synth time. That's the one that you hear that gets clichéd. It can be used creatively, or it can be used in a more casual way. We would hear how Devo used it, and then how Tangerine Dream would.
Yeah, or John Carpenter.
The early analog sequencer experience had the energy of rock music. When we heard [Pink Floyd's] The Dark Side of the Moon ["On the Run"], the first use of the sequencer in there, that was with the EMS [KS Keyboard/Sequencer]. The analog sequencers, even though they're limited, as I began to explore that world deeper and deeper, I realized that it's not just an 8-note or a 16-note or a 32-note or a 64-note pattern, but I could combine sequences. I'd start changing the length of each sequence, and then combining those phasing sequencer patterns against each other. Then, we were entering into the world of Steve Reich [Tape Op #15], and that type of minimalism where the sequences are going out of phase and they're creating this moiré pattern of complete engagement. I can accelerate and create these multidimensional spaces that feel as if we're hovering or physically moving somewhere. It steps beyond any technical tool at that point, but it starts to do – what I called one of my albums – "skeleton keys." To me, there's no other type of music or function that takes me to that place. The way I need to hear sequencers, and the way I crave to hear it in other music, is when it takes me, and it starts to do these things in my consciousness. It opens up a door with the "skeleton key" that is accessed through that.
Structures From Silence was your third album, 40 years ago, and a bit of a breakthrough attention and sales-wise. How was it created?
It was basically the DSX, the Oberheim digital sequencer. MIDI had been out for about a year or so. I was at the very first NAMM meeting [1983] where Dave Smith [Sequential Circuits] announced MIDI, and it was like some kind of biblical moment there!
It did change a lot.
Yeah. So, the MIDI sequencer then allowed me to sit at the Oberheim OB-8 and play my diaphanous, flowing, and breathing chords, and play them as if I'm playing them into, at that time, a Tascam 3340, which is what I recorded Structures… on, partially. But with the DSX, I could play that chord progression that is the title track for 30 minutes. Then I hit Stop, Loop, and it would come back. At that point, I could participate with it but in a way where it's not on tape. I could change the filters and add a few notes here and there. It's similar to playing with a collaborator, at that point. Once I saw how I could do that polyphonically, that had nothing to do with the Berlin school or sequencer-style music – the way we were used to hearing it up to that point. It was using it as a polyphonic device, basically what would later be revealed in the DAWs, where we could create multi-layered, orchestrated music and call it a sequencer; but really recording into a multitrack digital workstation.
Right.
It wasn't a matter of me not having the right tools, but the kind of space that I wanted to create aligned instantly when I got my hands on the DSX – the polyphonic pre-MIDI sequencer – and the Oberheim OB-8; this was the world I knew I wanted to paint in. I'm coming from a visual perspective, where I could have three or four long, atmospheric loops that are not synchronized together. You're lying on your back, and you're watching those shapes in the sky move against each other and creating their own beautiful synchronization organically that way. That really is what has continued on for me all the way 'til right now, that style of music. Again, the mixing board has never left; it'll always be. In my mentoring of artists that I help along I'll say, "The mixing board is number one. This is the first thing that you need to get your hands on."
You can plug a synthesizer into an amplifier, like a guitar, but you usually can't even plug two into one amp.
