Want to fill your YouTube feed with basically all synthesizer legend Suzanne Ciani, all the time? Now’s a great time to click subscribe, as she’s uploading an incredible amount of music. (Eat your heart out, Aphex Twin.) Also, can we pause and just consider that she wrote an incredible composition for a beeping GE dishwasher?
This first one is not a new upload. Still, it’s an exceptional example of minimal composition – a whole lot of beeping – and netted her a well-deserved Clio award in 1984, advertising’s highest honor. (There was also apparently “a lot of time in my production studio putting it together.”)
But there’s an incredible amount of stuff happening now on her feed, gems and rarities from over the years, entire albums… I could do due diligence and be a journalist and write the composer and ask what’s going on, but I’m too busy sitting here watching it happen. (Hey, it’s the week everyone is off from the usual workload, okay?)
Let’s needle-drop here. There’s the frenetic, fuzzy futurism of “Time Lapse,” with Jonathan Fitoussi:
And live quadraphonic:
And “Help, Help, The Globolinks!” which you have to admire for the name alone. (It’s a score for Gian Carlo Menotti, but I do recommend you shout it out on your next visit to the grocery store and see what happens.)
Two minutes ago, this happened, it’s gorgeous, and honestly I didn’t know it existed. (Maybe that demonstrates I’m ignorant, but it does say “the private music of Suzanne Ciani” so I’ll take that as a defense.)
Or how about a live “Concert at Phil Niblock’s Loft”:
I’ll leave you to her feed to catch more.
But, wait, that reminds me of her creating a soundtrack for a pinball machine:
To flip back to the vintage YouTube uploads of 10-15 years ago, which in turn salvage the public television of 1980, let’s just use this as an excuse to kick back and watch some 3-2-1 Contact:
What’s beautiful is, 44 years later, this doesn’t really sound vintage; if anything, we’re probably more attuned to hear these sounds and their compositional possibilities. And the joy of synth raindrops never gets old.