The late Don Buchla made one of the greatest and most influential synthesizers of all time – a number of them, in fact. But true as that may be, it feels like only part of the story. A byproduct of the intellectually far-out ‘60s San Francisco, Buchla took a commission from Morton Subotnick to turn the concept of the musical instrument on its head and build a machine for making music that was truly new – sonically, compositionally, even politically. Along the way, his devices garnered a small but supremely dedicated following of music-makers whose lives were changed by their possibilities. How would a hive of transistors and patch cables do something like that? Drawing from RBMA’s interview archives and the expertise of Buchla maestro Suzanne Ciani, Jordan Rothlein untangles one of the most unique instruments ever to make sound.
