Most people have a hard time doing one thing well. You've had four distinct careers. How have you managed to explore it all?
I'm a double Gemini. This is what happens. There are four people living in me, and I'm just now getting to know them. I'm always incredulous that things do change. I always said when I started the Buchla that I would not go back to the piano again. Then when I started the piano, I said I would never go back to the Buchla. Well, then I went back to the Buchla and I said I wouldn't go back to the piano! Now I don't believe myself at all. I know that I don't know what's going to happen. So, this is a surprise to me; but I'm used to surprises. Getting out of New York and commercial production, that was really a health issue. I got sick. Maybe it had nothing to do with my life there, which was intense; I loved it. But I got early breast cancer. It was a signal to me that I was supposed to change my life. I left the big city and came to the end of this dirt road, after my treatments.
You embrace the surprises?
I'm a follower. I have an instinct for a path, and I explore it, as if it's opening up in front of me. I don't come up with an idea and then pre-plan how to go there. I'm organic. I go with the flow.
I'm curious about your time in NYC when you started Ciani/Musica. That was groundbreaking at the time, not only to pack up and go to New York, but to have this idea of starting a studio that made noises for people.
Well, I went to New York to do a live Buchla performance in quadraphonic. I fell in love with New York. I loved the smell. I loved the energy. I felt the minute that I got there that that was where I belonged. So, I never went back to L.A. I didn't even have my belongings with me. I had them put in storage. I just had my Buchla for that concert, and I stayed in New York. Then I got hungry; I was starving. My brain said, "You've gotta find a solution to this." I had done a commercial when I was still in northern California. I had done more when I was in L.A. I had worked in film in L.A., teaching technology to film composers. There was a real interest back then in the film world for this new thing. In New York, I tried to make a career as a performer on the Buchla. What stopped me was that they wouldn't put up four speakers any place in a theater. I'd be at Lincoln Center with a concert scheduled and I needed two more speakers in the back of the room, and they'd say, "What? Are you crazy?" I said, "Well, if you don't put them up, I can't play." That was a dealbreaker. Then I worked for a year and a half trying to get the theaters to change. I started a non-profit corporation called The Electronic Center for New Music. I had a lot of people from the AES on my board, people from the speaker industry, and folks like that. I got to the point where nobody would listen to me because I wasn't rich and famous. I thought to myself, "Well, I'd better become rich and famous." That's what triggered my appetite for moving forward commercially. I stopped wanting to be the Buchla performer, and I started to go after making money with a vengeance.
Where was Ciani/Musica?
I had an apartment at 40 Park Avenue. With the first iteration of Ciani/Musica, the studio was in my apartment, and the office was at 1650 Broadway; the classic music building of all time, right near the Brill Building. It was wonderful. I didn't have to be near the office activity. The studio I initially put in was when I got money to do The Incredible Shrinking Woman soundtrack. I got a big check for that, and I put a home studio in my apartment. There weren't any home studios back then. It was a doorman building, and the guys just let me do it! I didn't allow shoes in the studio, so sometimes there'd be 15 pairs of shoes outside my door when I had clients in. I always felt nervous that I might be threatened to have to move out, but that never happened. For about ten years I ran it in my apartment. I had a view of the Empire State Building. It was tiny, though. Gear was piling up to the ceiling. It was wonderful, but then I felt obliged – because the company got big – to build an outside, big studio. But I was never as happy as I was when I was working at home.
How many people did you have working for you?
Well, I've been working on my archives, and I recently came across a telephone list of contacts for Ciani/Musica staff. There were about 30 people on that contact list. I had employees, but I also had studio interns. Frequently that was how you got in. You'd come in as an intern, and you'd work your way up. That's how it was done. The woman who eventually ran my company, Marina Belica, came in as an intern. Initially I didn't want to hire her because she was too smart. She'd gone to Yale. She was going to be coiling cables and sharpening pencils. I said, "I think you should go get a real job someplace." She said, "Hire the person you want to hire, and I'll come in anyway." She made me an offer I couldn't refuse. She became the head of the company.
Were you able to move a lot of the management of these 30 employees over to her so you could focus on the music side?
Yes, and we also investigated computer systems. In those days, computers were pretty new. They weren't personal computers. I hired a company to computerize our bidding systems, our production reports, our interfaces with the clients, our billing, and all that. It took a year to design this computer system. They installed it. It cost $40,000 to get this thing in, and it blew up immediately. Later I found out that they took my software design and sold it to other music houses, but you have to pick your battles. There are too many. I let that one go.
Aside from the Buchla, you were an early proponent of digital synthesizers, like the Synclavier, which was essentially a computer.
The Synclavier was an amazing tool for production of commercial music. I really didn't use it for my art music. I didn't like the sound. It does get credit on some of my albums; I did use it judiciously. But the sound was too hungry. It ate up the track. It was really good for sampling. Without the Synclavier, sampling was a nightmare. With the Synclavier, you just popped a sound in. You could transpose it. You could filter it. You could surgically alter it. You could sequence it. It was so fast. Without the Synclavier, I don't know how people did it.
On top of working with synthesis and doing sampling, you were one of the first people to get heavily into vocal processing with the vocoder and various other tools.
There's a reason for that. For my own music, I can't sing. Early on, I did a promotional tour for Sennheiser with Herbie Hancock. For part of the tour, we came out to the West Coast, and I was in Herbie's studio. My use of the vocoder was for gracing my tracks with a feminine aura. He was using it to produce an album [Sunlight] singing! It sounded insane. I thought, "Are you kidding me? This is not to make you a singer." I wanted just the vocal breath component, so Harald Bode did a mod for me on my Bode Vocoder that was brilliant. Most of the filter bandwidth is cut off in the vocoder, because the speech part was only in a certain bandwidth, so you missed the breathiness, the air of the female voice, and the humanity. Harald put this pass-through filter in for me, and my breath came through. It made all the difference in the world for the sound of the vocoder. My first album uses that heavily. I always used it. It's on everything I did, even though it's not that obvious. Here's the other reason: For my artistic work, I wanted my breath. I wanted my presence. I couldn't sing, so I gave it my presence through that. In commercials, there were several unions that governed usage of recordings. There was the Musicians Union, that paid you as a musician, and there was the Screen Actors Guild, that paid actors and singers. The SAG contract was negotiated by Ronald Reagan. It was a much better contract. I would do a whole production, compose, arrange, record, and produce, and a singer would come in for 20 minutes and they would get paid a fortune. I said, "This is not working for me. I can't accept that. You have to pay me as a singer. If I'm going to do all this work, I want to make as much money as the guy who comes in for 20 minutes." So, some of them said, "Fine." Some of them said, "Can't you give us some excuse for doing this?" So, I said, "I'll use my voice." I had the Voice Box – a rack of multiple pieces of gear I'd use to process my vocals – and use them on tracks so I could get paid as a "singer." Rob Zantay was one of my production assistants, and he helped me build it.
You're in the middle of cataloging your archives. How is that project going?
Well, I'm an impulsive mover, as we've noticed. I moved from L.A. to New York without knowing it. I also moved out here lickety-split from New York City. All my stuff came out with me and went into storage here. It's been there for 30 years; I paid no attention to it. When the pandemic hit, I had to confront it. I had no more excuse. I'd been so busy, busy, busy. "I can't deal with that stuff." But now, suddenly, I was grounded. I'm home. And I said, "Okay, let's take it on." I started bringing that stuff out here to the beach, one box at a time. I hired somebody to help me catalog it. Now I have a functional archive. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it. At first, I thought I would separate it into different categories, because there is an archive at Duke University that is for commercials and advertising. I thought, "Maybe I'll give them the advertising part." I have tons of scores, contracts, and the legal work from the heyday of advertising. The '80s was the peak; it's when creativity reigned. Before the suits came. Before they had invented business school. [laughs] Cornell [University] has the Moog archive. I've spoken with them. I've been so busy doing the work that I haven't yet decided on a home for it. That's what I have to do next. It's interesting; it's an encapsulated era. When there was paper.
