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SUZANNE CIANI

Suzanne Ciani & Jonathan Fitoussi

Golden Apples Of The Sun

Obliques and Atmospheric are very happy to present their new album “Golden Apples of the Sun”. It is the result of a close cooperation between Suzanne Ciani and Jonathan Fitoussi. The American electronic music pioneer (5 time Grammy award-nominated) has joined the French composer to sign a four-hand album around mythical synthesizers like Buchla, Moog and Ems...

Mainly recorded in California, facing the Pacific Ocean, the white sound of synthesizers mixes constantly with the sound of the waves and wind. The music generated is directly blended with the surrounding elements of nature. It is both organic and live, hypnotic and rhythmical, powerful and dreamlike.

Suzanne is a five-time Grammy award-nominated composer, electronic music pioneer, and neo-classical recording artist who has released over 20 solo albums. Her work has been featured in films, games, and countless commercials as well. She was inducted into the first class of Keyboard Magazine's Hall of Fame alongside other synth luminaries. Most recently, she is the recipient of the Independent Icon Award from A2IM. Suzanne has provided the voice and sounds for Bally's groundbreaking "Xenon" pinball machine, created Coca-Cola’s pop-and-pour sound, designed logos for Fortune 500 companies, and carved out a niche as one of the most creatively successful female composers in the world.


TRACK LISTING

A1. Golden Apples Of The Sun
A2. Coral Reef
A3. Time Lapse
A4. Pinwheel

B1. Oceanium
B2. Rainbow Sequence
B3. Sonar
B4. Spirit Rock

Suzanne Ciani & Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith

FRKWYS Vol. 13 - Sunergy (Expanded)

    Sunergy brings together synthesists Suzanne Ciani and Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith for the thirteenth installment of FRKWYS, RVNG Intl.’s intergenerational collaboration series. Revisited and expanded for a radiant, radical 2023 edition, the Pacific Coast’s panorama provides the place and head space for a musical appreciation and consideration of the ocean’s life-giving form, vast and volatile with change.

    Fortuitously (as is the freaky way), Smith and Ciani were discovered to be neighbors in their small coastal community in Northern California. The two had become close friends, bonding over their experience as women musicians and, more unusually, their shared passion for the Buchla synthesizer. The music of Sunergy embraces this kinship, with Ciani and Smith respectively performing on the Buchla 200 E and the Buchla Music Easel, two modern configurations of the innovative instrument developed in the ‘60s by Don Buchla.

    Sunergy was recorded in 2015 in the home where Ciani has now lived for the last three decades. Her living room overlooks the Pacific Ocean from a cliffside perch, creating an idyllic, inspired setting for music making. Setting up their synthesizers side-by- side, Ciani and Smith took turns keeping time and freely improvising for the album sessions. As a complete piece, Sunergy is shaped by slow, pulsing forms and sinuous, melodic sequences that conjure both an oceanic world and the unlimited sound made possible by modular processing. Eight years on from their meeting and recording, these sublime, expansive synergies still retain their potent transportative power.

    Since its initial release in 2016, Sunergy has become a touchstone in both artist’s catalogs, marking a return to Buchla form for Ciani (who at the time had not released a new synthesizer recording in forty years), and a transformative moment for Smith, whose breakthrough instrumental album Ears was released the same year. Ciani has since toured globally, dazzling audiences with live Buchla improvisations in the vein of those heard on these recordings, and Smith has solidified her place on the vanguard of electronic pop.

    This expanded LP, contains the previously CD and digital only bonus track “Retrograde.”


    TRACK LISTING

    A1. A New Day
    B1. Closed Circuit
    B2. Retrograde (Vinyl Edit) 

    Suzanne Ciani

    Flowers Of Evil

      As faithful custodians of Suzanne’s vault of vintage electronic music, Finders Keepers present the first-ever release of these vital archive recordings. As a genuine vanguard of electronic music composition at the forefront of the modular synthesiser revolution in the late 1960s, Suzanne Ciani’s forward-thinking approach to new music would rarely look to the past for inspiration, which makes this unheard composition from 1969 a rare exception to the collective futurist vision of Ciani and synthesiser designer Don Buchla. 

      STAFF COMMENTS

      Barry says: There is something distinctly enchanting about Ciani's work, whether she is crafting ambient sketches on beautiful vintage modulars (the Buchla Sessions being a particularly beautiful recently released example), or in full, wistful melodic mode (like on my absolute favourite of her outings, "Seven Waves"). 'Flowers Of Evil' is a perfectly measured mix of the two, with more protracted sections being beautifully accentuated with warm pads and distant warped vocal samples. Stunning.

      TRACK LISTING

      Flowers Of Evil - Based On The Poem Élévation By Charles Baudelaire
      Glass Houses
      Token Spokes Part One
      Token Spokes Part Two

      Suzanne Ciani

      Help, Help, The Globolinks!

        As faithful guardians of the Ciani Musica Inc. studio vault Finders Keepers Records twist the key and return to their collaborative series of previously unreleased music from one of the most important and influential composers in the history of multi-disciplinary electronic music. Open-minded, unpretentious, enigmatic and consistently inspiring, Suzanne Elizabeth Ciani would shatter the mould and invert the stereotype of electronic composers in the early 1970s with a bona fide education in classical music, a clear understanding of technology and a genuine will to communicate and naturalise electronic music.

        All of these unique attributes, coupled with her natural charm and generosity, would win her success and notoriety in the colliding worlds of art, film, advertising, theatre, dance and eventually popular recorded music in the latter part of the 21st century - a multifarious achievement which remained unrivalled by any of her contemporaries, regardless of gender, conquering many male-dominated platforms and breaking creative ground in the process. It is exactly these key factors that would form the basis for this multifaceted musical project. This electronic soundtrack for an operatic, ecological, scholastic, science fiction theatre production for children of all ages not only further reveals Suzanne’s vibrant and versatile skills as an experimental musician and narrative sound designer but also highlights her European heritage - working to the script of Milanese librettist Gian Carlo Menotti and a cast of forward-thinking fellow Italian-American creatives (including Giorgio Armani and Fiorucci in the wardrobe department).

        Originally written and performed in 1968, and gaining worldwide acclaim throughout the 1970s, Gian Carlo Menotti would update and revise his play for the turn of the 80s which called for a new approach to the music and sound effects - all of which would make their world premiere in New York high school theatres in April of 1980. “I was honoured to have been selected to create a new electronic score for Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera for children,” Suzanne told Finders Keepers. “The original production had been in 1968 and I felt that the electronic music component could be more playful and less abrasive than the original production.” For this task Suzanne would approach the brief with the same zeal and tenacity that she continues to apply to all her work by reinventing the process, challenging convention and supplying the audience with something they have never experienced before. For ‘Help, Help The Globolinks!’ Ciani would give Menotti’s well-travelled aliens a brand new voice and with reinvention she communicated with a young audience keen to hear the genuine sounds of the future while retaining melodicism and personality quite potentially overshadowing the ‘human’ casts exceptional abilities and challenging the director’s and writer’s authority in true Ciani style: “I recall meeting with Maestro Menotti at his home in New York City,” recalls Suzanne. “Later I was told that he was upset by the size of my credit on the poster.”

        Unlike many successful electronic composers, Suzanne, as a serious and genuinely revolutionary artist, managed to evade the obvious typecasting of her music through the medium of shlock sci-fi cinema (Swiss composer Bruno Spoerri readily observes that all the best space film scores veered from this pairing) but within the realms of opera and education Suzanne found her perfect channel (scratching her other cosmic cinematic itches with android music in ‘The Stepford Wives’ and as “the first female composer to score a major Hollywood movie” with ‘The Incredible Shrinking Woman’ release one year after ‘The Globolinks’ redux debut). Furnishing a plot of an ecological alien intervention worthy of a Magma youth starter pack and realigning early pioneering electronic operas such as Karl-Birger Blomdahl’s ‘Aniara’ or Remi Gassmann’s ‘Electronics’ for family consumption, this virtually undocumented work by the hardest working woman in VCO business is finally preserved after just a handful of exclusive theatrical airings over 35 years ago. Having honed her craft in the close company of late synthesiser designer Don Buchla (a company of whose development she played a key role) it is plain to see how the young Suzanne Ciani combined roles as an abstract artist and an astute technician in equal measures.

        The American Delia Derbyshire Of The Atari Generation.

        With a sonic portfolio that boasts commissions for the Xenon classic pinball machine, the sounds for the Meco Star Wars theme, the Atari TV commercials and the electronic sound effects in the original Stepford Wives film (amongst many others) the mutant electronic music CV of Suzanne Ciani is proof that in a 1970s commercial world of boys toys, monopolised by a male dominated media industry, a woman’s touch was the essential secret ingredient to successful sonic seduction. A classically trained musician with an MA in music composition this American Italian pianist first came across a synthesizer via her connections in the art world when abstract sculptor and collaborator Harold Paris introduced Suzanne to synthesizer designer Don Buchla who created the instrument that would come to define Ciani's synthetic sound (The Buchla Synthesiser).

        Cutting her teeth providing self-initiated electronic music projects for art galleries, experimental film directors, pop record producers and proto-video nasties Suzanne soon located to New York where she quickly became the first point of call for electronic music services in both the underground experimental fields and the commercial advertising worlds alike. Counting names like Vangelis and Harald Bode amongst her close friends Suzanne and her Ciani Musica company became the testing ground for virtually any type of new developments in electronic and computerized music amassing an expansive vault of commercially unexposed electronic experiments which have remained untouched for over 30 years... until now.

        Finders Keepers Records are happy to announce a new creative archive based relationship with Suzanne Ciani, a very unique and celebrated experimental composer in her own right, who, as one of the very few female composers in the field (save Chicago's Laurie Spiegel, Italy's Doris Norton, and a post-op Walter Wendy Carlos) turned a hugely significant wheel behind-the-screens of many early computerised music modules throughout the 1980s dating back to her formative years studying at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Labs in the early 70s. Suzanne Ciani's detailed and academic approach to music and electronics coupled with an impeccable sense of timing and melody (and a good sense of humour) shines throughout this new collection of previously unreleased recordings. "Lixiviation" complies and recontextualises both secret music and commercial experiments of Suzanne Ciani made for micro-cosmic time slots and never previously documented on vinyl or CD.


        TRACK LISTING

        1. Lixiviation
        2. Atari Video Games Logo
        3. ‘Clean Room’ ITT TV Spot
        4. Almay ‘Eclipse’ TV Spot
        5. Paris 1971
        6. Sound Of A Dream Kissing
        7. Atari Corporate Tag
        8. Princess With Orange Feet
        9. ‘Pop & Pour’ Coca-Cola Logo
        10. ‘Discover Magazine’ TV Spot
        11. Live Buchla Concert 1975
        12. ‘Inside Story’ PBS TV Spot
        13. ‘Liberator’ Atari TV Spot
        14. Eighth Wave
        15. Sound Of Wetness
        16. Second Breath


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