Synergy

After hoofing my way through the endless acres of museums, my mom took pity on me and asked if there was anything I’d like to do. I scanned the Time Out and found two things of interest – both involving lasers (Star Wars had just swept the world, and me, up in its arms). One was Laserium, which was playing at the Planetarium and the other was the Museum of Holography.

We went to the museum first, and marveled at the incredibly not lifelike three dimensional images trapped in the glass. It was uncanny the way you could walk around them and see different angles, but the fact that they were all red kind of gave the illusion away. Still, this was cutting edge optics and it was sort of interesting. In the final room was a programmable laser just like they were using at Laserium, and every few minutes they’d have a little demonstration of it with some music playing. I don’t remember what the demonstration was, other than it ended with the laser drawing the Guinness logo on the ceiling, but the music, ah… the music.

Up until this time, I was pretty uninterested in music. I heard lots of it – almost all classical – and it was nice and all, but it wasn’t anything that had really captured my interest, despite (or because of) piano and viola lessons. But standing in that room that afternoon, watching the laser shill beer I heard something that shook me deep in my soul, something that awakened me and made me realize that I had been sleeping for thirteen years. I had never heard music like this – it was epic in scope and scale and the sounds were entirely unrecognizable. I could identify no instruments, and the sweeping panorama of sound took my breath away. And then, in a moment, it was over. Intrigued, but clueless as to what that was and how to find more of it, I stumbled back out into the bright London afternoon and back to my ignorant bliss.

The next day, our penultimate day in London, we went to Laserium. I was excited by the trippy sci-fi reputation and begged my mom to shell out the extra pound so I could rent headphones for the show. My mom and Oma were as excited to be there as I was to go to high tea, so they skipped the headphones and took their seats and I worked my way across the room to the section with headphone jacks and found a seat, plugged in and started looking at the program. There was some interesting music on while people filed in, something vaguely familiar. Something very like Dvorak’s New World Symphony played in counterpoint to Paul Winter’s Icarus, but played on the synthesizer. I settled back in my seat while the auditorium filled up and waited for the show to begin.

Then, in a moment of supreme serendipity, a moment I daily thank the gods for, a new piece of music started playing. There was an eerie swell of sound, a rushing of notes, a breathless crescendo of electronics, and then a gorgeous, epic theme started unfolding. My heart stopped. It was the piece from the holography museum. Transfixed and afraid to even breathe, I listened as the piece climbed and developed. The sounds, all electronic, were fantastic. There was such a visual element to the music – it sounded like you were boldly going into space on a heroic journey. I couldn’t believe my ears. Gradually the piece shifted and changed, and the grandeur and majesty of it gave way to something else, something a little sinister, a little foreboding, but absolutely spellbinding. The piece gradually changed some more, now blossoming into a rich, almost baroque counterpoint exercise, lines doubling and redoubling, layers and details added until an entire symphony orchestra’s worth of sound was cascading over me. Except there was no orchestra. There were no conventional instruments. It was all electronic and it opened up the back of my head, took my brain out, and put it back in upside down. The piece shifted back to another eerie section, and then exploded in a scorching, intense finale, like you had made it across the vast reaches of the universe and were now flying directly into a supernova. Faster and faster, higher and louder the piece moved relentlessly on, gaining momentum until it exploded, leaving me pinned to my seat and panting. And then the lights went down and the show started.

I remember almost nothing about the actual show. There were pretty lights, they made pretty pictures, there was some music playing, but none of that mattered. I had been fundamentally altered and I couldn’t concentrate on anything else. A switch had been flipped in my brain, and I’d never be the same again.

When the lights came up an hour later, I looked down at my program and saw the list of songs that had been used for the show, And at the top, in small letters, it said “entrance music: Sequencer by Synergy”.

I got it! A clue! A line to follow! A beginning!

I didn’t know anything about Synergy or electronic music, but I was sure as hell going to find out. If there was music like this in the world, I wanted to hear more of it.

We got home and I saved my pennies until I had enough and then I went to the local record store (the pathetic Camelot Music in the mall) to buy my treasured record. Surprisingly, they didn’t have it and had never heard of it. I chalked this up to the fact that Synergy was British (or so I thought – since that’s where I heard it). What I didn’t realize then – but what would become painfully clear later on – was the reason they didn’t have it and hadn’t heard of it is because they were fucking morons. Well, no, that’s not fair. They knew the charts, the whole charts, and nothing but the charts, and if it wasn’t popular, they didn’t know about it. And didn’t want to, either. I had heard a fair amount of so-called popular music and it really didn’t interest me, so I really shouldn’t have gone to the mall to find the music that moved me, but I was a complete musical neophyte and had to learn how unusual my musical tastes were the hard way. Eventually that became – and remains – a point of pride with me, but it was disappointing to discover that, now that I had done the hard part and actually identified something I liked, that didn’t mean that I’d be able to actually find a copy. So I asked if I could order it. The clerk looked hassled and patronizing at me, but I didn’t have any other options, and I wasn’t going to abandon my quest that easily, so he slowly, reluctantly looked up the record and said he’d put in an order and that I should call back and check in a couple of weeks.

That was in 1978 and that record is still, I believe, on order.