Synergy

Eventually, I made my way through the whole album, and was – and still am – amazed at both the sounds and the music. The music was often quite intricate, almost baroque, with intertwining lines and sophisticated harmonies and phrasing. The album was well-titled, as much of the music was made from sequences weaving together into dense sonic tapestries. In fact, the long piece that had first turned me on so much was called (Sequence) 14, and is a set of theme and variations built on a strange 14 note sequence (in 7/4). But it was really the sound that captivated me. Most musicians are drawn to music because they are fascinated by the qualities of sound (my friend Allen switched from the tuba to the electric bass – he must like low notes). The sonic palette that Synergy used was glorious and enticing. I had heard synthesizers before – a little pop flourish here, a Switched-On Bach there – but the sound was largely thin and gimmicky. These sounds were different – they had meat on them, they sparkled and swirled and shimmered delightfully. Debussy said something to the effect that the century of airplanes needed a new sound, and he went about expanding the palette of tone colors composers could use. Well, we were way beyond airplanes now, having landed a man on the moon a few years earlier, so it was time for an even more adventurous palette, and Larry Fast was all too eager to supply it.

For Synergy is Larry Fast. Although he very occasionally used other musicians to fill out his sound (Pete Sobel is credited with playing a guitar synthesizer on a later record and Ron Howden of Nektar is credited for supplying “invaluable percussive aid”, whatever that means, on Sequencer), virtually every note and timbre on the Synergy albums was created from scratch by Larry Fast. Although he is not well known, Fast created the modern sound of the synthesizer and did more than anybody to bring it out of the closet of novelty and give it its rightful place in the pantheon of instruments. Although synthesizers and tone generators had long been studied in academic environments, the music that was created with them – that is, solely electronic music – was largely an academic pursuit, and a lot of the early electronic music sounds like it. The other side of the coin was, of course, using the synthesizer to make goofy sounds or as a little frosting over more established instrumentation. Fast gave the synthesizer dignity and proved that it could stand on its own and didn’t need support from other instruments, and the music that could be made on them could be enjoyed emotionally and viscerally instead of just intellectually. He gave the synthesizer heart and soul. Unfortunately, by accident or design, he is a pretty obscure character, and there are few outside the circle of passionate enthusiasts and professional musicians who know who he is or how much he contributed.

Fast had a classical music background, which he brought to bear on his compositions, which can be quite elaborate in their structure and form. But he also is an engineer, and designed and built many of his instruments. This duality served him well. In one of the few interviews I was able to find with him, he talked about how these two different interests really helped him. When he got stuck musically and couldn’t squeeze out any more notes, he’d turn his attention to designing or modifying existing equipment and circuitry. And when he started to feel too much like an electrical engineer, he’d put his soldering iron down and go back to the keyboard. He was enormously talented in both areas, and brought a depth and richness to electronic sounds that had previously been lacking. Even now, over twenty years later, when most of his contemporaries’ music sounds thin and reedy, his tones stand up. In fact, if you buy a new synthesizer, many of the preprogrammed sounds are direct imitations of sounds he created. My Alesis synthesizer even comes with a preset called Synergy (although, to be fair, it also has an “Enopad” and an “Emerson Saw”, named, not after the college, but after Keith, the E in ELP).

Fast’s Synergy albums were largely inspirational to a select group of musicians, who then carried the ideas further. The records themselves were never that publicly popular. Where Fast did make an impression on the public was by supporting Peter Gabriel for his first three albums. Fast was Gabriel’s synthesist, and created much of his sound, and lots of people were intrigued by the murky modern textures of that, so Fast got a fair amount of session work because of his reputation. Again, he, as a personality, was still in the shadows, but his sound was changing the sound of popular music. He was hired by musicians as vastly different as Hall and Oates, Barbra Streisand, and John Denver. In one memorable session, the hugely popular rock band Foreigner hired the two leading lights of synthetic creativity, Larry Fast and Thomas Dolby, to fill out their radio-friendly ballad, Waiting for a Girl Like You (a session which Dolby marveled at because it took as long to lay down a couple of lines for one song as it took him to record his entire (and wholly superior) album The Golden Age of the Wireless).

If there was nothing on Sequencer but (Sequence) 14, it would still be a colossal album. But there’s much more. The opening track is an intricately layered confection called S-Scape. Which is followed by the gorgeous Chateau. The album also includes a fantastically exciting and brilliantly arranged version of Mason Williams' Classical Gas, which Fast makes so much his own that I literally could not imagine it being played on a guitar, even though that is its original form. The track that leads into (Sequence) 14, which is what I heard as I took my seat in London, really is a combination of the New World Symphony and Icarus. Fast plays glorious arrangements of each, and then plays them both at the same time. The way they fit together is positively uncanny. Because this is the track right before the holy relic, I still get shivers when I hear the end of it, knowing what’s coming next. Only the pedestrian Cybersports keeps this album from achieving perfection, although I am sorely tempted to award it that honor because the other tracks on it are so far and above anything else I’ve heard. Ever.