Synergy

The next Synergy album, Cords, came out right after I got back from Seattle, while the awkward dance with Frank was in full swing. I held onto that album like a lifeline. My mom and Frank were too absorbed in each other and the ramifications of their actions to pay much attention to me, and many was the night and weekend I spent in Frank’s modest apartment, plugged into the stereo, memorizing every note and sound on Cords. The headphones helped me disappear into the music, and helped make me disappear from the apartment, so my mom and Frank could be “alone”. So I was enthusiastically encouraged to listen to the headphones as much as I liked, and it became a sustaining friendship for me when there weren’t many others around. Music, in a fundamental way, was becoming home for me, a place I could relax and that gave me nourishment, no matter where I actually was.

Cords was a strange and disturbing album, much different in texture from the first two. It was darker and more foreboding, and used a harsher sonic palette. The gorgeous, orchestral richness of the first two albums was replaced with a more stark, more severe, more patently electronic sound. The album is very percussive in many places, and utilized unusual time signatures and drastic dynamic shifts. I wasn’t quite sure I liked it, but that was sacrilegious to me, being Synergy and all, so I stuck with it and came to appreciate it, although never as much as Sequencer. But, then, I don’t think I’ll ever appreciate anything as much as that, the foundation upon which my entire collection and, to a large part, my personality rests.

Disruption in World Communications is my favorite track on the album (followed closely by Phobos and Deimos Go to Mars – Larry Fast wisely gave the chore of naming the tracks for this album to the much more capable Peter Gabriel). It is wonderfully creepy and foreboding, and explodes into terrifying passages that sound like nothing so much as a giant robot going berserk and destroying Tokyo (it’s always Tokyo that gets destroyed, isn’t it?). And as exhilaratingly devastating as the sounds are, the music is astonishingly complex, switching meters dozens of times throughout its relatively short duration. In fact, I’ve listened to it what must be thousands of times by now, and there are still a few sections that I can’t count out properly. God knows how he was able to write it, let alone record it. It is a darker, scarier Synergy, crackling with energy and edgy with menace, but it was perfectly in tune with my emotions at the time, and I took great comfort in it.

By the next album, Games, even I was willing to admit that the music wasn’t as good anymore. Some of it was that, by that time, I had a lot more to compare it to, but it really isn’t nearly as good a package as those that came before it. Because Synergy was what it was, I also bought the mail-order only Computer Experiments album, which offered a couple of early computer generated compositions, and which belong firmly in the academic realm and is really tiring to listen to. Just when I was about to lose faith completely, Fast released Audion, a gorgeous album that returns to his rich orchestral tones and appealing compositions. For a while, Audion became the album of choice for my friends and I to get stoned to – so rich and tasty were its textures, so soothing were its sonorities.

Fast eventually stopped releasing records under the Synergy name entirely, after the disappointing Metropolitan Suite. He briefly ran an electronic music label, Audion, but that disappeared fairly quickly, although it did bring out a couple of wonderful albums by Gary Hughes, who would later resurface in Euphoria.

It is impossible to overstate the influence Synergy has had on me and my development – not just musically, but as a person. I was so infatuated with Synergy that I once wrote a letter asking Larry Fast if I could become his unpaid apprentice (he never responded). Curiously, years after Synergy and Audion ceased, he showed up writing some music for a low-budget, straight to video horror film company called Full Moon. And it was Full Moon that did accept me as an unpaid apprentice in the editing department, and started me on my path to becoming the editor I am today.

Synergy opened me up to a whole new world, the world of music, and my life and soul would be impossibly impoverished if it wasn’t for that beautifully intricate, gorgeously layered music I heard by chance all those years ago, watching a laser spell out Guinness. Synergy was the different drummer that set me marching on my own path, unconcerned and uncaring where everybody else went, confident in my ability to find that which could sustain me. Synergy showed me the power of music, the darkness that it could unleash, the comfort it could dispense. My relationship with music is the most beautiful, most sustaining relationship in my life, the only one that has never let me down. It reaches deeper into me than anything I have experienced, far deeper than any words can go, and has immeasurably enriched my life. Synergy showed me that there was more to life than met the eye, and more to me than I could ever explain to anybody, even myself. It showed me, truly, that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.