hypersongs

Suzanne Ciani

The American Buchla synthesizer pioneer whose archive anthology Lixiviation opens with a film score for the sculptor Ronald Mallory.

Buchla and a career in sound

Suzanne Ciani was born on June 4, 1946 at an army hospital in Indiana and raised in Quincy, Massachusetts. She began piano at six, studied at Wellesley College from 1964 to 1968 with classical training, and a cross-registered class at MIT introduced her to music technology; she took a summer computer-music course at Stanford with Max Mathews, John Chowning and Leland Smith, and completed a master's in composition at UC Berkeley in 1970. She met Don Buchla through the artist Harold Paris and Buchla became her mentor and employer. She told Bandcamp Daily in 2018, he's the Leonardo da Vinci of electronic instruments. Her instruments are the Buchla 100 and 200 modular synthesizers, later a 200e, and piano; she is nicknamed the Diva of the Diode, which is also the title of her official site.

Her first paid job in 1969 was ten Macy's Christmas ads. Her debut album, Voices of Packaged Souls (1970), grew from music for a Paris sculpture show, using musique concrete techniques at KPFA. In April 1974 she moved to New York and played a solo Buchla concert at Bonino Gallery, and her commercial sound design included the Coca-Cola Pop and Pour sound, Columbia Pictures logo themes, the swoosh on Starland Vocal Band's "Afternoon Delight" and sounds for the pinball game Xenon (1979), with her voice through a vocoder. Her 1980 appearance on Letterman was a first for synthesis on mainstream US television, per Google Arts and Culture, and she scored The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1981), described as the first major Hollywood film scored by a solo woman.

Records and honors

Her albums include Seven Waves (1982, Japan first and US on Atlantic in 1984), The Velocity of Love (1986, RCA), Neverland (1988), Pianissimo (1990), Hotel Luna (1991), Dream Suite (1994, recorded in Moscow), Turning (1999) and Silver Ship (2005). She founded her own label, Seventh Wave, in 1994. Neverland, Hotel Luna, Dream Suite, Pianissimo II and Turning each earned a Grammy nomination for best new age album. Later work includes Sunergy with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith (2016), the quadraphonic Live Quadraphonic (2018) from a March 5, 2016 performance at Gray Area in San Francisco, Flowers of Evil (2019, recorded in 1969), Music for Denali (2020), the compilation A Life in Waves (2020) and Golden Apples of the Sun with Jonathan Fitoussi (2023).

She received the Keyboard Magazine Hall of Fame honor in 2012, the Pinball Expo Hall of Fame in 2013, the Moog Innovation Award in 2017, the first woman to do so, and the A2IM Independent Icon Award in 2020. The Particles and Waves tour of 2024 played cathedrals, and setlist.fm shows a show at EartH in Hackney on October 12, 2026.

Albums

Songs

  • Lixiviation Lixiviation (Ciani / Musica Inc. 1969-1985) · 2012

    The opening track of the 2012 anthology, a film score for Ronald Mallory's moving mercury sculptures.

Sources

  1. Suzanne Ciani, Wikipedia
  2. Suzanne Ciani interview, Bandcamp Daily (2018-05-11)
  3. Suzanne Ciani, Seventh Wave
  4. The Diva of the Diodes, Google Arts & Culture