I still love Carlos’ Switched-On Bach and Switched-On Bach II, but my favorites of his/hers is The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, which most people seem to have forgotten.
Walter Carlkos by Request has some good stuff, too. I dislike most original Carlos’ compositions (you can keep Sonic Seasonings), but I really did like Pompous Circumstances, which isn’y merely Elgar’s most famous composition played on the synthesizer, but is the sort of musical mash-up that Charles Ives indulged in with his America Variations.
I’m also a big fan of Rick Wakeman, who mixes piano and organ with his synth stuff. I still listen to his oldest solo stuff – Six Wives of Henry VIII, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Myths and Legends of King Arthur. I also like Return to the Center of the Earth, his quarter-century later sequel (except I think he shouldn’t have written the spoken lines himself. For the original Journey he used quotes from the Penguin edition of the Verne book. For Return he obvious wrote the lines himself, and as an editor, I have to cringe at his abuse of the English language.) I recently found a recording I’d never seen before, of a live concert of his that I actually attended, back in the Pleistocene Era.
I like Jean-Michel Jarre’s work, too (He’s the son of frequent film scorer Maurice Jarre), especially Oxygene.
Seems like back in 2002 no one had any love for Tubeway Army’s (Gary Numan’s) Are ‘Friends’ Electric or Replicas, the album it came from. Gary Numan wasn’t the first but he was one of the the first to have a big pop hit in the UK with a heavily synthesised sound. One of my favourite songs.
History of synths from the 60’s on. East Coast (Moog) vs. West Coast (Buchla) approaches to music synthesis, how synths got huge, then faded and then have been having a renaissance for a while now.
The narrator’s voice is bit flat, and I wish they spent more time actually showing how to work a synth - for the modular ones, show how one module generates a waveform and another module manipulates it, etc.
By the way, to my knowledge 96 Tears has no synths on it - that’s an organ.
Wakeman is currently recording an expanded remake of King Arthur–which makes a change from his endless recyclings of Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Although he had some sustained success at home in the UK, he was a one-hit wonder in the USA. “Cars” made the Top 10, bolstered by a performance on Saturday Night Live, and the album it came from, The Pleasure Principle, charted respectably. But even though I remember “Are ‘Friends’ Electric” and “Me I Disconnect from You” getting substantial FM airplay in the day, he seemed to disappear soon afterwards.
As ZipperJJ noted in post #3, several of the songs in the OP feature organs, not synths. “Runaway,” however, does feature a homemade version of the clavioline, the electronic instrument used by the Beatles on “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” which keyboardist and co-writer Max Crook called the Musitron.
My brother had a tape that was titled “Best of Synthetizers Instrumentals” or something like that. I remember we listened to it a lot in the summer of 1990. Most of the songs were already old at the time, dating mainly from the 70s - early 80s but I still cherish those old-fashioned “cutting edge” sounds.
Jean-Michel Jarre: Oxygène II and (especially) IV, Equinox IV Ryuichi Sakamoto: Forbidden Colours Kraftwerk: The Model Vangelis: Chariots of Fire
“Endless”? Aside from Return has he done another version? The only other things I’ve heard are excerpts (although I admit that the concert tape I picked up included the whole thing)
There have been all sorts of live and remake versions released over the years (including the version on Rick Wakeman’s Greatest Hits, which is not a greatest hits album per se, but a double CD of instrumental remakes of Yes and solo material), and even a release of the *rest *of the concert that the original JTTCOTE album was taken from. This 40th anniversary remakewith added material is really nice.