I love the sounds of analog synth, but my music collection is sorely lacking in albums. I’ve heard some stuff by Giorgio Moroder, Terry Riley, and Wendy Carlos that I really liked. I also have a couple of full albums by Laurie Spiegel which are really excellent. The intro to The Who’s “Eminence Front” makes me sit up in my seat every time. So where do I go from here? Where is all the fantastic noise hiding? Any suggestions?
Edit: including albums by the above musicians that I mentioned. Except for Spiegel, it’s always in the context of ‘listened to a couple songs on Youtube and they were good’. Also I don’t like the Blade Runner soundtrack just to pre-empt its mention.
You mentioned Terry Riley so you probably have already heard A Rainbow in Curved Air (I think the whole version is available on youtube but it’s blocked where I am.
Genesis had many long synth melody sections back in the 70s. They would stick them together into a medley when they played live. It’s mostly the last 2 minutes here (Cage Medley part1) and then another minute or so here (part2). Also Riding the Scree.
Chick Corea El Bozo. Actually lots of Chick Corea in the 70s. If you like this let me know and I’ll recommend more.
Some good Moroder albums: Battlestar Galactica (especially, “Evolution”, which is also on E=MC[sup]2[/sup]) E=MC[sup]2[/sup]
From Here to Eternity.
Also, the extended version of Donna Summer’s I feel love is a classic.
You might also like the soundtrack of Cat People if you like your synth music a bit more dramatic and less bouncy.
::grabs popcorn and pulls up chair, taking notes::
I enjoy a lot of this stuff. I love the thick tone of the main riff on Gary Numan’s Cars. I love MGMT’s retro-update songs Kids, Electric Groove, etc. Donna Summers’/Moroder’s I Feel Love is amazing.
Some of what is described in the OP feels very much like it capitalizes on the thick tone of an analog synth; some feels like it is focusing on the “minimalist/pattern” delivery. I love Music for 18 Musicians by Steve Reich, which feels similar to a lot of stuff listed, but uses no synths…
You should check out Beaver & Krause. Two of the original Moog artists. (Not all of their stuff sounds Moog-y; sometimes they were trying to demonstrate how much the synthesizer could sound like other instruments.)
Linda Cohen, a folk/classical guitarist, released two LPs, Leda and Lake of Light, on which she is at times accompanied by some subtle analog synth.
I can’t recommend Klaus Schulze highly enough. He was part of the German cosmic scene. He started with Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel, and then went solo, and he’s still going strong.
A good album to start with is Moondawn. (Eight minute excerpt. The full track is 27 minutes long.) I can also recommend the two Body Love albums and ‘X’. His two earliest solo albums, *Irrlicht *and *Cyborg *are very good too, if a bit ‘difficult’. There is a good discography here.
Moe kinda mentioned, but Genesis is a great source for synth stuff, and their whole album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is full of great synth parts.
Not sure how versed you are on a lot of the classic mainstream(ish) songs with synth in them, so I hope everyone forgives me for some of these “obvious” suggestions off the top of my head:
Subdivisions - Rush
Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man) - Styx
Questions of My Childhood - Kansas
Seperate Ways (Worlds Apart) - Journey
Won’t Get Fooled Again - The Who
Walk Under Ladders - Joan Armatrading
. . . and many other tracks by any of those groups. Also, the whole album Remain in Light by the Talking Heads is full of synthy goodness.
Try the “KPM 1000” series of library music. These were recorded in the 1970s and have some of the first generation analog synth music (as well as other styles of 1970s instrumental music) that were extremely influential in the music community. There are a few easy to find web sites that let you browse and sample through the whole KPM 1000 series. You might want to spend the day there!
For something a little more polished, have a listen to the Italian band Goblin - their themes for the 1970s horror movies Suspiria, Tenebre, Deep Red and others are very popular.
Pop out and buy the following Stevie Wonder albums: Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale. You already have Songs in the Key of Life, or your parents do. There’s your answer. Pick up a copy of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn as well and just play side one.
On a tangent, a lot of the synth albums of the 1970s have surprisingly little synthesiser on them. Tubular Bells and A Rainbow in Curved Air are mostly guitar and organ respectively, and Jean Michel Jarre’s first two albums are surprisingly organ-heavy as well. He had an organ strings machine that had a very distinctive, heavily-phased sound. Tangerine Dream’s classic albums, such as Phaedra and Zeit and so forth, have some classic analogue synth sequences but are otherwise mostly organ and Mellotron and guitar. And piano. Same with ELP. Please don’t buy any ELP albums, they’ll put you off music. Gary Numan’s The Pleasure Principle, which has “Cars”, is an odd hybrid of analogue synth lead riffs with a conventional rock band doing the drums and bass.
Kraftwerk’s The Man Machine and Computer World, Yazoo’s Upstairs at Eric’s, the Human League’s Dare are all pretty much 100% analogue synthesisers (plus some electric piano), although people often think of them as digital albums because they have a very clean, precise sound, and they came out in the 1980s. Except for The Man Machine, which came out in 1978, but was ahead of its time. Vince Clarke and The Human League in particular were absolutely militantly pro-synth, and Clarke carried on using analogue synthesisers throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, at a time when they had briefly fallen out of fashion.
Nowadays a lot of the mystery of old synthesisers had died off, because you can download VST simulations of them. I have a simulation of the ARP 2600 made by a company called Arturia, which has cables and things you can move about with the mouse. Also, download this VCS 3 simulator, and just play with the knobs and the pin board: http://ninecows.dk/cynthia/