Misunderstood...

            Synthesis has given our generation a means to produce music that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to make. From being able to create new unique sounds that are not physically possibly in the natural world, to recreating the sounds of common instruments, the synthesizer is a wonderful tool.

            Just recently I learned that one of my favorite dark wave artists, Zola Jesus, is combining the two worlds together. In her younger years, before producing electronic music, she was training to be an opera singer. After awhile she grew tired of the training and switched gears, focusing on an easier to produce and more marketable form of music, electronic.

            At The Guggenheim museum in New York City, May 2012, Zola Jesus had the opportunity to perform her songs with a string quartet, the Mivos Quartet. Arranged by J. G. Thirlwell of Foetus, Thirlwell took the Zola Jesus’ heavily string-synthesizer based songs and helped her realize her original goal when she wrote the songs.

            Zola Jesus’ music before its reinvention at The Guggenheim, might not of seemed accessible to the average listener, primarily due to the electronic tag that is associated with it, but after, won the hearts of the packed halls. The point I am trying to make is that, sometimes within the electronic genre, stereotypes are formed, and most people won’t give the artist the light of day, till it is radically altered. In this case, the songs weren’t radically altered; rather they were just performed differently.

Zola Jesus interview and performance at The Guggenheim Museum.

            Just ask Wendy Carlos, in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, after the release of her album, “Switched-On Bach”, she helped record various soundtracks, some of which you may be familiar with (A Clockwork Orange, The Shining, and Tron), till the AFM, or the American Federation of Musicians, banned synthesizers from soundtracks for a period of time. The reason they were banned, because they thought that synthesizers were going to take the place of “real” musicians.

Wendy Carlos from A Clockwork Orange.

            Synthesizers have always been misunderstood; even today there is a vagueness, a shroud of mystery that surrounds them. After a few years AFM removed the ban and synthesizers became prevalent in movies again, but they never completely took over like they thought they would. Think of how radically different some of your favorite movies would have been without synthesizers; Star Wars would not have been able to come up with some of their iconic sounds achieved from the Arp 2600, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind with the Arp 2500 (There’s a pattern, and it’s that Arp’s were great for creating sound FX)

            While today there is no ban or strike against synthesizers, they are still treated as outsiders, as oddballs, and as different. But Zola Jesus, for as brief as her combining the natural and electronic may be (she is on tour with the quartet now), she helped some people realize that down beneath the oscillators, filters, reverb, and controllers, there is more then just electronics, there is passion, soul, creativity, and most importantly, a song.

Another Zola Jesus performance at The Guggenheim Museum.

...My mistake in "Player Piano" was my failure as a futurist. I did not foresee transistors, and so imagined that super computers would have to be huge, with bulky vacuum tubes taking up a lot of space. -Kurt Vonnegut in "Letters"