My family were slightly bemused by my excitement on Xmas morning when I opened a parcel to find a copy of the Illustrated Compendium of Musical Technology by Tristram Cary, co-inventor of the VCS3 synth. I'd asked my mother for a copy, and she found one second-hand. It's my new geek bible, a 542-page encyclopedia of lore, full of diagrams and flowcharts. It's great because Tristram Cary really, really knows what he's talking about. The ten pages on oscillators don't just explain what they do, but how they do it. And because he came into electronic music from a classical, avant-garde angle (he founded the Royal College of Music's Electronic Music Studio in 1967), there are no endless chapters on 303s, 808s, SL-1200s and those same old stories from Detroit and Chicago. Instead, there are entries on things like magnetic hysteresis, Helmholz resonators, graceful degradation and swarf (the little ribbons of plastic spat out by a vinyl cutting head). I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys this site. I suspect Faber and Faber were expecting something with a bit more popular appeal when they published it in 1992, and perhaps it failed to find many buyers at £45 so fell out of print. Fortunately, it's not too hard to find - UK Amazon
have a few copies second hand. Thanks, Mum!
Thanks to Peter for discovering this - undoubtedly the coolest synth cake ever made (unless you know better). It's a EMS VCS3 (check out the silver Vernier dials, the joystick and the matrix panel full of candles!), that was made for the 80th birthday of Tristram Cary, one of the founders of EMS, who helped invent the VCS3. He's had a very cool career. He was a naval radar officer in WWII, when he started thinking about music made with tapes and electronics.
After the war, he studied and made a living as a composer. He did music for film & tv, working on early Dr Who episodes and Quatermass and the Pit. In 1967 he founded the Electronic Music Studio at the Royal College of Music. In the '80s he moved to Australia and continued composing and wrote the great-sounding-but-very-expensive Illustrated Compendium of Musical Technology. He's now 80, and his neice has a blog, which is why we can all see his cool birthday cake... More on Tristram here. (And more synth cakes here)
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One of the most tantalising websites in the world is ems-synthi. demon.co.uk. It's the official page of EMS, the company co-founded by Tristram Cary, makers of the VCS3, and - at the very least - the British Moog. Anyway, that demon.co.uk page is tantalising because it says "Original Synthi As, VCS3s and Vocoders are still in production", and offers a price list quoting £1800 for a brand new VCS3. Unfortunately, it also says "Last updated: 8th August 1998". I've never heard of anyone actually buying one. Now I've got a mail from Chris: "You might be interested to know I had an email from Robin at EMS. I was after a vocoder and wanted to know if he still had any lying around. He said that EMS has lain dormant for the past 6 years but that he was considering getting things going again and that email inquiries like mine served to propel things along a bit. I for one would love it if they started churning out the old gear again. He's a way off yet but I will keep you posted." Robin is Robin Wood, who was recruited to EMS as back in the late '60s and has been with the company ever since. Those prices are very unlikely to stick, given that - for starters - VCS3-style pin matrixes are made in Switzerland and cost around £300 each wholesale...
The Tone Generation is a ten part series of podcasts about the earliest days of electronic music. Part One [mp3 link] covers Britain - with rare recordings from the 1950s and '60s by people like Tristram Cary, Daphne Oram, and assorted Radiophonic Workshop alumni. The music on offer is all pretty challenging - lots of atonal bleeps and waves of noise and very different from the commercially-minded output of Raymond Scott, who was working at the same time - although with more expensive gear. The podcast is presented by Ian Helliwell, and produced by Simon James, who also did the splendid Welcome to Mars.
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Tristram Cary and his cake reminded me of this page on the strange, lost-in-time website for EMS (it hasn't been updated since 1998). It's a collection of ads for various EMS synths. A few are missing, but look out for the Christmas special, and the picture of EMS founder Peter Zinovieff in a rustic idyll, synthesizing on batteries. Then there's the picture above, which is truly wonderful.
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