Rich Aucoin – Synthetic: Season 3

Can machines sing? With his Synthetic album cycle, Rich Aucoin answers that question with a resounding, exuberant “yes.” The four-part project sweeps listeners through a gallery tour of synthesis history, giving voice to a chorus of specimens from the past century of electronic sound. On Season 3, Aucoin deepens his dive into the variegated genealogy of dance music, charting a joyful course through the many flavors of rave euphoria. From March 2020 through February 2024, Aucoin recorded Synthetic: Season 3 during a series of visits to the National Music Centre in Calgary and the Vintage Synthesizer Museum in Los Angeles. Among these collections, he found historic synthesizers ranging from the ubiquitous to the esoteric, each with its own voice just waiting to be jolted to life. During these sessions, Aucoin took the opportunity to air out some of synth history’s most iconic instruments. “Moog” delights with roiling, retrofuturistic arpeggios drawn from a Minimoog: the 1970 portable synthesizer beloved by Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, and Parliament-Funkadelic. With “ElectroComp,” Aucoin brings the 1969 EML ElectroComp 200 squarely into the techno era, shaping whispery accents with its analog filters. Album closer “Optigan” adorns jittery breakbeats with wistful melodies from an organ-style keyboard released in 1971 by American toymaker Mattel. On “M1,” Aucoin pulls classic deep house beats from the computerized brain of one of the best-selling synthesizers in history. The Korg M1 consolidated functions from a variety of machines into a streamlined digital workstation in 1988, bearing heavily on the crisp, icy sounds of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Throughout Season 3, you’ll also hear the songs of much rarer birds. “Delta Music Research” sees Aucoin working an obscure modular system built in Calgary in the 1980s to churn out rollicking acid house loops. For “Sonica,” he siphons trance bliss from the button-inlaid fretboard of the 1979 Frank Eventoff synth of the same name: a wooden, sitar-shaped device that was released in a run of 650 units. On “Synthi,” Aucoin commandeers an EMS Synthi 100 — a 1971 digital/analog hybrid synthesizer housed in a massive wooden cabinet and limited to just a few dozen builds — for a deliciously squelchy tech-house romp. From the mass-produced to the bespoke, each synthesizer on Synthetic: Season 3 sends a transmission from its makers’ own historical vision of the future. The instruments’ tactile interfaces — from fields of patch jacks to 50-year-old optical discs to rows and rows of voltage dials — all lend embodied dimension to the practice of shaping sound from raw electricity. Each of them carries a story about what might have tumbled into being from the moment of their creation. In awakening these machines, Aucoin cross-pollinates a choir of futures into an ecstatic, reverential present. – Sasha Geffen