Suzanne Ciani - Lixiviation LP

Label: Finders Keepers

The American Delia Derbyshire of the Atari generation. With a sonic portfolio that boasts commissions for the Xenon classic pinball machine, the sounds for the Meco Star Wars theme, the Atari TV commercials, and the electronic sound effects in the original Stepford Wives film (1975), amongst many others, the mutant electronic music CV of Suzanne Ciani is proof that in a 1970s commercial world of boys toys, monopolized by a male dominated media industry, a woman's touch was the essential secret ingredient to successful sonic seduction. A classically trained musician, with an MA in music composition, this American-Italian pianist was first introduced to the synthesizer via her connections in the art world when abstract sculptor and collaborator Harold Paris introduced Suzanne to synthesizer designer Don Buchla who created the Buchla Synthesizer, the instrument that would come to define Ciani's synthetic sound. Cutting her teeth providing self-initiated electronic music projects for art galleries, experimental film directors, pop record producers, and proto-video nasties, Suzanne soon located to New York where she quickly became the first point of call for electronic music services in both the underground experimental fields and the commercial advertising worlds alike. Counting names like Vangelis and Harald Bode amongst her close friends, Suzanne and her Ciani Musica company became the testing ground for virtually any type of new developments in electronic and computerized music amassing an expansive vault of commercially unexposed electronic experiments which have remained untouched for over 30 years... until now. Finders Keepers Records present a new creative archive based relationship with Suzanne Ciani, who, as one of the very few female composers in the field (save Chicago's Laurie Spiegel, Italy's Doris Norton, and a post-op Walter Wendy Carlos) turned a hugely significant wheel behind-the-screens of many early computerized music modules throughout the 1980s, dating back to her formative years studying at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Labs in the early '70s. Suzanne Ciani's detailed and academic approach to music and electronics coupled with an impeccable sense of timing and melody (and a good sense of humor) shines throughout this new collection of previously unreleased recordings. Lixiviation complies and re-contextualizes both secret music and commercial experiments of Suzanne Ciani made for microcosmic time slots and never previously documented on vinyl or CD.