Back catalogue: Leftfield

Review: Suzanne Ciani's pioneering Buchla synthesiser performances, now available on vinyl from Finders Keepers Records, represent a monumental collective moment in music history. Captured at a New York art gallery 50 years ago, this release finally brings Ciani's groundbreaking work to a global audience. As an archival project of 'art music', it redefines musical history and challenges our understanding of music technology. Ciani's Buchla Concert records aren't just gamechangers; they symbolise a musical revolution and an artistic revelation. They serve as a benchmark in the evolution of synthesiser music and highlight Ciani's role as a pioneering force in a male-dominated field. This sonic installation, along with her WBAI/Phill Niblock 1975 sessions, marks a triumphant moment in the synthesiser space race, showcasing the untold story of the first woman to explore these new musical frontiers. The album captures a genuine live act experimenting with the Buchla, a fully performable music instrument, during a time when such performances were groundbreaking. Had these recordings been released alongside those of Morton Subotnick, Walter Carlos, or Tomita, Ciani's influence would have already been recognised for its radical impact on the shape and sound of electronic music. With this release, Finders Keepers illuminates Ciani's legacy, celebrating a visionary artist whose work has remained in the shadows for too long.

Review: Reissued again via Finders Keepers, Suzanne Ciani's Buchla Concerts 1975 returns again to highlight one of the best among the sublime synthstress's many live performances. The story goes that Ciani (dubbed 'the first woman on the proverbial moon' by the label) was a not-by-chance employee of the Buchla company, whom at the time were San Francisco's neck-and-neck contender to New York's Moog. Unlike the latter, Buchla refused to indulge the end user of intuitive design features like keyboards or styluses, so their products soon gained a herculean reputation. So when Ciani came along and performed this set of divinely feminine, daresay anima-rousing versions of her mentor Morton Subotnick's Silver Apples Of The Moon - to a comparatively small, stuffy, feckless and likely easily bemusable audience compared to the all-earses of today - all particulars changed thereafter. She became the first woman to publicly demonstrate the use of Buchla technology by a woman, and so one of the primordial synth sisters. A holy grail of electronic music history, this record exhumes two fantastically eerie odysseys in sound, seguing from melodious opening trips to aleatory alien burbles.