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Baker's Dozen

While His Synth Gently Beeps: Benge's Favourite Electronic LPs
Luke Turner , February 15th, 2017 10:50

We know you all love a bit of synth porn so here's Benge's Baker's Dozen - a sort of synth erotica reading, if you will, as he guides you through 13 electronic favourites from Morton Subotnick to Else Marie Pade and George Harrison's Moog explorations to Air and Autechre. Benge photo by Ed Fielding

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Laurie Spiegel - The Expanding Universe
Laurie was a pioneer of early computer based composition, and came out of the New York experimental scene in the early 70s. This album was composed between 1974-76 using a computer playing the actual sounds by controlling analogue synthesis equipment using the GROOVE (Generating Realtime Operations On Voltage controlled Equipment) hybrid system which was developed by Max Matthews and F.R. Moore at Bell labs. Interaction with the computer was through a keyboard, a drawing tablet, pushbuttons and knobs, as well as complex algorithms written in FORTRAN.

The music itself is beautiful and complex, and must have taken so long to put together using the room-sized computer at Bell Labs.