Electronic music is a relatively new phenomenon, but within its short lifespan the genre has experienced a profound technological transformation—that from hardware to software. For Melbourne Electronic Sound Studio (MESS), that transition calls for some nostalgia. The collective is fascinated by the synthesisers and drum machines that predated computers, and their installation at MONA’s upcoming Mofo festival will allow members of the public to experience and interact with rare instruments that are seldom used by musicians today.
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Needless to say, MESS musicians Robin Fox and Byron J Scullin are electronic music nerds from way back. They’re quick to say that they don’t hate computers….they just happen to be romantically intertwined with their precursors. “Computers are the most powerful sound machines humans have yet made, but having the power to make any sound you can think of and do whatever you want to it doesn’t automatically mean the experience of making music on a laptop is also amazing,” Scullin tells The Creators Project.“In fact, it’s often the inverse. Most people making music on computers are doing the same things that people punching numbers into a spreadsheet are doing; using a keyboard, mouse, trackpad or touchscreen. It’s got to be the most unmusical set of physical gestures you can think of when you compare it to playing drums or a guitar. There are some people out there who take this too far and think that by playing a guitar their music is more legitimate, or electronic music is fake, or some such bullshit. However, computers make amazing sounding stuff and that’s why pretty much everyone we know is making music with them and why so much music we listen to comes from them.”
Making music without a screen to direct you is a liberating feeling, and it’s what drives MESS. “If we did a blind test between the sound of a vintage synth and its software counterpart most people, if not all, wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. However, put a human in front of a vintage synth and all that goes out the window,” Scullin says. “It’s like stepping out into an unknown sonic landscape and with every turn of a dial or flick of a switch the world is changing around you. You go into the sound and take ownership of it when you have to build it from scratch.”
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Few musicians, and fewer still music fans, are able to take that ownership—which is what the installations at Mofo will aim to rectify. The largest install, Tone Temple, is a pyramid of analogue electronic instruments that will serve as the basis for various performances. “Some of the largest instruments we have at MESS like the Moog System 55 and the Roland System 700 are in there,” Fox says. “When we’re not performing on the Temple, it’ll be running autonomously playing some longer ambient, drone-like stuff and give people a chance to get up close to some of these machines.”The pyramid is strictly not for touching, but MESS will also place instruments around the MONA grounds for curious festival goers to play with. Fox explauns how one installation will see two joystick-controlled Transaudio 3 Oscillator educational synths originally built for the La Trobe University Music Department in the mid 1970s placed in a maintenance cupboard. “They were then pulled out of a dumpster in the late 1990s as the department was unceremoniously shut down. It seems appropriate that they are reborn at MONA in a maintenance cupboard. Hidden, almost discarded again, but this time with a voice.”Visitors to the cupboard will be able to play with the retro instruments. “By sweeping frequencies up and down users can find sum and difference tones, tune the space, aim for resonance or dissonance, perform a duet. Basically the most (legal) fun you can have in a cupboard.”
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Another weird and wonderful vintage find on display at Mofo is the Triadex Muse, designed at MIT and released in 1972. “They were touted as the world’s first artificially intelligent sequencer and, according to the user manual, ‘you can only make the music of the future’ with a triadex muse,” Fox explains. “This installation features two of these amazing machines spinning out two independent melodic lines accompanied by the light box that was an added extra to the synthesizer. In the spirit of the undulating melodies they create we decided to install them in the goods lift.”Tasmania’s fraught colonial history is represented in Colonial Drone (Prison) where synths designed by legendary British synthesiser manufacturer EMS represent the past in more ways than one. “When we walked into the caged area off the white library at MONA we immediately felt like we were in prison,” says Fox. “So why not play to Tasmania’s heritage and put a bunch of British synths outside the cage? Cables will snake into the cage and through squeezing these, punters can activate and spatialise the sounds of a VCS3, Synthi A and VCS1.”The final installation we take over the central elevator at MONA with a series of small Chimera synths mounted in the ceiling. “The dials will be accessible and those tall enough will be able to manipulate the synths while travelling up and down,” Fox says. “The lift is circular, the synths are circular. It was a match made in heaven.”
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