It was an ad in the paper, one ad you
know paid $20 for a week to have this ad
there. It said, "Looking for an engineer to make," 
well I think I probably called it an
electronic music easel because, you know
that easel is a nice metaphor, you
know, you can paint music.
I walked into a concert one day I was going to the concerts on a regular basis and very
timidly walked up to Mort Subotnick
and asked him if I could look at his
studio and he said, "Fine come on up." And
so I went up and checked it out. There
were three tape recorders and I was very
invasive. So I started working in the
studio and I observed they had
techniques for constructing electronic
music and constructing studio production
tapes but they depended entirely on
bomb sites and Hewlett Packard
oscillators and leftover equipment from
this and that. And I suggested that they
use electronics to to build an
intentional instrument one designed for
electronics and that was a bit unheard
of in those days.
There was an Italian television engineer by the name of Paolo Ketoff and he designed an instrument
called the Sin-Ket in the early 60s, he
worked with a lot of musicians. I think
he and I were similar in that we
were we were both engineers but we liked
working with musicians.
Don and I worked
for well over a year before there was
any equipment because we needed $500
which we didn't have so we did it all on
paper and by the end of that year when
he first started to work I already
knew, I had conceptualized
the logistics of most of the what the
modules were going to do and had even
imagined doing what I just did but
didn't have the equipment to do, so the
first two or three years of the
synthesizer was actually knowing that I
could do it and practicing until it
actually happened.
At the same time that Bob Moog was
inventing the synthesizer in New York
there was another engineer named Don
Buchla he basically invented the
synthesizer as we know it about the same
time Bob Moog did and they didn't really
know and they didn't know each other
they just independent. But Moog's
philosophy was always to make it so that
a musician could relate to it from a
conventional music point of view so it
had a black and white regular
conventional keyboard. Buchla didn't
believe in that and still doesn't to
this day that much and so he was
building synthesizers that you
interfaced with various kind of touch
keyboards and other non-traditional controller ideas.
Perhaps in about '68
did I had heard of Moog and he had his
first synthesizers out almost at the
same time as I did but we were... One of us
myself working with the West Coast
aesthetic and Robert Moog was working on
the East Coast and a totally different
aesthetic  but strangely enough built
very very similar modules. But their
interconnection philosophy was quite different.
Buchla is still doing fantastic designs
but he's a musician as well as an
engineer and more than that you know
more than me
Buchla has his own musical vision I
don't have a real musical vision other
than helping other musicians to do their thing.
Don Buchla also was the first, he invented
the sequencer, he invented a lot of
things on synthesizers and I think Bob
Moog even said once that Don may have
built a modular synth before he did but
most people just don't realize that.
By the time I met Don which was a few
years later he had already progressed
enormously in his vision of what this
machine would be. I talked to Mort and I
was surprised to find that he never
thought of the Buchla as a performance
instrument he thought of it as something
you recorded, you made a nice sound
you put it on tape, you made another sound, you overdubbed and that's how Silver
Apples [of the Moon] was made it was really a tape
project. By the time I met Don I was
proselytized with his new vision which
is that he was making a performance
instrument in the tradition of musical
instruments that you played live.
There's a work of mine called Autumn Signal that
was inspired by Merce Cunningham and how
he moved his dancers in space. And using
the Buchla synthesizer I was able not
only to modify the text material
that I put into it but also let the
sounds, some of the sounds actually walk
around the periphery of the sonic
geography, some of them fly across, some
of them  be spatially located.
I thought everybody would have one of
these and in like minutes you know I
just, I really did. So I was very
patient because nobody knew what was
going on. If I played the Buchla nobody
even knew that the sound was coming from
the machine and I always took the time
to explain because I felt responsible
you know for that I was going to you
know help all this to happen. And it was
just never going to happen then, it
wasn't time to happen.
But now it's happening.
