released April 17, 2020

Although my first “official” release was 1983’s “From Distant Shores” my first recorded efforts started in 1972 when I was just 15 years old and still in school. During that fateful year, when I was first hearing the likes of Tangerine Dream, Hawkwind, Gong and Roxy Music, etc., one of my friends gave me his old tape recorder to do with as I wished. By that age I had developed an interest in electronics and I got it into my head to disassemble the tape recorder and see what would happen if I connected it to the family record player amplifier. To my amazement out from the loudspeaker came a varied array of fantastic electronic sounds, not just oscillating whistles but many strange rhythmic sounds, bubbles and white noise, dependant on where I placed the connections on the circuit board! Thus, by which was to be one of many synchronous events in my life, I had inadvertently brought into being my very own audio generator which was capable of making sounds similar to those I was hearing on those early aforementioned bands albums.

Later that year, with my pocket money I purchased an oscillator for around £1 from a local electronic shop and I found that by combining this with the audio generator it could be controlled and affected by the generator. Pitch was controlled not by a keyboard but by a knob. It was a strange little machine, with pieces of meccano used as electrical contacts jutting out of a red and white wooden box I built to house it in.

I decided to give it a name - Synda - well there was the EMS Synthia around at the time! It also had the ability to transmit its sounds into the ether as the family transistor radio could pick it up! Being a strange child I had the weird notion that some form of small entity was attached to it but I digress…

By using a small reel to reel tape recorder and recording sounds on that and then playing it back whilst recording new sounds onto a cassette recorder (or vice versa) I began to record my own rudimentary sound collages using whatever came to hand in conjunction with the audio generator, such as short wave radio sounds, a WOC mini electric hand held organ (similar to a Stylophone) and even requisitioning my younger siblings toy piano, acoustic guitar and chord organ!
I used to be a source of great bemusement and fascination at school as I’d set it up during break times and it’s weird sounds could be heard echoing around the school corridors!

I had no musical knowledge or training at the time - I made up my own tunings for the guitar for example and only later began to teach myself beginning first with a humble recorder! An early discovery was that by placing a knitting needle under the strings of the acoustic guitar at different places it could make it sound like some kind of medieval instrument like a psaltery as on track 27.

None of my 1972 recordings exist but many remain from 1973 onwards. Most are very basic, formless, short in length and crudely recorded but they give an insight into my musical development at the time and point to the directions I was later going to go.

Mk. 2 was built around late '75 early '76 and consisted of the original generator and oscillator plus an envelope generator, reverb and ring modulator. It was by now totally self contained and portable with it’s own loudspeaker, etc. I have fond memories of being driven into the countryside on family trips, being dropped off and playing it on hills and in fields. It must have sounded very weird to anyone within earshot of it! There was also many a time I’d take it to friends houses and play along with it to Hawkwind records, etc.

I also used it at the time several times as an accompaniment to reciting some of my poetry but thankfully I will spare you that but track 7 “Coming of the Sea” is a part of one.

"As reality gets nearer to the limits of illusion
I wait day to day for the coming of the sea
And as I stand on that lonely shore
An echo of the past haunts my memory".

Around ’77 I redesigned its case along the lines of the classic VCS3 synthesiser and this is the surviving model. The “gull” like sounds that open my 1983 “From Distant Shores” album were created with it and I also used it on 1985’s “Evocations” and 1994’s “Matrix”. It can also be heard on the Thaneco & Hillman “Call of the Ancients” album released in 2019 which used some of my 1978 recordings.