According to CME “Whether she is a professional keyboard player or a music fan, the Pink U-key fits all her needs and the distinguished the color will make her be noticed.”

That’s pretty cringe-worthy copy for this day and age, but the hot pink keyboard controller actually looks pretty cool.

The CME U-Key Mobiletone keyboard, which is already available in White and Blue, has ultra-slim, full-action semi-weighted keys with a built-in, 64-polyphony high-quality sound module, and an internal high-fidelity speaker driven by a digital amplifier.

The CME U-Key comes with more than 20 user-defined controllers, including a joystick, trigger pads, an encoder for data entry, and pedals. All controllers are fully-programmable and each function can be easily set up and saved. USB powered and compatible with both Windows XP/Vista and Mac OSX, it’s a great solution for composing on laptops.

The Pink U-key is now available at the prices: $209.00 US MSRP

It’s been awhile since we highlighted any Chicks That Mix.

There’s probably no better way to remedy that situation than drawing your attention to Little Boots‘ Victoria Hesketh.

Hesketh is the former lead singer with Dead Disco, and now she does her own electronic dance music as Little Boots.

“Little Boots is just me, Victoria,” says Hesketh. “Well, it’s the name for my music project. I write and play stuff and sing and DJ and remix and do covers…Whatever I can get my hands on really!”

And she does analog:

There’s a fully produced mix of this on her MySpace page, but this solo version has its own charms.

Check out her Moroder-esque single, Stuck On Repeat, below. You can also sign up for a free mixtape from Little Boots at her site.

They aren’t kidding, either. The site has collected hundreds, if not thousands of photos of woman in headphones. The site caters to all manners of headphone fetishists. Here’s a slice of what the slice is all about…..

It’s got busty babes in headphones:

It’s got Suicide Girl redheads in headphones:

It’s got your standard uber-babes in headphones:

It’s got naughty synth-babes with headphones:

It’s got slightly disturbing babes with headphones:

It’s got black babes with headphones:

Here’s what the site has to say for itself:

You might wonder why such a strange fetish has a huge website devoted to it. The answer is simple – it has lots of really devoted fans, who scour the internet day and night to find awesome pictures for the site.

You won’t find any explicitly sexual images on the site, as this fetish tends be more orientated towards an aesthetic appreciation of ladies in headphones.

Liz McLean Knight, aka Liz Revision, describes herself as “a multi-websited busybody, experimental electronic musician, and jewelry designer, with a love of all things technologically innovative and geek-chic.”

We found her site while checking out some dj-geek wear and were impressed. Knight’s got one of the coolest portfolios of projects that we’ve seen:

• Produces experimental / ambient electronic music as Quantazelle
• Founder and manager of subVariant Recordings
• Designer and owner of Zelle, a design company featuring jewelry and accessories, right, created from computer and electronic components.
• Manager of Fractalspin.com, an online store selling Zelle accessories, subVariant music, and other fashionably-geek gear. Check out their “Your beats are weak” shirts, and their electronic musician gear.
• Designer of the Electronic Musicians’ Emergency Adapters, an all-encompassing kit of adapters intended specifically for laptop-based and other electronic musicians. Looks like it would be a great idea to throw one of these in the back of your car, in case you show up at a gig without a crucial connector missing.
• Founder and editor-in-chief of Modsquare.com, which she calls “Chicago’s premiere online resource for experimental electronic music / IDM (intelligent dance music).” Unfortunately, their site got hacked – hopefully it will be back up soon.

In other words, if there’s something cool related to electronic music, she’s probably doing it.

You can get a taste of Liz Revision’s mixes below. She’s got more DJ mix MP3’s at her site, and you can also check out her podcast.

DJ/producer Reid Speed began career in the New York City drum & bass underground in the nineties, when it was still a bit of a novelty for a woman to be DJing. She quickly built a reputation, though, in the word of drum and bass.

Since then, she’s toured the world spinning drum and bass, speed garage and 2-step, she’s released several mix CDs and been the house DJ for the Jamie Kennedy Experiment television show.

Check out her Filthy Nasty Breaks mix below for a taste of her work. She’s also got a collection of free MP3s at her site to introduce you to her work, including DJ mixes and original productions.

She bought turntables in early 1996, and began playing out less than a year later. By the summer of ‘97 she was a resident of rave promoters Stuck on Earth and the following year a member of the Direct Drive crew. At their numerous events she cut her teeth playing alongside some of the biggest & the best in the business.

At the same time Reid was serving as her college radio station’s RPM director and also working at drum & bass store Breakbeat Science. Capitalizing on their large and widespread customer base, her demos soon spread across the country, which led to her travelling to many new cities around the US and Puerto Rico, as well as Ireland, Canada, and Mexico.

She visited England that summer and developed a love for Speed Garage, which inspired her to throw her own events, pushing the music she had grown to love. This movement morphed into a love for many other genres from 2 step to nu skool breaks to house and beyond.

In 1998 she distributed her first speed garage/2 step/house tape and in 2000, Reid, DB and 4.0 Marketing came together to do a successful series of 2 step events, including the first 2 step showcase at the 2000 Winter Music Conference.

Reid had also begun working on original production, releasing “SIMPLOT” with FS on Jungle Sky, and assisting Datcyde with a remix of NYC jungle anthem “Naughty Ride” featuring MC Blaise, which was released on Taciturn.

In 2001, after thirteen self released mix tapes and one animated short movie for Showtime’s Shonext channel, her debut mix CD Resonance was released by Breakbeat Science. In support of the release, a 40 date tour sponsored by Mixer magazine introduced her sound to an even wider audience. After wrapping that tour, Reid came home to NYC only to do another tour, this time with Madhattan breakbeat kings Ming & FS. They did 28 dates in 30 days across America in an RV. Warming the crowd up for an average of 3 hours a night, Reid developed her signature genre-busting style for the increasingly larger audiences.

After that month on the bus Reid was primed for a massive change. She decided to move to Los Angeles. She started Rude Sound, a party showcasing 2 step and nu skool breaks. In the summer of 2003, Breakbeat Science came calling for their second mix, entitled Life After Dark . Inspired by 9/11 and the decline of the NYC scene (no thanks to Mr Giuliani, Mr Bloomberg, or the darkness pervading the drum & bass scene at the time).

During that summer, Reid also recieved a call from a TV show looking for a special DJ to provide on-air flavor to the show. After competing against hundreds of male scratch/hip hop DJs, Reid was chosen by Jamie Kennedy to play drum & bass for one season on his show, the Jamie Kennedy Experiment which aired on the WB network. She went on to appear as the DJ in an episode of Spike TV’s MDN.

After completing the tour for Life After Dark in late 2004, Ms Speed got back to business with production of original tracks. Her & Sense’s track Bring it Up was recently featured on Richard Vission/ Swedish Egil’s Power Tools.

Images: DogsOnAcid, Maven of Mekka

The latest DJ in our series of Chicks that Mix is 23-year-old Montreal native Vivie-Ann.

Vivie-Ann says her sets cover everything house with a hint of ping or pong – anything that makes hands fly in the air. When asked to describe her sound, Vivie-Ann says it’s “bump in the night with a little dynamite,” adding that her sets could also be called “morally immoral.”

A six-year student of conservatory piano and a graduate of McGill University’s computer science program, she currently holds residencies at Palladium in Acapulco, Hulala in Rome Mokai in Miami, and last year in Ibiza @ Penelope.

Vivie-Ann released her first major remix release in 2006, an amped-up version of Kobbe & Austin Leed’s Bodyshaker. Vivie-Ann is now concentrating on production with her partner, DJ Kevin Barnett for their DJ collective, 02music, and the launch of their new DJ-inclined clothing line, ADD (Addicted DJ Designs).

You can preview Vivie-Ann’s work below, or download free MP3 mixes at her management site.

Dj Anastasia was born in Kiev, Ukraine in 1985. Since she was a child, she has loved music, dancing, playing piano and guitar.

When she was 16, Anastasia fell in love with electronic music and made her first attempts to mix vinyl.

Since then, DJ Anastasia has played with Felix da Housecat; DJ Diamond, Dj Dan, Deep Dish, Tiest and others.

Anastasia DJs regularly in clubs in the Ukraine. She also had played clubs in Milan, Madrid Allegoria, Zenith, Athens Venue, island Miconos Space (Greece), Georgia FTV and Night Office, Moscow and Ibiza Privilege.

You can get a taste of DJ Anastasia with her house music dj mix, below.

Amber Nixon is a San Francisco-based techno and tech-house DJ and producer with a taste for driving beats and aggressively risky mixing.

Aggressive and risky is good.

Her unique approach to mixing is featured on her three CD releases, Live with Friends and Family (2004), Gold (2002), and CityDweller (2001), and her latest track, Your Love, is featured on the CD Altered Evidence (2004).

In 2003, Amber co-founded NorCal DJ and Music Production Academy in San Francisco, where she develops and instructs DJ courses. She is also a recurring guest lecturer for the UCLA Graduate School of Musicology course on The History of Electronic Music.

Amber is a resident with the San Francisco branch of Sister USA, a cross-genre, all-female DJ collective. Amber and her projects have been featured in Remix Magazine (US), XLR8R (US), Etc. Magazine (US), Karma Magazine (US), Szene (Germany), the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Magazine and numerous online publications.

You can preview Amber’s aggressive and risky mixing style with her grinding, feverish acid trance mix, CityDweller. Amber’s got more mix MP3s at her site, along with her performance schedule.

In the video, Ciani is brilliant, gorgeous and geektacular, if you can look beyond the amazing array of sexy classic synth gear.

magneticring via Matrix

When DJ Diva came to our attention, it was clear that Surreal wasn’t spinning topless alone. Diva may have topped Surreal, though, by jumping topless out of a plane as her entrance to a DJ gig.

DJ Niki Belucci, right, is the latest topless DJ on the scene. Belucci is a 23-year old DJ from Budapest, Hungary. She’s got an ugly MySpace page, but somehow, it’s more striking than Tiesto’s.

Belucci specializes in house music. Topless djing may not be mainstream yet, but based on this video of Niki Belucci in action, it may not be far off.

Warning: Not worksafe.

The video below contains graphic images of topless DJ Niki Belucci in action.

It also contains old-school house music some may find offensive.

Click here to view the embedded video.

DJ Diva joins DJ Portial Surreal on the short list of topless DJs. She’s probably the only topless skydiving DJ, though!

She started her career in 2002, taking a training course at the Dutch DJ school in amsterdam. At her first gig, it was very hot and several women were topless, so she took her top off, too. After that, people asked her to do gigs at parties and events, some with “an erotic touch”.

Recently, DJ Diva was asked to open an outdoor event by jumping topless out of a plane on the beach of Scheveningen/Den Haag!

Her slogan is “Music is for the ears, but the eyes need something as well!”

“Every sound you hear that is not a vocal, was once live sex,” explains Vale. “We did not use a ‘traditional’ instrument on any piece.”

Vale and Ivan Evangelista collaborated with fellow musician Jean-Luc Cohen to electronically transform the sounds into a usable sonic palette. Vale notes, “The reaction to the music is affected by one’s voyeuristic tendencies, and a subconscious recognition of the carnal. It’s as if the listener is laying next to me.”

In this interview with Synthtopia, Vale talks about why she wanted to make an album from sex sounds, using vibrators to get bass lines, and her unusual recording sessions.

Background

Synthtopia: Tell us about your background. What led you to make this CD?

Jessica Vale: I’ve done a lot of work in multimedia, working with video in particular. There were a lot of concepts and ideas that I’ve been working on over the last couple of years. I’d actually been putting them into a screenplay I’ve been working on.

Ultimately, it wasn’t really working out. It didn’t feel like the right medium to get across what I was trying to say. Making an album seemed like the best way to do it, because of the sexual themes that I had in my head that I wanted to get out, and that I wanted to write on worked really well…That’s what started the ball rolling.

Then I found Ivan & Jean-Luc & talked about it.

Synthtopia: How did you come up with the idea for The Sex Album?

Jessica Vale: Originally, it began like any other music out there…the different tracks started as writing lyrics & what not, deciding what sort of songs I wanted to write. It seemed that they were mostly sexual themes. It seemed kind of obvious to try and go ahead and record live sex, and see if we could make that the source material.

We use it more as puncuation, to bring out what the actual content is. We weren’t really sure how it was going to work, right off the bat. It’s not like we set out to make an album out of sex sounds. It was more like, “Here’s the ideas that Jessica has, here’s what I’ve written, and what’s the best way for us to do this?”

We decided that, rather than trying to get a band together, why not actually compose it out of sex?

It’s one thing to write music with a guitar and know exactly how to make it happen, and another to want a certain bass line and have to figure out how you are going to get that out of breathing, smacks and various other things that are the result of sex.

Synthtopia: The CD comes out Feb 14th?

Jessica Vale: We’ve got a preliminary release online. It is a limited edition. We are currently weighing our options and negotiating for a larger distribution in coming months.

Synthtopia: What sort of reaction have you been getting from people?

Jessica Vale: A really good one. A lot of people are telling me that it seems very genuinely erotic, as apposed to cheesy, which is great…

Synthtopia: That’s always a risk when you are doing something specifically sexual – the worst thing you can do is try to be sexy and then have it be lame….

Jessica Vale: That was something that we really paid very close attention to. One fear I had, right off the bat, is that as soon as you bring not just sex into something, but sexual sounds, you run the risk of being very superficial, very cheesy, and even pornographic. I didn’t want that to be the case. So we really spent a lot of time, very meticulously, deciding how much to process the sounds.

It depends on the context. Do we process it so much that you can’t really tell what it is, or do we leave a little hint of what the sound is? In some cases, it’s pretty obvious…but it really is very difficult to make something sound sexual and not make it sound cheesy..

Synthtopia: Were there ideas that you had, or sounds that you put together, that you listened to and decided “Scratch that off the list!”?

Jessica Vale: Yeah…there were times when were were aiming for a certain sound. “What if we use a moan to create that?” and we put it in and in some cases it would just sound completely wrong. It was a very heavy step-by-step process, with every single sound, trying to make sure that it blended in with what the air of the song was.

Synthtopia: Did you come up with the idea or concept for the song and then go through the process of getting the sounds & working with Ivan and Jean-Luc to create the music, or what was your process?

Jessica Vale: I had a lot of the concepts of the songs fleshed out. I didn’t necessarily have all the lyrics written, but I had some ideas for most of them. We then went ahead and did the recording of the source material, and it was kind of a long, very awkward process, because we used a lot of couples that, in some cases, would be really into the idea, and then chicken out, so we’d be left with nothing. Then we had other couples that were great, and they went through with the entire thing. The agreement was that they would remain anonymous. We had to spread that out over a while. We initially wanted to get it out of the way right off the bat, but when you have people freak out and decide that they can’t go through with it, it kind of changes your plans a little bit!

Once we had adequate source material, we went ahead and started doing the processing and writing, and in a lot of cases we had to go back and get more. It wasn’t very cut and dry.

The Sex Part of the Story

Synthtopia: Tell me about the process of getting the source sounds…that’s got to be one of the most interesting aspects of making the CD. What did you tell people when you decided that you wanted to get their input for source material?

Jessica Vale: None of them were close friends. None of my close friends wanted to get that close. Some of them were acquaintances that I approached and said “Listen, I have this album that I’m working on, and we decided that we wanted the source material to come from recorded sex, and we’re looking for people that might be willing to let us record them.”

I got a few people that were acquaintances that I went to right away. I had a feeling that they might be more OK with it than the average person, just from knowing them, and those people were. So I kind of asked “What is the place and setting that you’d be most comfortable with, so that we could come and do this, that is also conducive to recording?”

I didn’t want to just throw them into a public studio, and ask them to get into some pretty intimate situations!

We had to work around how they were comfortable, which also made the recording kind of difficult at times. We just worked as long as we needed to get what we had to.

Synthtopia: Were there any surprises in the process?

Jessica Vale: It was just a very fun process, I have to say. When it comes down to actually recording people having sex, it’s a very technical process on our end, so we’re trying to make sure they’re doing things that are appropriate for getting microphones in the right places. It’s sort of difficult trying to direct them, but also try to keep them having an air of intimacy. I didn’t want it to just seem very cold and calculating. I wanted it to sound somewhat real and natural and emotional. We tried to get as many people to be involved as we could, for that reason.

Synthtopia: Listening to the CD, the sounds aren’t obviously people having sex…it sounds like electronic music. If the sounds aren’t explicitly people having sex, what is the motivation for the process you went through to create the sounds?

Jessica Vale: It was very important to have the source material start from sex, given the subject matter of the album. We wanted the listener to pay attention and listen more closely than he or she would normally. These tracks work in a club atmosphere, over loud booming speakers…but they are meant for more intimate settings. We want the sexual sounds to resonate subconsciously. We want them to show themselves subtly. In certain tracks you really can’t tell it’s sex at all until listening a few times.

It lends itself to a more emotional and sexual experience, given it’s source. Even if your conscious mind doesn’t know for sure what that sound is, I do think that it affects you on a deeper level. There is part of you that will pick up on that.

The Songs

Synthtopia: Let’s talk more about the music. It’s really varied. There are some tracks that are ambient, some that are almost disco, and some tracks that are closer to performance art. How would you describe the music?

Jessica Vale: I didn’t want to pinpoint sex as being one particular type of experience, and because of that I didn’t wan the music to be just one type of experience. I wanted it to kind of move through different emotions. That’s why it starts off ambient and builds, not so much to represent one isolated sexual experience, but more just the different types of emotions that myself and most people have in relation to sex. The music has its ambient tracks, it’s got a few that are more along the synth-pop new wave side of things, and a few that are even more towards disco that I think would certainly work in clubs.

Synthtopia: Tell me about the track Welcome. It starts out sounding like guided imagery, and then adds sort of fantasy undertones. What was your concept with that?

Jessica Vale: Ivan and I sat down and were talking about wanting to do an introduction, something that would start you off, get you into the music. We decided that we wanted to make it sound clinical, like we were instructing . It ended up not being the first piece.

Synthtopia: I love the way you’ve got Ivan’s voice speaking the text, and it almost imperceptibly fades between his voice and yours.

How about Boy in Black. What were your ideas with it?

Jessica Vale: That track stems from something that I’ve thought about through most of my life, this idea of one projection of a person, that I didn’t necessarily think existed, but I had wanted to. The writing on that is basically stream of consciousness about this idea, because it’s not really a person, it’s just this idealistic perception of something that fulfilled a need that one might have.

Synthtopia: How about Sweet 16. It’s way outside the norm of what you’re going to hear on pop radio…

Jessica Vale: That is the most personal piece on there. It’s sort of read as a diary entry.

Synthtopia: It sounds like an audio diary that you might have done….

Jessica Vale: That one definitely has the more serious weight to it. It’s sort of about the experience of having sex, especially as a very young person, and the strange reaction that young girls have to this. It’s sort of a comment on that.

Synthtopia: One of the things I like about the track is that it’s sort of the complete opposite of what you hear in terms of the way popular music normally tries to deal with sex. It’s usually very one-dimensional. Sweet 16 seems like it talks about desire, but also a lot of complex emotions that come with desire, like responsibility, regret, and all of these things….

Jessica Vale: That’s correct. It fits into the idea of the album. I obviously wanted to portray sex in a beautiful, loving way, because that happens plenty, but sex can also be very dark. Sweet 16 has very dark elements, but also a very raw, very real element to it. Ultimately, that’s what I wanted to go for, something that’s not sugar-coated in any way, shape or form.

Part II: More Sex Talk

DJ Lisa Lashes, sometimes known as the Queen of Hard House, is one of the top DJs in the world. With her mix albums and busy schedule of performances, she has attracted a global following.

Lisa is the first and only female to be considered among the top ten DJs in the world by DJ Magazine, ranking ninth in 2000 and continuing as the top-ranking female DJ in 2001, 2002, and 2003. Her mix albums, Hard House Euphoria (2002) and Extreme Euphoria Vol. 2 (2003), have been the highest selling hard house compilations in the world. Lisa has even conquered Ibiza with her own Lashed in Ibiza nights at Eden, packing in the crowds with her superb technical skills and explosive musical style.

According to Lashes, “Whatever style of house it is, I play it hard and dirty; it’s my favorite way!”

In this exclusive interview with Synthtopia, DJ Lisa Lashes talks about current tracks, her equipment preferences and the surprises in her music collection. Prepare to get Lashed!

DJing:

Synthtopia: Lisa, you’ve had top-selling CDs, you’re one of the most popular DJs in the world, and you’ve performed around the globe. What achievements or events stand out for you as highlights of your career?

Lisa Lashes: Performing in South Africa in front of 33,000 was an incomparable moment.

And I always enjoy doing the mixed albums. But the most exciting project I’ve ever been involved with so far has to be my Lashed parties. We’re actually about to tour the UK & Ireland, I can’t wait!

Synthtopia: It takes a lot of hard work and great sets to get to where you are. What do you focus on when you’re playing?

Lisa Lashes: What the crowd wants, I try and give them. It’s really important to feel the vibe so that you can produce a good set.

Synthtopia: For somebody new to your work, where’s the best place for them to start?

Lisa Lashes: Come to one of my Lashed parties. You have to see it to believe it!

Synthtopia: You help set the trends in house music. What do you look for in a great hard house track?

Lisa Lashes: It has to sound different to what is being played at that moment. I like to play hard and dirty tracks.

Synthtopia: What tracks have you found recently that you’re excited about?

Lisa Lashes: On The Roll by Nick Sentied and BK’s Razor Babes are two great hard dance tracks and at the moment I also love Orbital’s One Perfect.

Synthtopia: Your success attests to your DJing skills. Who are some DJs that impress you?

Lisa Lashes: I think BK is the best DJ around at the moment, though there is a lot of emerging talent with the likes of A-Star and Max Cooper.

Synthtopia: Do you have equipment preferences? What do you think about the digital DJing revolution?

Lisa Lashes: At home I have Technics 1210, a Pioneer mixer and Trackmaster needles. I prefer vinyls, but I guess one day CDs will take over eventually.

Getting Personal:

Synthtopia: Is it true that your idea of a wild evening is playing chess with your friends? What makes chess appeal to you?

Lisa Lashes: The wild thing about chess is that a game can go on for days!

Synthtopia: What’s in your music collection that fans might not expect?

Lisa Lashes: Barbara Streisand. I’m her biggest fan!

Synthtopia: What’s the biggest misconception people have about you?

Lisa Lashes: Because of my sexy image, blokes think I’m easy to pull. Sorry, but I have standards!

Gender Issues:

Synthtopia: What issues have you had to deal with that are unique to being a female DJ?

Lisa Lashes: Actually, everyone has always been supported. I’ve never experienced any negative attitudes towards me neither from the clubbers nor the promoters.

Synthtopia: What do you think about being a role model for young women interested in DJ’ing and electronic music? Does that ever enter into your thinking?

Lisa Lashes: Role-model is a big word. I just hope that I inspire other girls to do what I do because it’s the best job in the world.

Synthtopia: You’ve developed a sexy and provocative image. How do you use your looks and style as a tool without having it distract from your talent as a DJ?

Lisa Lashes: When you’re a female DJ, obviously the way you look is going to have more importance than if you were a bloke. There is definitely an extra dimension added to the job. But at the end of the day, if you’re a good DJ and you give the crowd a good night out, it doesn’t really matter.

Current projects and upcoming work:

Synthtopia: Tell us about the Lashed project.

Lisa Lashes: I can’t believe the success it has had. We started off in Ibiza after years of talking about it, then we took it all around the world, and now we’re about to tour the UK and Ireland. It’s kicking off on November 5th at Heaven in London; there will be five rooms with some of the best DJs in the world playing hard dance, trance, house, electro and breaks. You can check out the website http://www.lashedworld.com/ for more information.

Synthtopia: In addition to DJing, you’ve gotten into production work and artist management recently. What direction do you want to take with your career?

Lisa Lashes: DJing is what I like to do most, so I don’t intend to stop. But it’s important for me to broaden my horizons. Recently, I’ve been in the studio with BK and that’s been great. Artist management is something I definitely want to develop.

Synthtopia: What’s coming up for you in the next year?

Lisa Lashes: The new Lashed album will be out in January 2005 and we will organize a tour to support it.

Synthtopia: What’s the best way for fans to keep track of what you’re up to?

Lisa Lashes: Check out my official website http://www.djlisalashes.com; I try to update it as often as I can. Or you can also go on http://www.lashedworld.com to find out about our Lashed events.

Hypnotique

In this exclusive interview, Hypnotique talks about her work, making it as an alternative musician, the sensuality of theremin, the challenges of playing it and her thoughts on the state of electronic music performance.

Hypnotique has trained with acclaimed thereminist Lydia Kavina and performed as a thereminist with Zorch, Radio Science Orchestra and in cameos on British television. She’s toured Europe providing vocals, theremin, woodwinds and keyboards in several alternative bands. Her musical influences range from Throbbing Gristle and Lydia Lunch to John Barry and Ennio Morricone.

Recently, she produced several documentary radio programs, including Into the ether, a 90 minute show about the theremin, and “Switched On” interviews with Jean-Jacques Perrey and Bob Moog.

Synthtopia asked Hypnotique about her work:

Synthtopia: Your work covers a lot of ground. How would you summarize your style, and your approach to music and performance?

Hypnotique: I come from the hidden triangle, which is a meeting of the past and the future. You could call my style ‘electronic cabaret’ – as my sound is influenced by music from a global popular music heritage (theremin music from the 1920’s, Berlin cabaret from the 1930’s, lounge music from the 1950’s, through to 1980’s industrial music and even 1980’s pure pop music) but fuses tradition with modern sounds (synthesizers, sequencing, digital production) and styles.

I am a creature from another time, and the Hypnotique solo project is born from a cabaret rather than a pop music tradition, as it started off as a bit of fun with a pianist friend playing jazz versions of Nirvana covers on the clarinet, and later James Bond songs on the theremin! The Hypnotique experience is highly visual, and sonically challenging. Dance and electronic music is so gray and GAP, it’s all about the non-personality and the logo T-shirt – I make a reaction to this by returning to the traditional show – call it a type of modern day music hall, if you will.

Synthtopia: Don’t you think that dance music serves a very different purpose than your music? Dance music and electronica are often quite commercial, “GAP” as you say, but they are also about loosing your inhibitions, experiencing a group high, driving fast, and giving yourself permission to doing things that your logical brain would tell you are stupid. Isn’t that very human, and a valid area for artists to explore, too?

Hypnotique: Please don’t misunderstand me, I’ve absolutely no objections to the more widely spread forms for music for dancing – techno, trance, house – in fact I’ve been known to lose my inhibitions once in a while, too (although I prefer the really naff sort of old school/big beat sound)! But please do not confuse euphoria with taking pills, because the two can often be synonymous in this music. I prefer more strange and esoteric dance music, John Callaghan is a good example of this – using conventional beats with subversive samples and sounds. I had a friend at college who made dance music in 5/4 time, which was really interesting – and fun to dance to!

Maybe I’ve been unfortunate in the live music I’ve seen lately, but what I object to is the way this culture of anonymity of the DJ has pervaded so far that many live electronic ‘bands’ are really just a group of ugly guys in T-Shirts with laptops and nobody dancing! Kraftwerk can pull it off (just about) as their music is classic, but recently I saw four guys ‘larging it’ behind laptops, and what they were doing was so ridiculous.

At least a DJ is a craftsman with tools, the mechanics of the beat matching, which can be a tiny little bit fun to watch – but anyone can press play on a computer. Laptops should stay where they belong, in the office, and people should go back to playing live instruments alongside samplers and programmed parts. Otherwise it’s like The Orb playing a gig via ISDN while they are playing music in their bedroom – it’s not a statement, it’s just lazy.

Laptops have no soul, in the way that analogue synthesizer are ‘little machines with souls’ according to Jean-Jacques Perrey. He has some very cutting remarks on contemporary composers – he believes they just push the button and let the sounds come out, and the music is not inspired, and not carefully considered for the way the sounds affect the psyche of the body. I’m tempted to agree. Bad music really makes me feel very low, it is like being on the edge of the world, in the days when people knew that the earth was flat.

Synthtopia: Tell us about the music projects your involved in.

Hypnotique: Apart from the solo Hypnotique ‘electronic cabaret’, I work as a collaborator, session musician or guest musician on any projects people will throw at me! I have co-written and sung a tune with Dawn of the Replicants on their new album “The Extra Room”. The song “Arctic Sails” is a kind of alternative love ballad about two people who meet in the foundations of a shaking building after an earthquake shifts two tectonic plates together in different continents. It includes luscious synths and squiqqly saxophone – my hallmarks on the Replicants otherwise Pixies-esque indie music.

Rhythmicon ( http://www.rhythmicon.com), is a new project with Earthrid Records (http://www.earthrid.com) founder Kevin Busby, which is a mix of avant-garde improvisation with industrial beats & extreme morphological sound mutation, again, part of the ‘stand up’ performance based music to react to the ‘no performance necessary’ laptop music.

I have recorded and gigged recently as a member of Art Terry and the Fairys (http://www.artterry.co.uk) who is an amazing singer-songwriter and pianist who writes really engaging lyrics with a consciousness, and he has a great stage presence.

I recently performed at the Alpha Centauri Electronic Music Festival in the Netherlands with a collective called Intelligentsia (http://www.wisdomcore.com) who again, produce highly visual electronic music using on film divas and masked Japanese techno dancers!

I’m looking forward to a new collaboration this year with John Callaghan, who is a hugely innovative music producer and wild performer (he even gets almost naked onstage) who released a few singles with Warp Records – but hasn’t yet had the recognition he deserves. His music is very witty, because humour is a very important quality in electronic music; as my friend Jean-Jacques Perrey tells me – humouristic music will heal the world!

Sadly, I really don’t get many offers to collaborate or record with others – I have a solitary existence – so I’m keen to do more projects, either performance or even ‘by post’ projects with overseas musicians who have talent and passion.

Synthtopia: What are your cabaret/performance art shows like?

Hypnotique: I don’t get a chance to play live very often, so in the long dearths between shows the style changes quickly! I have done the gay cabaret show thing (which resulted in a near-death threat from the audience), even weddings playing ‘there-aoke’ (theremin karaoke) and jazz standards with a pianist – but now I’m concentrating on my artistic show (smaller audiences, less financial gain – but more wholesome!) as I think it’s about time the theremin was taken seriously.

The shows are focused around traditional songs and noir stories with musical backing. I perform with a backing tape of pre-recorded parts, live vocals & live instruments (woodwind and theremin) – alternating between vocals and instrumental within each song. I vary the ‘strangeness’ of sounds and material depending on the nature of the gig, often using electro-acoustic mind-bending sounds in a few places just to make the complacent audience sit up!

I like the idea of contrast – launching from a melancholic classical theremin solo to a noisy industrial track in a blink of the ear, so to speak. I like to dress up in stylish outfits – at the moment I’m sporting a 1950s secretary look, but it varies! I think live shows should always be about glamour and the visual, showing the audience something they could not merely hear on a CD, or MP3.

I would love to do a tour of some European countries towards the end of this year, I think Netherlands, Switzerland and Germany would appreciate me more than the English!

Synthtopia: Do you write your own music, too?

Hypnotique: My non-commercial shows are all my own music, I’m working on a CD (provisionally titled ‘the hanging gardens‘) to release in Autumn 2004 to the listening several.

My songs focus on lyrics – I’m more of a wordsmith than a vocalist (or rather I cannot sing like Celine Dion – thankfully). I love story telling, but not in the folk tradition – rather stories about strange and funny ideas – a couple who murder the woman’s lesbian lover in a bizarre sex ritual in surburbia, a nation’s leader who doesn’t know when he should jump from a sinking ship, if Princess Diana was killed by a landmine… I hope it’s a little thought provoking. I seem to have a thing about writing about killing children – to date it’s appeared in five songs. (You probably shouldn’t print that…they would send the hit squad round to get me!!).

I like to write about the dark psychology of life, things we all think from time to time – about death, murder, deception – and a few people take the extra step and actually carry it out. It’s not a glorification though, just a sort of expressive violence about what lurks beneath the surface. I like the idea of the checkout girl secretly wanting to smash the bottle of wine over the rude customer, or how office rage can explode over a tin of spilt paperclips leading to a bloody end… small but bitter revenges. The songs are very English, and quite political, but it’s a sort of ‘soft politics’ – highlighting situations and attitudes rather than the shouting politics of Billy Bragg. I want my music to represent the frustrations of my nation, the apathy, despair, the ridiculousness – but also to be fun enough to not take itself too seriously.

Of course, like many electronic musicians, I use many samples of words from records, loops, and little quotations for extra resonance (Jean-Jacques Perrey also taught me that quotations are a valid and good way to compose). I believe copyright laws are outmoded – if people like it, it should belong to the people, not Walt Disney or Elton John, but only if it is re-invented in an original way. I hope I don’t get caught out like VVM (a small record label who did an album of covers of ‘relax’ by Frankie, and were sued by EMI despite not making a profit on the record).

Synthtopia: I understand you cover Celine Dion tunes. How do you approach interpreting her work, and transmute it into something worthy of a theremin goddess?

Hypnotique: Ah, a musical interlude from my cabaret days! I was doing daytime TV and all kinds of other sickening crimes.

Unlike fellow theremin player Peter Pringle (http://www.peterpringle.com) who has sung with Ms Dion, I can only admire her vocal grandeur from afar – as far away as possible (Vegas is good – at least if she’s there, you know where she is).

Funnily, just today I heard one of the most inspiring pieces of music I’ve ever heard. It was a show on Resonance FM (http://www.resonancefm.com) of a children’s music making project. Most of the show consisted of children playing the Titanic theme tune very badly on toy keyboards. The tune would keep coming back, but with a different backing beat – maybe a rumba, maybe rock, maybe reggae – but always the same melody for nearly one hour. It was hypnotic, and hilarious! Obviously a hit in the playground. You can’t hold a good tune down – and Titanic sounds just so silly and outrageous on a high pitched instrument like the theremin. Funnily, I hear that Celine has a video of a show where she sings Bohemian Rhapsody (which I also play on the theremin) – which is supposed to be hysterical. Perhaps it would be good for myself and the ‘muse’ as she calls herself to do a show together – it could be called ‘the mistress and the muse’. I would insist on my own dressing room.

I’m fascinating by characters like her, and why housewives are so moved by her obviously ridiculous music and shallow personality. The mother of Paul Vickers, from Dawn of the Replicants, is convinced a song we wrote would be a hit as, according to her, it sounded like Celine Dion. I suppose it depends on your musical points of reference. My parents thinks everything I do sounds like ‘The Spinners’.

Synthtopia: You’ve worked as a musician, performance artist, radio producer, and music educator. How much of this is a conscious choice, and how much of this is a necessity to survive as an avant-garde musician?

Hypnotique: Ha ha! I really don’t see how any man (or woman) can live on avant-garde alone. I suspect music will always be a loss making activity for me, despite my music degree and abilities to multi-task. I have a day job like everyone else. Anyone who doesn’t is obviously lying, signing on, or sleeping with the head of A&R at EMI (who, ironically, used to manage Dawn of the Replicants!).

At the moment I’m ghost writing a book on golf, amongst other stimulating tasks. It’s a depressing state of affairs that in a cynical and selfish country like England, music talent is so rich and considered ‘two a penny’ that promoters short change artists, and we still have this ‘pay to play’ mentality. If you ask for money – you are perceived as not being a ‘true artist’ and exploitative – which is ridiculous, as you wouldn’t ask anyone to work for free just because they enjoyed their job, otherwise society would collapse.

I’m playing more illegal type venues run by enthusiasts rather than proper venues nowadays. I vote a return to Communist Russia attitudes – then you could audition to be a state musician and put on a state salary to do your thing. Nowadays, you have to pretend to be a humped black Jewish lesbian to try and get an arts council grant, which is the nearest equivalent. It seems you cannot hope to make money from CD sales, or so they say, nor gigs – but remember if you do if for the love – someone is making money out of your love from some angle.

I should say to music enthusiasts – don’t be apathetic, or good music will die. Buy CDs, don’t just download the MP3s, but buy them directly from the artist if you can – and don’t make excuses, go to that gig you heard about – bring £10, don’t spend it all on beer, and buy a CD. If you have no money, support how you can – tell the artist you appreciate them, send them a nice email. Because if you don’t, another artist like myself will just go home dejected, lonely, poor, and ready to throw in the towel.

Synthtopia: Most of your work seems to revolve around the theremin. What turned you onto the theremin?

Hypnotique: I studied electro-acoustic music composition as part of my music degree, in 1999 I decided to write an essay called ‘Space Age Music and the Moog’ – which has become the basis of most of my work to date. Then I researched electronic music pioneers and the inventions of electronic music since the turn of the 20th century, and also how the lounge music tradition had been revived. Amazing, strange and unbelievable things like the 200 tonne sand, cement and water constructed Dynamaphone, the first electronic instrument, the trautonium, the only instrument to produce sub-harmonics, and of course the world’s only space-controlled musical instrument – the theremin.

After Steven Martin’s documentary theremin, an electronic odyssey, there was a lot of interest and a revival in the instrument. I saw the Flaming lips and Cornelius play one, and I soon became hooked, and asked my brother to try to make one as a present. My theremin heroine is the great Russian virtuoso, Clara Rockmore. She has such poise, such talent, and such style. And she was the original primadonna! Once I heard her album The art of the theremin, playing great Russian classical music, it is so beautiful, poignant and emotive – far more so than a violin – and that made me try harder to play theremin seriously.

Synthtopia: You play a lot of instruments, including keyboards, alto sax and clarinet. How does the challenge of performing with the theremin compare to other instruments that you play? Do things like the temperature or humidity affect your performance? Do you think playing the theremin offers unique expressive possibilities?

Hypnotique: Absolutely. The theremin has been described by its players as ‘the everest of musical instruments’. Although in the 1920’s the RCA corporation marketed the instrument as something ‘anyone who can hum, whistle or sing’ can play, it is probably the hardest instrument in the world to play! There is no pitch reference points, you can only guess where the pitch is in the air, and everything affects the pitch arc – temperature of the room, stability of instrument, object within the playing sphere (around 2ft around the antennae of instrument), even your body weight and density of your hand. It’s also a temperamental beast (even the modern instruments) – so you have to be nice to it, otherwise it may decide to pick up a bad karma hum from the PA system, refuse to switch on, or blow itself up!

It is incredibly frustrating and hard to master as a precision instrument – I have been playing for 4 years and I’m only still at the foothills of the Himalayas. You must be disciplined to play, and have some kind of prior musical training. Sadly, the estimated drop out of serious theremin technique is 90 – 95%, and most people (notably Goldfrapp, Polyphonic Spree) resort to crappy toy instruments and noisy squeals and swoops – which is a bit ungraceful, as the theremin can be very graceful like a Chinese stringed instrument, or female singer, and this lazy style of playing is why it has such a poor novelty reputation.

On my theremin radio show people from all over the world – Russia, Japan, America, Holland – sent in fantastic and highly original recordings of all kinds of intelligent music with the theremin as star. It was truly inspiring. As theremins become cheaper and easier to buy, more players will raise the standard, and my teacher Lydia Kavina (shown in photo with Hypnotique) can demonstrate just how versatile and dexterous the pure theremin sound can be, performing her own contemporary compositions, classical music and even surf-rock. Pure inspiration.

The problem for the theremin is shaking off the shackles of its sci-fi reputation, only then can it become a serious instrument in its own right. I once wrote the London Symphony Orchestra, they wrote me a snooty letter saying they have no need for such instruments. When the young Bob Moog met the great Hollywood movie thereminist Samuel Hoffman and told him about his new idea for making a new instrument called a synthesizer, Hoffman laughed and said it will never catch on. Times will change.

Synthtopia: As “Hypnotique”, you’ve developed quite a persona. Your site describes you as a “mythical space-age enchantress” and a “germanic dominatrix”. How did you come up with Hypnotique as a performing persona? Is Hypnotique an extension of your own personality, or more of a complement?

Hypnotique: An alter-ego is a strange creature, I like having a ‘working name’ as it means I can differentiate it from my other life. Hypnotique is really the name for my band – but there is no one else in it anymore! I won’t form a band now, it’s all about politics and power. I feel it would be arrogant to ask someone else to play my music, and I would require such unusual and exceptionally gifted people to play my music – I would spend a lifetime searching for that supergroup so for now it’s just me. Collaboration is a better option – a meeting on the bridge, which can benefit both parties.

I liked the idea of taking everything that has inspired me to date – gothic lyrics, dark stories, electro-acoustic music, easy listening, pure pop, film soundtracks, Romantic classical music, avant-garde electronic music – and mixing it up into a potent cocktail. You really will hear it all! I aspire to be a timeless sort of performer, classic songs, classic style – and hopefully people will be able to relate to my style in the future and speak to future generations, like Clara Rockmore or Edith Piaf can continue to inspire. There just aren’t enough great female divas – or rather there are many great female musicians, but they never have the success or longevity they deserve.

My alter ego can sometimes frustrate me – I’m really not as much of an ice maiden as her, and I’m really much more fun and less moody. She is often more my temperamental, and depressive side. You probably wouldn’t recognize me in my casual wear in the supermarkets of Tottenham!

Synthtopia: How important do you think it is for a musician working in the electronic or avant-garde to have a unique image?

Hypnotique: I think it counts as a negative, rather than positive element in most aspects of the British music scene. It’s a culture of blandness, that whole anti-performance thing in electronic music. I would stand more chance of success and getting gigs in high places playing wibbly noises with a laptop and theremin whilst wearing grey overalls than trying to do my vocal set. Sony tell us to ‘go create’ by having means to download or copy identikit music, or taking stupid pictures at 50p a go on a mobile phone and send them to your mates. That’s not creation – it’s just part of the whole Blairite Britain of ‘choice’: they want you to cast your vote by Big Brother style text message. No, creativity and uniqueness are not encouraged. It can be a frightening thing to do, tackle the music scene with something not done before. You need to have a lot of courage, and you get a lot of knocks for it. No one should be afraid to be original. Except maybe those fashion student sort of girls who go to parties dressed up in crazy clothes they’ve made our of traffic cones – that is shameful.

Synthtopia: In addition to calling yourself an enchantress, and a dominatrix, you’ve called your performances “highly sensual”. How does sensuality figure into your performances and your appeal as a performer?

Hypnotique: The theremin is a highly sensual instrument – to play is as if to cast a spell. It does feel as well as look very elegant to play.

Some people, mainly men, think the theremin is quite phallic, but I disagree. If by sensual, you mean sexual, I would say my music has sort of dark and seductive undertones, but you have to listen not just to the mood, but very carefully to the words. You must listen very quietly to let the emotion come to you, slowly.

Synthtopia: Men think that the theremin is phallic?!! Is it the antennae? That’s a little odd!

Hypnotique: A man’s thoughts are little, and odd.

Synthtopia: Ouch! Back to your comments on the sensuality of the theremin….theremin performance requires an intensity and focus in the performer and is almost like an abstract dance…is that what you’re referring to?

Hypnotique: Lev Termen (Leon Theremin) invented an instrument called the Terpsitone, which was a giant theremin which you played by dancing through the air. He tried to get many dancers to play it, but none could hold a melody – so the great theremin virtuoso Clara Rockmore performed on it. It doesn’t exist now, but I would love to play that instrument; to me, this would be the ultimate expression of the complex gestured movements, the little dances, of the theremin.

It does feel magical, to play in the air with no weight or forces to hold you down, and the magic dust tends to rub off onto the audience. But people must learn to appreciate the instrument not just for its strangeness, but also for the originality and musicality of the performer. I like the way The Man From Uranus (http://www.manfromuranus.com) plays the theremin, using many Mooger-Fooger and other FX to sound like a machine from a Science Fiction film, but not in a cliché way. Although he does not play melodically, it is a very original way to play.

Synthtopia: Do you think that sensuality of it is one of the reasons that the greatest thereminists have been women?

Hypnotique: My three favorite thereminists – Clara Rockmore, Lydia Kavina and Pamelia Kurstin – are all, like myself, petite women, and this is no coincidence. The answer is simple, men cannot multi-task, and playing the theremin is like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time, as the movement of the hands is quite dissimilar, compared to most instruments. And men cannot be bothered to be disciplined with such studious tasks. I think the fineness of the instrument suits a small hand and a little arm that can move nimbly. Women also look far more sexy playing the theremin than men!

Synthtopia: For the electronics freaks, what sort of theremin do you play on stage?

Hypnotique: I recently purchased a T-Vox Tour theremin, which is designed by the husband of the great theremin virtuoso Lydia Kavina. It’s a joy to play, with a seven octave range, a very pure electronic tone and a wonderful space age pure white lightweight case. I tend to favor the pure classic style of playing with no FX (which is the best way to practice), but during the set, I sometimes have a more wild number using FX like distortion to sound like a screaming guitar, or an echo chamber effect from a Behringer V-Amp unit. I also put the saxophone through this to give reggae style long delays. For Rhythmicon, we put the theremin through a lot of extreme modulations on the computer.

Before that, I had an Etherwave theremin, the most popular theremin in the world, which is made by Bob Moog. It is the best instrument to have to start to learn precision playing.

Synthtopia: You’ve recently produced several radio shows, including an introduction to the theremin, and profiles of Jean-Jacques Perrey and Bob Moog. How did you get involved in these shows? Can you tell us a little about them?

Synthtopia: Resonance FM is a new art music radio station which started in London in 2002. It has an ‘anything goes’ attitude, and I thought it would be fun to pursue my dreams of being a radio producer.

The first show, Into the Ether: the Music of the Theremin was a showcase of new and old rare theremin recordings from around the world, including old 78’s, bizarre and inappropriate lounge music and recordings sent in from the growing community of theremin players. We interviewed Steve Martin, the acclaimed documentary producer of Theremin: an electronic odyssey. I even produced three plays about famous theremin players with an actor friend, which was great fun, especially ‘the ether disco’, a fictitious comedy about the meeting of great thereminists, past and present. Sort of jokes to appeal to maybe 20 people in the world, but why not be indulgent! This was for the 10th anniversary of the death of Leon Theremin. I knew he was watching us, because I had a big power cut which affected just my street the night before. He knew we were laughing at him recording the play, and he wasn’t amused. And weird sounds kept leaping onto the broadcast when we listened back that weren’t on the original tapes. There was definitely a strange force in the ether for that one!

I have always been a big admirer of Jean-Jacques Perrey and Bob Moog, who I wrote about in my university dissertation, “Space Age Music and the Moog”. I got together with Bruce Woolley, who is a maverick record producer and songwriter who found is fame in the 1980’s writing hits like “video killed the radio star” with Trevor Horn and he had his own band, The Camera Club. He doesn’t like talking about it, but I think it’s really cool, all those quirky and funny songs from the 80’s are really amazing and original, and will come back in fashion, just as the quirky electronic music of Perrey has come full circle. We decided to produce a series of shows to celebrate a 125 years of electricity called ‘Switched On’, by interviewing some of the most important names in electronic music; many, like Gershon Kingsley, are in their 70’s and 80’s, so we may not have long left!

Jean-Jacques was the most inspiring person I met. I went to his flat in Switzerland by a big lake, and we spent two days making a very, very long interview where he talked about his amazing life, working with Jean Cocteau, Edith Piaf, Django Reinhardt and Jacquel Brel in Bohemian Paris, and then his dreamlike time in America composing crazy tape loop music for albums and adverts, where he met many legends – Walt Disney, Hitchcock, Salvador Dali, Serge Gainsbourg – so many stories! His philosophy on life is very important: he believes in the healing power of music, and that electronic music should be a source of joy and fun. He even carried out experiments with dolphins in Canada, whom he believes know the secret of external life (it’s to do with a substance they excrete, apparently), but he won’t tell the world the secret, until all healing is brought to man, and there are no wars. As he is 75, we may not yet get to find out his secret in our time. Jean-Jacques is the most pure and un-cynical person I have ever met in music. Jean-Jacques is a true showman. I saw him play in London recently, and he charmed a huge audience with his funny stories, jokes and music. I’m very proud of the documentary – which also features contributions from Angelo Badalamenti, Air, Stereolab and others.

The Bob Moog documentary is in production but follow a similar format of a face-to-face interview and lots of rare recordings. Bob, too, is a very inspiring and amazing individual who has literally changed the sound of modern music heard in the world today with the invention of the first commercial synthesizer (minimoog). Both Jean-Jacques and Bob do believe that electronic music has a connection with the cosmos, and those strange machines like the synthesizer do have a direct connection with the musician, they are mini-creatures needing love! You just don’t get that connection with a laptop, I don’t think. They are not as advanced as the old analogue equipment. I remember using a Publison (sort of tape delay unit) at university to make tape music – if you turned it on a bit too much it would get very hot, and spin the sound around and around in a terrifying way until you had to switch it off in fear! Crazy device.

We hope to continue the series with the big fish, Wendy Carlos, if we get an opportunity. There’s no money in all this, so it’s another ‘for the love of it’ project we have to try and fit in around the day jobs. When I wrote my dissertation, I didn’t ever believe I would come to meet and be friends with these legends of science and music! I didn’t even know they were still alive when I wrote the paper. It’s amazing when the abstract comes into focus, and I feel honored to have shared in a small part of their life.

Synthtopia: Are your radio shows available online?

Hypnotique: Yes, you can download the theremin one from my web site http://www.hypnotique.net, and ‘Switched On’ Perrey and Moog documentaries from www.switchedonradio.co.uk

Synthtopia: Do you have any recordings coming out?

Hypnotique: A mini CDR by Rhythmicon entitled Feedback Machine in Autumn 2004 on Earthrid Records (www.earthrid.com).

Dawn of the Replicants’ The Extra Room is in the shops now (www.dawnofthereplicants.com).

I’m not sure what to do about my solo record (provisionally titled ‘the hanging gardens’). It’s almost finished recording; it’s a little lo-fi in quality but has songs & instrumental music of which I am exceptionally proud, and I hope people will enjoy it. I’ve not exactly been flooded with offers to help me release it, and I have to go through the nightmare of finding a good distributor who just might give a small shit about it. I’m at that hard stage of deciding whether to make 500 CDs or just make CDRs by hand for the listening several who want one.

Oo it’s a glamourous life in show biz! Anyone who can help, or even offer some moral support, can contact me (below). This is one of the most heart-breaking and depressing decisions I’ve ever had to face in my artistic career, when you realize you are at the very bottom of the food chain. I will be selling a budget price MP3 album via my website. I’m thinking of nice packaging if the CD comes out – textured materials handmade – a bit Laura Ashley, but hopefully it will be very sensual!

Synthtopia: If readers want to find out more about you, or if they need a theremin goddess for a gig, where should they look?

Hypnotique: http://www.hypnotique.net or email info@hypnotique.net. Look inside yourself – you too could become the next theremin goddess!

Goodbye Synthtopia…and thanks for the great website and nice questions. You guys rule!

Cynthia Webster is the synthesist and designer behind Cyndustries, a company that makes modular analog synthesizers. She recently shared her thoughts with Synthtopia about a variety of topics, including the analog vs. digital debate, Nietzsche, women in electronic music, the mystery of “wishbone127″  and even banana envy.

Webster is an electronic music veteran. In high school, Webster bought an ARP 2600, and after graduating, she attended the Boston School of Electronic Music and studied with Jim Michmerhuizen, author of the classic ARP 2600 User’s Manual. There she discovered ElectroNotes and electronics and dove into schematics and circuit boards.

In the seventies, Webster founded Synapse, an electronic music magazine. During this time, she continued her study of electronic music in the synthesizer labs at San Francisco State University and Mills College. She also performed frequently, jamming with friends in the electronic music community, and performing with Triode, a synth band. They performed “live sound sculpture” with modulars in the San Francisco Bay Area, and headlined the Los Angeles Electronic Music Festival.

Webster took a detour in the eighties and worked as a cinematographer in Hollywood. After a twenty-year hiatus, Webster returned her focus to electronic music and founded Cyndustries, where she presently builds custom Modcan-compatible synthesizer modules.

Synthtopia asked Webster recently about analog synthesis, her company and her background:

Synthtopia: What got you interested in electronic music, Cynthia?

Cynthia Webster: I heard “Lucky Man” by Emerson, Lake and Palmer on the radio and was instantly hooked!

In a quest for, “whatever it was that was making those wonderful sounds”, I learned of Wendy Carlos’s efforts and those of others, and soon found myself hanging around the halls of Cal Arts, trying to get a closer look at the mighty Buchla systems there. Miraculously, I actually got some time on the systems, (considering that I wasn’t even a student there!) and made several friends in the process. Here I was, still in my senior year in High School, and all my friends were much older composition students at Cal Arts who were building the first Serges and studying with Mort.

For my age I quickly developed quite an academic taste in music listening to the likes of Subotnick, Xenakis, Ussachevsky, and Stockhausen.

In ‘75 or so UCLA had a two-day lecture by Danlee Mitchell on Harry Partch culminating in an evening performance of “The Bewitched”. Between the lecture and the performance we were actually allowed up on stage to see Partch’s fascinating 43 tone-to-the-octave instruments up-close, and encouraged to fondle and play them. I was electrified with the notion of creating a synthesizer in this microtonal scale and possibly jamming or performing in his orchestra. Ok, I was a silly teenager! I kept wondering “Where is Mr. Partch?” and hoped to speak with him, but was crushed to find that he had already passed away.

Synthtopia: In your career, you’ve performed as a musician, founded a magazine, worked as a Hollywood cinematographer, and now you’re designing and building analog synth modules. What has made you want to do so many different things?

Cynthia Webster: I guess that is just my nature. I am a workaholic and don’t like doing anything half-baked. If you’re going to do something, then get on with it and DO something!

I’ve had other hobbies and professions such as acting, DVD Authoring, scuba diving, and 1,000-yard 50-caliber target shooting. Most whatever I get involved in requires an intense focus, and I like it like that.

There are groups of people who go out in the desert launching homemade liquid fuel rockets. They can be quite expensive and many are ten or twenty-feet high. That’s the kind of thing that appeals to me, because there is no room for screw ups.

Synthtopia: What led you to want to start Cyndustries?

I never planned it. Years ago, I’d started with miniphone jacks on an ARP 2600, but all my friends were using bananas and I instantly saw the advantages. I guess that you could say I had banana envy!

About the same time the economy went bust several years ago, the majority of the DVD pressing plants and authoring facilities went off shore to build manufacturing plants overseas. I ‘d been working for the studios in DVD menu design and navigation with a specialization in foreign menu translations. If you ever see any of the James Bond movies in Vietnamese, Svenska, or Portuguese, I did those menu graphics!

Suddenly I was out of work, so I thought for a while about what it would be that would make me most happy to do, and looked-in on what was happening lately in modular synthesis and I happily dove right in.

After looking at all that was available, I chose to buy a Modcan system, not only for it’s wide range of available modules and very high quality, but also because it struck me as the ideal combination of classical East Coast (ARP Moog Aries Polyfusion) type thinking, and the psychedelic far-out West Coast (Buchla and Serge) experimental philosophies. These are of course terribly broad generalizations, however I find these stereotypes to be pretty close to reality, man.

Soon I was overflowing with designs for new modules, and started looking into just what it might take to make myself some of them. Other modular enthusiasts started asking me to make some for them as well and the rest is history!

I guess you could say that it kinda’ snowballed into what it is today. We are a lean mean research and development machine!

Synthtopia: Everything’s been going digital for 20 years. Why analog?

Cynthia Webster: Digital has spent the past 20 years approximating analog, and they’re still not there!

Digital has some wonderful properties of it’s own, don’t knock it! If I had chosen to make programmable keyboard synths with lots of pre-programmed sounds, I very might have gone digital. I’m most interested in infinite possibilities in both system architecture, as well as the positions between all of those encoder knob positions, and that still requires analog circuitry to do best.

Some might assert that the human hand is not capable of finer resolutions than 256 or 1,024 steps in a 300 degree arc of knob rotation. I really don’t know, just that most such instruments have a different overall feel to my hands and especially to my ears.

To do digital right, manufacturers should spend a lot of money everywhere, throughout the machines, with A-to-D converters and D-to-A converters of the ridiculously highest resolution, everywhere, to offer the greatest variety of subtlety to their sounds. Perhaps it is because most manufacturers today don’t spend that kind of money on their products, because they have to answer to committees in boardrooms and their share holders?

I don’t want to belabor digital versus analog, as some machines such as the EDP Wasp are made mainly of the most ultra ultra low resolution logic circuits, and I love their nasty raw sounds! Don’t hold me to any of this, as my own electronic knowledge is like a great Swiss cheese…tasty, but full of holes! Whatever works for each individual artist is obviously best.

I also like to get away from sitting at the computer screen for hours each day!

To me, it is the human knob and patch cord interface that makes me happiest, I’ll pitch a whole machine into the trash before dealing with tiny liquid crystal menus, though with it’s tiny buttons and tiny screen, it’s kind of a wonder that I still have a cell phone!

Synthtopia: Do you think you bring an alternate perspective, as a woman, to a world of electronic music that’s largely male?

Cynthia Webster: Well, I feel I have a highly tuned intuition and often it guides me far better than theory alone!

Actually, the majority of my friends are male, just don’t ask me anything about competitive sports, or likely you’ll just get a blank stare! Theoretically, creativity should be genderless right?

My observations are that in our society women are generally discouraged from things technical, it is was getting better for some time, but its seems lately the pendulum is swinging back the other way. Kind of scary…

Synthtopia: Modular synths seem to reflect a lot of the personality of their designers. Buchlas are known for encouraging experimentation, while Moogs are known for meeting the needs of more traditional musical approaches. Do you think that your line of modules has this sort of personality, and if so, how would you describe it?

Cynthia Webster: In a word, my modules must be fun! (and thus be useful, and inspire creativity!)

New capabilities and new parameters of control are important to me. I also strive for an elegance of design, and have found that in some rare circumstances it can actually be the removal of excess that sets a design apart, and renders it as classic.

I approach module design as if modular synthesis and analog development had never stopped.

In a way it was big corporations moving-in to the arena and their “dumbing down” of the equipment that hurt us synthesist most. This has a lot to do with why I jumped into the mix!

I do a lot of custom modules for customers, this and new module development keeps the game exciting and fresh for me instead of making the same widget over and over day after day.

It is an interesting balance as while innovating, one has to be consistant and keep quality high shipping orders to customers in as timely a fashion as possible. This can be a challenge!

Synthtopia: Your module descriptions are a blast to read, and your selection of modules seems very creative, too. How much does Cyndustries reflect your personality and values?

Cynthia Webster: A lot! No board rooms and no “design by committee” here!

Also, I am a Synthesist first and foremost, and a designer and manufacturer second. I feel that this allows each module to represent a clear vision of someone who spends most every waking hour each day trying to build us all better mousetraps!

Many run their business by spread-sheet and are motivated by logic and profits. I create modules out of sheer love of the medium and the tools instead! My philosophy is often to “Zig”, while all the others “Zag” as in, “no one in their right mind would go to all of this trouble for that one stinking feature…”which is precisely why I’ll do it!

While we’re discussing philosophies , If I say I will do something, I do it. It may take some time for me to get there, but I always do what I promise. That is one of my ways of doing business, as well as “a deal is a deal”, no baloney!

Synthtopia: How do you go about deciding on and creating new modules for Cyndustries?

Cynthia Webster: An old Japanese woman that I know has a Ouija board, and in the afternoons we will drink tea and divine for new module designs together in the sunset… Kidding!

It can be a variety of things actually, It all starts with keeping one’s radar at full awareness on all hailing frequencies. Sometimes inspiration is in the form of new semiconductor announcements where a subcomponent with new capabilities suggests things not possible before.

Other times it may be a conversation read on one of the boards, a customer request, or I may approach something just because I know that it is so absurd that any logical businessman would never attempt such financial folly! Ideas just come to me, and I am fortunate to collaborate regularly on new design ideas with some of the smartest engineers in the business! (A huge Thank You to you all!)

It is also important to experiment all the time, like hooking up a pair of hydrophones backwards to see if you can hear music underwater at the bottom of your swimming pool)

A lot of folks have been writing about the beauty of finite instruments lately, and I totally agree.

Wasn’t it Nietzsche who said, “without limitation, there is no art?” the interpretation here is that a violin sounds as wonderful as it does partly because it is not also trying to sound like a tuba. It is the restrictions of the sound cavity, and the unique shape, that give it it’s characteristic sound.

Similarly, a Minimoog is a classic because of what it doesn’t offer, as well as what it does.

Recently, I’ve heard this philosophy applied towards modular systems, that some are somehow more worthy or desirable because of their limitations as closed systems. I feel that this is quite silly, as the whole point of modulars is to be, well, modular, and thus allow any possible combination of elements that the user sees fit for their particular style or purpose.

You can rest assured that we will continue to expand the horizons of your investment and artistic options with great zeal!

Synthtopia: What’s the best part of your job?

Cynthia Webster: Boxing modules and shipping them to happy customers!

Listening to all the CDs that customers send-in of music they’ve made with our gear.

Synthtopia: What’s the worst part?

Cynthia Webster: Unexpected production set-backs that slow down shipping cycles… Ugh! Also inquiries from customers with strange e-mail names like “wishbone127″ who ask about their orders, but provide absolutely no other information, so we have to grind production to a stop and spend the afternoon playing Sherlock Holmes trying to figure out who they are!

Synthtopia: I guess “wishbone127″ can consider himself warned! So, what’s in store for the future for Cyndustries?

Cynthia Webster: We have already made a move to announce new products much closer to their actual shipping dates. I never apprenticed to anyone in the manufacturing business and have learned many lessons the hard way over the past few years, that doing things right simply takes far more time than one would ever imagine!

We plan to complete orders with more efficiency in a timely manner by slowly shifting the business to where there is completed stock of every item already on the shelves, instead of the present “Build-to-Order and ship several weeks later” paradigm. This shift is ongoing and will take many months, though.

Several totally new Top Secret module concepts are already in the works here that are going to Rock-Your-World, Baby! You won’t be disappointed… so Lookout!

Synthtopia: Any plans to do modules or other items physically compatible with other formats, such as MOTM, in the future?

Cynthia Webster: Oh, I might have a surprise or two up my sleeve someday, but I don’t plan to abandon the Modcan Community and they will always get the latest designs long before any other format would.

I see Modcan as the premiere line of what is available, and every move that we make will support that belief. Every time you see the very coolest of the coolest stuff available only in our format, think to yourself, “damn, I shoulda’ bought a Modcan!”

Synthtopia: What are some of your interests outside of electronic music?

Cynthia Webster: Bunny rabbits, (I adore bunnies!) nature hikes, women’s issues, animation, cooking, sailing, and lately… sleep, ’cause I never get any!

Synthtopia: What do you hope to accomplish with Cyndustries?

Cynthia Webster: To make the finest and most thought provoking modular tools available anywhere and to see them enjoyed immensly by those who use them.

Synthtopia: Thanks, Cynthia, for sharing your thoughts with Synthtopia!

Cynthia Webster: Thank you for this opportunity to chat!

Additional information about Cynthia Webster:

Personal Link: http://www.cyndustries.com/info_1.cfm

Music link: http://www.cyndustries.com/music.cfm

Favorite musical artists or recordings: Eno, Orbital, ELP, Left Field, Segovia, Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, Harry Partch, Groove Armada, classical Indian music, Wendy Carlos, King Crimson, and The Cardigans to name a few. Crimson’s “Lark’s Toungues in Aspic” and Carlos’s “Timesteps” are two of my most favorite pieces, (how can I not mention “Supper’s Ready” by Genesis?)

Pink Noises offers profiles of women in electronic music, and book, video, and music reviews of their work. There’s information on the hottest women electronic artists, such as Bjork, Cibo Matto, Wendy Carlos, Andrea Parker, and Peaches. You’ll also find out about many artists that you may not have heard of.

The oral history section gives voice to women electronica artists talking about talking about tecnique, the role sex and gender issues play in electronica, and, best of all, a woman’s view of the business of electronica.

Pink Noises does the job of providing a women’s perspective, but is best when it adds a little humor to the mix. Their “small wonders” feature reviews audio gear that is small enough to “fit in your bad-ass back pocket or clutch purse”. Or, as Peaches puts it in her interview, “I don’t give a shit how good you are at knob wanking; I am there to be entertained.”

Of turntables. And something tells us that if they are full of plastic, the clubbers will be up all night.

DJ Portia Surreal, is “up and coming”, according to her site, as a New York DJ and “glowing disco ball vixen”. She’s appeared with some of the DJ world’s headline acts, including Sandra Collins and Tiesto. She mixes it up with an emphasis on dark house and break beat cuts.

She’s a bit of an curiousity in the DJ world. Surreal developed her theatrical approach in the underground fetish and goth scenes. Her stripped-down approach to electronica has taken her around the world. We’re waiting for her to get to Kansas.

Her site has news, tour schedules, and (surprise!) photos of the self-billed “Erotic Fetish DJ Extraordinaire”.