This site is named after two Germans and has spent five months on Berlin. It is time to say the obvious: the machines were American. Bob Moog built his in a shop in upstate New York; Don Buchla built his across the bay from San Francisco; and before anyone in Berlin had heard a sequencer, an American woman had sold a million copies of Bach played on one. The American story is older than the German one, it runs alongside it, and in the eighties it is where the German story went to live. Five records, in order.
The Moog
Trumansburg, New York. A keyboard, a voltage-controlled oscillator, a ladder filter. The instrument on every record on this site.
The Buchla
Berkeley, California. No keyboard on purpose; touch plates and a sequencer. The other road, and the one the modular revival took.
Steve Roach
Tucson, Arizona. Born in California in 1955, heard Tangerine Dream and Schulze's Timewind (1975) as a teenager, and taught himself the synthesizer at twenty.
The five, in order
Switched-On Bach
The record that made the synthesizer a real instrument in the public mind, and one of the very few classical records to reach platinum certification, in 1986; sources call it either the first or the second. Every note played one at a time on a Moog modular and stacked on tape, over five months, because the machine could only play one note at once. It is not Berlin School, it is Bach, but it is the reason Virgin thought a synthesizer band could sell. Start here because everything starts here.
Silver Apples of the Moon
The first electronic piece commissioned for a record rather than a concert hall, and the first thing anyone did with a Buchla. No keyboard, no tunes, a sequencer running bubbling patterns that never repeat. It sounds like nothing before it and, honestly, like nothing much after it either, which is the point. This is the west-coast road: the sequencer as a generator of surprise rather than a floor to stand on. Play it second to understand what Berlin chose not to do.
A Rainbow in Curved Air
The missing link, and the American record that Berlin actually heard. Riley, alone, with organs, harpsichord and tape loops, playing a repeating figure for eighteen minutes and letting it drift. There is no synthesizer on it. It does not matter. The idea of the long, pulsing, slowly changing solo piece, the idea Schulze made a career from, is fully formed here in 1969. Schulze said that while he was recording solo he heard LaMonte Young, Wendy Carlos, Terry Riley's In C, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and felt he was not on his own. Pete Townshend heard it and wrote "Baba O'Riley." Everyone heard it.
Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra
The American Berlin School record, made in New Jersey in the same year as Rubycon by a twenty-three-year-old who had heard the Virgin albums and thought: yes, but with tunes, and in stereo. Fast went on to play with Peter Gabriel; this is the record he made before that, and it is the one American album of the seventies that a Tangerine Dream fan will recognise as family. Melodic, layered, meticulously built, and slightly too clean, which is what happens when the room is not a cathedral.
Structures from Silence
Where the Berlin School went to retire, and got a second life. Roach heard Tangerine Dream and Schulze as a teenager in California, began with Now in 1982, and then in 1984 turned the sequencer off and let the chords breathe for half an hour. It is the record that turned Berlin School into ambient, and the Arizona desert into a genre. Play it last because it is the destination: the pulse gone, the patience remaining.
Two roads
The American story has two coasts and they never agreed. New York had Moog, a keyboard, and the idea that a synthesizer was a better organ; from there you get Carlos, Fast, and eventually every film score. Berkeley had Buchla, no keyboard, and the idea that a synthesizer was a new thing entirely; from there you get Subotnick, Suzanne Ciani, and, fifty years later, the entire Eurorack movement. Berlin took the New York machine and used it the Berkeley way: a keyboard instrument, played by a sequencer, as if nobody was there. That is the whole trick, and it took Germans to see it.
The inventors
Moog, Buchla, Carlos, Subotnick, Riley. The machines are built and the first records are made. Nobody in Berlin has one yet.
Alongside Berlin
Synergy, Michael Garrison, Tomita in Japan. A small American scene listening to Virgin imports and answering them.
The desert
Roach, Michael Stearns, Robert Rich, Kevin Braheny. California and Arizona. The sequencer slows and stops. Berlin becomes ambient.
Eurorack
The Buchla road wins. Small modular systems everywhere, and a generation that discovers Phaedra after buying the machine.
Save these for later
- Switched-On Bach → Silver Apples → Rainbow → Synergy → Structures from Silence. Machine, surprise, pulse, tunes, silence.
- Then go back to Phaedra. You will hear where every part of it came from, and what Berlin added.
- The desert records after 1984 get their own guide. There are forty years of them.
Where to get it
Where to find the records in this piece. New CDs and LPs are on Amazon; older pressings and used copies are on Discogs.