Syntaur Illuminates: Suzanne Ciani’s Seven Waves—A Sonic Tidal Memory

The birth of ‘Seven Waves’ unfurls as a meeting of two rivers: Suzanne Ciani’s classical heritage and her embrace of electronic language. She speaks of longing to make this album for years, only to find the world transformed by the time the opportunity arrived. The landscape of synthesizers—Yamaha, Korg, Roland, Moog—was blooming, yet Ciani’s heart carried the solitude of her early Buchla explorations, misunderstood by many.

Within this shifting terrain, ‘Seven Waves’ emerges not as a break from the past, but as a confluence. Ciani’s careful documentation of each instrument—Roland MC-4, MC-8, and, of course, the Buchla—reveals her reverence for these machines as her own orchestra. The album becomes a vessel, carrying both the nostalgia of analog’s first dawn and the promise of new sonic frontiers.

At the core of ‘Seven Waves’ lies a longing for refuge—a safe space conjured in sound. Ciani’s vision was to envelop the listener, to create an environment as immersive as fog rolling through a dream. Working in quadraphonic, she sculpted spatial sound, inviting us not just to hear, but to inhabit the music.

The machines, with their dependable rhythms, became her co-conspirators in slowness. Where human hands might falter, the electronics could sustain languid pulses, halving the speed of the era’s music. In this deceleration, Ciani found a gentle gravity, a place where time dilates and the listener floats, unhurried and unafraid.

Ciani’s relationship with the Buchla is intimate—a dialogue rather than a command. She eschews samples, preferring to sculpt each wave from the raw voltage itself. The Buchla, she insists, remains the supreme architect of these undulating forms, each one a living, breathing entity rather than a mere recording of the sea.

The album’s seamlessness is no accident. Vocoder textures, crafted with Harold Boda’s invention, weave through the fabric, allowing Ciani to sing without singing. Every sound is hand-shaped, a testament to the personal significance of crafting waves from nothing but electricity and intention—a process as tactile as molding clay in the dark.

Time spirals forward, and Ciani finds herself in dialogue with a new generation—one that reveres analog and modular systems. She recalls her own journey from isolation to connection, from a world unready for quadraphonic immersion to one where Eurorack systems bloom in countless studios. The audience now listens with new ears, attuned to the spatial and emotional nuances she once pioneered.

Her encounters with contemporary artists like Floating Points and Gerald Donald (Drexciya) reveal a living lineage. The Buchla 200, designed by Don Buchla—the Leonardo da Vinci of electronic music—remains central, its spatial movement and voltage-controlled magic still unmatched. Yet, Ciani sees the evolution as unfinished, with new possibilities and missing tools still waiting to be discovered by today’s sonic explorers.