Larry Fast's first release, from 1975. Cutting-edge synthesizer work; it still sounds pretty damned good.
The Synergy project
Fast recorded a series of pioneering synthesizer music albums under the project name Synergy. Some of this work was used as the basis for music in Commodore 64 and Amiga computer games, notably Rob Hubbard's score for the C64 version of Zoids, which was an unofficial cover of Synergy's Ancestors from the 1981 album Audion.
The first album in the series, Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra, was released as an LP in 1975. Like the following albums, it exclusively makes use of electronic instruments, mainly synthesizers. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Fast released eight more Synergy LPs on Passport Records, all of which were later re-released on CDs. The 1998 re-release of Semi-Conductor, a compilation album originally released in 1984, was a remastered version of the original, and contained ten additional tracks. The eleventh album in the series, Reconstructed Artifacts, was released in 2003, and contained completely new performances of select compositions from the previous albums, using modern digital synthesizers, as well as the new digital recording technologies.
Currently Fast is slowly developing a new Synergy album, which is likely to come out in either 2011 or 2012. This will be his first studio album consisting of new material in over twenty years. According to Fast's website, it will heavily make use of software synthesizers (one of which is, fittingly, Sample Logic's Synergy synthesizer) rather than the hardware equipment he has been using so far. He has amassed a lot of new thematic material and plans to rework some old, as yet unreleased pieces for the new album as well.
On Synergy's first and second album, the following statement appears: "This album was created with absolutely no guitars." This is an apparent counter-reference to repeated statements appearing on albums by the rock group Queen that "This album was created with absolutely no synthesizers."
The albums by Synergy are:
1975: Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra #66 Billboard 200 (18 weeks)
Larry Fast's blog (not updated since 2009) featured this nice animated gif.
Heh. I didn't know blogger supported those. Didn't work a few years ago, as I recall; I had to stash the anis in Photobucket.
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