Charles Cohen at the Buchla Music Easel

This colorful video features sound artist Charles Cohen improvising on a 1970's Buchla Music Easel. This extremely rare instrument is one of Don Buchla's 200 series. Buchla (a pioneer of audio synthesis) only manufactured 14 of these units. The entire film was edited from an hour-long set of free improvisation, with audio was taken directly from Charles' mixing board.

All of the photography and editing was produced by Alex Tyson, a sound and video artist from Pennsylvania. The film was shot in 16:9 720p High Definition format, using the Letus35 Extreme and a 35mm LensBaby 3GPL. This film is free to distribute, share, blog, vlog, etc. When re-posting, please copy and paste this text to inform anyone about the film. Also.. please 'bling out' the embed size to 640x360.

At this time the film is only available online. While you can stream it in HD, it is best viewed on DVD.
Please contact the filmmaker for hard copies if interested.

Alex can be reached at alextyson (at) gmail dot com

Category:

Film & Animation

Tags:

• Buchla
• Alex
• Tyson
• Noise
• Music
• Letus35
• Lensbaby
• 3GPL
• improvisation
• synth
• music
• hvx-200
• Charles
• Cohen

[MrCamelneck]

Kind of reminds me of my ARP Odyssey Model 2800. It even has the same colorful, plastic slider caps.

Go Charlie, Go!  :)

[brileegmx]

I wish my grandpa could do that

[Neijster]

Amazing sounds!

[windowlicker1]

i'd give a testicle to get my hands on one of these...

[Conkern65]

@Pc72 Fuck, yeah

[toborexperiment]

Don, please build a 2011 easel....

[FraterSoddi]

This "thing" wasn't mass-produced at the time because Buchla never mass-produced anything. Besides, has anyone noted that it has no keyboard? That is a row of touch-sensitive voltage plates, tuned by pots. NO MIDI. Normal musicians rejected it because it was hard to program and it didn't fit in well with a band that only used standard tunings.

[Pc72]

Karlheinz Stockhausen meets Aphex Twin.

[cpu558]

@cameronscottcairney Tobacco of Black moth super rainbow??

[43932]

Very fun in 1970 but nothing very interesting