SYNERGY - LARRY FAST - DELTA TWO

SYNERGY
ALBUM: GAMES.
THEME: DELTA TWO.

Larry Fast (Lawrence R. Fast) is a synthesizer expert and composer. He is best known for Synergy, his 1975-1987 series of synthesizer music albums, and for his contribution to a number of popular music acts, including Peter Gabriel, Foreigner, and Hall and Oates.

Fast grew up in Livingston, New Jersey and attended Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, where he obtained a degree in History. There he took his previous training in piano and violin and melded them with computer science to become interested in synthesized music and to build his own primitive sound-making electronic devices.

He was introduced to Rick Wakeman, the keyboard player from the band Yes during a local radio interview, and traveled to the UK to work with Yes on their 1974 album Tales from Topographic Oceans. It was there that he got a recording contract with Passport Records.

[edit] 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. In the following decade, he released eight more Synergy LPs on Passport Records, all of which were later re-released on CDs. The tenth album in the series, Reconstructed Artifacts, was released in 2002, and contained completely new performances of select compositions from the previous albums, using modern digital synthesizers.

The albums in this series, with original release date, are:

Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra, 1975
Sequencer, 1976
Cords, 1978
Games, 1979
Audion, 1981
Computer Experiments, Volume One, 1981
The Jupiter Menace (sound track of film The Jupiter Menace), 1982
Semi-Conductor (compilation with two new tracks), 1984
Metropolitan Suite, 1987
Reconstructed Artifacts, 2002

Category:

Music

Tags:

• LARRY
• FAST
• SYNERGY
• GAMES
• SYNTHESIZER
• DELTA
• TWO
• SPACE
• MUSIC
• ELECTRONIC
• VINTAGE
• PETER
• GABRIEL
• TONY
• LEVIN
• TANGERINE
• DREAM
• JEAN
• MICHEL
• JARRE
• KLAUS
• SCHULZE

[rg2027x]

This is awesome

[PeterMayer]

Larry always had great taste and sounds.

[patrickimo1]

I discovered Synergy back in 1989 and was fascinated by the unique style of the music. If you ever get your hands on a copy of the movie "The Jupiter Menace" (i.e. "2012 in 1982"), Synergy does the soundtrack.  That and the bizarre antics of the psychics predicting the world's end in 2000 make it well worth watching.

[Poltr1]

The slide show is a great retrospective of synth gear from the early 1960s to 1979 (when Games was realized) to now. And if all he needs is a K2000 and two MacBooks and perhaps a rackmount system....more power to him. 

[FlametopFred]

[/geek mode off] dang, I said [/geek mode off] ... oh oh ... I can't turn off my geek mode ..

[FlametopFred]

[geek mode on] What's the dual-manual custom-looking keyboard console that appears between 0:26 and 0:38. PAIA keyboards? Moog keyboards? And, what happened to all the old gear? Cheers.

[tubellarbells]

Delta 3 is my personal favourite and I believe there was a 45 r.p.m. single cut for radio promo. A nice albums though I still prefer the 1st three. Metropolitan Suite is also a nice one from the 80's, to me.

[kworld01]

Let's not forget Symphonic Slam (1976), first album with 100% synth guitars!!

[tombeaudry1]

All i can say is he is a genius!!!!!!

[stryker1999]

Tomita, Larry Fast, ELP, UK and Peter Gabriel (among countless others) are timeless legends, and a huge inspiration for me to this day as a synthesist. About to buy my second Kurzweil, because what Larry discovered about it is so true. Just an amazing chameleon of a synthesizer workstation. Basic sequencer, but you can't have it all.

[Blacksquareable]

Hey - what's wrong with Tomita! What is Larry Fast doing these days? There doesn't seem to be an awful lot after metropolitan suite.

[aliensporebomb]

@liverawkstar Couldn't disagree more. This is some of the most accessible Synergy music. No pretension detected IMO.