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The Hong Kong Doctors (1973)

from My Tangled Roots by Joe Paradiso

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This is the earliest piece on this album - I made it in the summer of 1973, when I was 17, before I had the organ and certainly any part of the synthesizer. I borrowed a couple of oscillators from my high school physics teacher that I modified to accept voltage control (allowing me to cross-modulate them and control pitch via finger pressure, etc.), as well as an analog formant synthesizer kit from Bell Labs and some guitar effects (wah pedal, fuzzbox, reverb) that I borrowed from musician friends. I found a way to voice the oscillator with a fast attack and slower decay - I think by toggling the power into the Wah pedal with a footswitch - and this allowed me to 'play' notes on the oscillators like an Ondes Martinot, turning the knob for pitch. You can hear places where I try to execute a 'riff' but that really doesn't work - maybe that's a good thing here... I worked on this piece for a month or so in my parent's basement, where I had a hangout room turned into studio with four reel-reel tapedecks (all of which I had either repaired or modified) that I used here to build up all the tracks, bouncing bits from one to the other or layering with sound-on-sound approaches. Tape loops are used liberally in this piece too, together with the first appearance of Allen Wrench percussion. It's coarse, and obviously the product of a kid trying to interpret the music he loved by the likes of early Pink Floyd, Zappa, and Electroacoustic composers, but falling far short and remained a twerpy adolescent armed with tape decks. In the process, however, he touched on some alien landscapes with it, so I think it's an apt track with which to conclude this compilation. Although I had been making shorter tape pieces like this for a year or two beforehand, this is where I really started.

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from My Tangled Roots, released July 15, 1976

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Joe Paradiso Cambridge, Massachusetts

Joe Paradiso has been designing, building, and using his own music synthesizers and systems since 1975. Joe is a professor at the MIT Media Lab, where he has designed many kinds of electronic musical instruments and controllers that have been used in performance worldwide. He has composed synth patches for live soundscape performances at several public venues, including Ars Electronica 2004. ... more

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