3.06.2013

"..And nobody played guitar": Larry Fast's Synergy

























Larry Fast on Tour with Peter Gabriel, Old Town Theater, Chicago (1980).


"Larry 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.
Synergy's first album states "..and nobody played guitar." The second album, Sequencer, says "...and still no guitars." These are rumoured to be a tongue-in-cheek response to statements that appeared on albums by the rock group Queen that they used no synthesizers, which were made to inform listeners who assumed otherwise. Fast's third Synergy album, Cords, states "Finally, guitars...sort of," which references the use of a Russ Hamm Guitar Synthesizer played by Pete Sobel." (From Wikipedia)

Synergy, Legacy (1975)