Synergy

Artist: Synergy
P: 1981 / 2003
Audion was the fifth album to come from Synergy and was originally released in 1981. It was the follow up album to Games although this album has a more rock feel than the structured feel of the previous album. The album contains ten tracks although again no guitars are present on this recording. Tracks include Orbit Five, Electric Blue and An End To History and with all the albums in this series of re issues has been re mastered and contains sleeve notes by Larry Fast.  This issue of Audion contains an exclusive bonus track of a 1976 demo of After the Earthquake.
 

Artist: Synergy
P: 1981 / 2004
“Computer Experiments” is an interesting and beautiful-sounding experiment in software-generated music, created at a time when interest in and hopes for artificial intelligence were at a high point (for example, at the time, Douglas Hofstadter’s well-known book on this topic “Gödel, Escher, Bach” had just been published).
Three times during January 1980, Larry Fast set up the “ground-rules” for a self-composing program called Pink Tunes and let it execute on a digital computer to produce a “score” of voltage settings for an analogue Prophet 5 synthesiser to convert into sounds. The program does this by letting loose so-called stochastic (or random) processes on the set of notes, harmonies etc. specified beforehand (i.e. the ground-rules) so that the end-result is more or less unpredictable. All this of course begs the question whose music this actually is. Is it by Larry Fast, who sets up the rules ? Or by the Pink Tunes software, which employs the rules ? Or perhaps even by the software developer, who created the randomness settings ? Or a combination of the three (sort of “ghost in the machine” idea) ?
Anyway, the resulting pieces (quite similar to each other) are strangely beautiful in an abstract sort of way and have a smooth nature with plenty of long notes. Although the atmosphere is slightly abstract, it can also be relaxing so don’t think this is the sort of avant-garde electronic music with those impossible bleepy rhythms. With the strange man-made ambient music around today and even then, if you didn’t know this music was software-generated, you wouldn’t be able to infer that fact from hearing this album, so I suppose it passes what could be called the “musical Turing Test”.
Hence for those who appreciate experimental music, these three pieces are all well-constructed examples of this genre.
But the question remains: “Constructed by whom ? Or what ?”.

Artist: Synergy
P: 1975 / 2003
Electronic Realizations For Rock Orchestra was the debut album from Synergy and was seen as a huge step forward for synthesizers in rock music when it was first released in 1975 and received not only critical acclaim but also positive commercial acclaim also. This re issue has been re mastered for this release and contain sleeve notes by Larry Fast and will be the first in a series of re issues that will see the entire Synergy back catalogue re issued over the next twelve months.  This version of Electronic Realizations includes a bonus track of an earlier version of Classical Gas than was to later appear on Sequencer.  this earlier version actually appeared on the Sire/Phonogram European release of that album (months after the US release). It's been placed in the same running order to re-create on CD the way the Electronic Realizations LP appeared outside of North America back in the mid 70s.

Here the last copy!

Artist: Synergy
P: 1975 / 2013
Electronic Realizations For Rock Orchestra was the debut album from Synergy and was seen as a huge step forward for synthesizers in rock music when it was first released in 1975 and received not only critical acclaim but also positive commercial acclaim also. This re issue has been re mastered for this release and contain sleeve notes by Larry Fast and will be the first in a series of re issues that will see the entire Synergy back catalogue re issued over the next twelve months.  This version of Electronic Realizations includes a bonus track of an earlier version of Classical Gas than was to later appear on Sequencer.  this earlier version actually appeared on the Sire/Phonogram European release of that album (months after the US release). It's been placed in the same running order to re-create on CD the way the Electronic Realizations LP appeared outside of North America back in the mid 70s.
Repress of 1995 CD version.
This album was mixed using the Sansui QS 4-channel quad system.
The QS quad encoding will decode with varying degrees of success on matrix surround-sound home theater systems.
Original bass line for the third theme of "Warriors" written by Jerry (Bass) Rutman.
Digital audio preparation by Larry Fast at the Synergy Studio, February, 1995 using Apple Macintosh-based Digidesign Sound Designer II™ with additional processing by C1™, Q10™, and L1™ DSP modules from k.s. Waves Ltd.

Artist: Synergy
P: 1979 / 2004
Games is the fourth Synergy album and includes nine tracks with four basic themes and the Soundcheck Delta Three Suite which was actually written whilst on tour with Peter Gabriel taking up six of the nine tracks on the album. This album is considered to be one of Synergy’s most important releases after the debut album of four years previously. As with all the re issues in the Synergy series over the next six months this re issue of Games has been remastered and contains sleeve notes by Larry Fast and the bonus track 'Delta Four (digital synthesizer track 1978).

Artist: Synergy
P: 1987 / 2004
Although composition of the music had already begun, it wasn't until Synergy founder Larry Fast came upon a book titled "New York 1900" that the Metropolitan Suite really began to take form. The book, a history of New York's varied influential architectural styles, gave shape to what would become a musical tale of the American city from the early industrial age until the hippie generation.
Musically optimistic, the tone and variation is reminiscent of contemporaries Mannheim Steamroller, but heavy enough on the cheesy analog keyboard sounds to do credit to its name by mimicking the re-invented soundtrack for the movie "Metropolis." Indeed, the entire theme of the album is the observation of the evolution of a metropolis, through technical and social evolution, and despair and love.
Broken down into nine tracks that are meant to represent distinct historical moments, there's an underlying theme to each composition that's played upon and varied for each time period. The march and passage of a generation seeing their sons and daughters prepare for World War I is then replicated in the pace of a song about the great depression, the constant being the habitation of a city structure by melodies of people. The disc later ends with an electronic interpretive homage to the music of the 1960's, which bears no resemblance to the music of that time at all.
Larry Fast is known for having contributed defining electronics to the music of Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, amongst others, but has almost always fallen somewhat short of making anything truly memorable on his own. Metropolitan Suite is something that probably is often left on shelves, being passed over for lack of name recognition, but is actually worth a listen. You'll probably be faced with few other chances to hear a 1980's electronic musical interpretation of life in the city in the 1920's.

Artist: Synergy
P: 2002
A new collection of recordings made in January and February, 2002 of classic, older Synergy pieces from the 1970s and 1980s, newly performed on digital synthesizers and recorded digitally. They are completely new recordings and performances, not repackaging or remastering of the original recordings.
This collection happened as a byproduct of preparations for a live Synergy appearance at the Alfa-Centauri Electronic Music Festival, Bussum, the Netherlands in March, 2002. After reconstructing the original analog patches on turn of the 21st century digital hardware and software synthesizers and relearning the arrangements, it became obvious that making recordings of the completed pieces would be a logical next step. At first I thought that I might make new recordings in very limited numbers for friends and associates who had been involved with the first recordings. Then the possibility of recording the live performance at Alfa-Centauri was explored. But the uncertainties of making a complete collection from a single live show is asking for trouble. Instead, this collection was recorded under somewhat more controlled conditions in the studio in the weeks before the festival. Enough people expressed interest that it made sense to put it into at least limited release.

Artist: Synergy
P: 1984 / 2004
A collection of electronic music from the first decade and a half of recordings and compositions by Larry Fast
SEMI-CONDUCTOR was originally compiled in 1984, before the first era of SYNERGY recordings concluded when the Jem Records/Passport Records/Audion Recording Company group folded in 1988.
Since there were additional releases after 1984, SEMI-CONDUCTOR release 2 includes some of those recordings.

Artist: Synergy
P: 1976 / 1998
Sequencer was the second album from Synergy and was released a mere twelve months after the debut album in 1976. Again the album is an intriguing and sometimes unpredictable set of instrumentals putting Synergy and Larry Fast at the forefront of electronic keyboard led rock music. This re issue has been re mastered for this release and contains sleeve notes written by Larry Fast and will form part of a series of releases which will see the entire Synergy back catalogue released over the next twelve months. 

Artist: Synergy
P: 1982 / 2004
As the only soundtrack in the Synergy catalogue, “The Jupiter Menace” accompanies the SF-movie released in 1982 about the disasters that would happen in 2000 when planet Earth topples over because all planets in the solar-system align. The timing of this release must have been unfortunate, because both the movie and music were probably completely overshadowed by the more or less concurrent SF-release of “Blade Runner” with the great Vangelis soundtrack.
To be sure, there is some forceful effect-music on this album with the usual vintage Synergy sounds but, always a danger with soundtracks, it suffers from containing too many under-developed themes of under two minutes in duration. The few slightly longer tracks that are present are taken from 5 earlier albums which means the amount of new music takes up less than half an hour.