The music of electronic composer Suzanne Ciani has quietly crept into many people's lives at some point. Her work effortlessly bridges the realms of the commercial and the avant garde, barely recognizing the distinction between the two. Ciani is a classically trained composer who studied with computer music trailblazer Max Mathews and worked with Don Buchla, the latter being the inventor of a frequently used tool in her musical armory, the Buchla 200 synthesizer. In the early 1970s she formed Ciani Musica, Inc. in New York, through which she produced soundtrack work for commercials by Merrill-Lynch, Clairol, Skittles, and GE among others (go here for some examples). Ciani's sound-effects work on Meco's platinum-selling disco version of the Star Wars soundtrack brought her unannounced to a wider audience, while her own career has positioned her as a proto-synth guru, a doyen of the new age musical movement, and, in more recent times, a noted classical musician.
Anyone looking for an entry point into Ciani's elastic career will be well served by Lixiviation, a compilation spanning 1968-85 from the always intriguing B-Music label. Here, the vaults of Ciani Musica have been plundered, with her peppy compositions for companies including PBS, Atari, and Coca-Cola documented, alongside ahead-of-their-time electronic pieces that hint at her later drift into new age. It's a perfect introduction to the far-reaching nature of her talents, but it's also useful for illustrating how music notionally thought to be "underground" often happily floats into family homes every evening. Through her commercial work, Ciani was prying open a door that led to unlikely collaborations further down the line, including Aphex Twin's work with Pirelli and music lent to a jeans ad by Sunn O))). In the sleeve notes, she indicates how her commercial work helped fund her creative pursuits-- another harbinger of how the music industry would ultimately evolve.
What binds Ciani's eclectic pieces on this album is the lucidity of her vision, which is emphasized further in those comprehensive sleeve notes. She talks of never using the word synthesizer ("it had strange and inappropriate connotations"), of spending "weeks just living with the machine, always on," when using her Buchla. It's not hard to romanticize her existence back then, buried under a deluge of wires and circuitry. This is a whole world she created, where brightly blinking synth noise flowed into fracturing swells of bass ("Lixiviation"), where a piece created as a choreography ("Princess with Orange Feet") sounded like great bursts of light collapsing into one another. The closing "Second Breath", recorded during Ciani's time at UC Berkeley circa 1968-70, is a precursor to the harsher, ever-repeating drones krautrock legends Cluster would appropriate as their central stylistic thrust a few years later.
It's easy to hear the hallmarks of that darker sound in some of Ciani's commercial work-- the "Clean Room" ITT TV spot has the same kind of density as John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 score, with sturdy prods of bass synth and a sparse, ricocheting beat providing the grounding for her to layer sunnier parts over the top. But Ciani was also enamored with the playful side of the instruments at her disposal. On the dainty clicks and whirrs of "Sound of a Dream Kissing", there are traces of the frivolous zing of Pierre Henry's classic "Psyché Rock". Her work for Atari and Coca-Cola are similarly buoyant, with the four seconds of bubbles, pop, and fizz she created for Coke forming a delightful piece of fluffy, synthesized mimicry.
It's telling that Ciani's music was deemed suitable for commercials and TV spots all over the world just as the public was getting to grips with a possible forthcoming computer age. Not just because of the obvious sci-fi components, but also because it bears a perfect blend of urgency, anxiety, and technological utopianism, straddling contrasting feelings of slack-jawed optimism about the future and all the Cold War-era jitters prevalent at the time. Her work for the PBS show "Inside Story" sounds like a dramatic precursor to receiving an impossibly bleak news update on our impending armageddon, while her corporate tag for Atari rushes assuredly into the future, embracing all the innovation around it. That ability to flit back and forth between styles and feelings no doubt made Ciani an attractive client to her corporate employers. But Lixiviation also goes some way to forming links between her disparate worlds, showing off more reflective work through what she describes as her "very feminine" synthesized waveforms, and demonstrating how such material bled through to the mainstream in unexpected ways.
