Film seems to consist mostly of footage shot in the mid- to late 1960's, evidenced by the haircuts and very early teletype computers, early Moogs and ribbon controllers, and some painfully cumbersome looking homemade interfaces. One rather self-satisfied bearded fellow demonstrates how he "composes" via a teletype machine, in something that looks like COBOL, and how he's rigged up some sort of odd gearshift for an envelope controller for some reason. We also meet a classic 1950's style science Edgar who informs us that the incoherent electronic mess he's responsible for is the direct result of his transcending the traditional orchestra and its limited timbres, and how his music is so sophisticated that he notates it with graphs (what would be the point of notating it anyway - to reproduce it ?). No mention is given to Schaeffer or Le Caine or Stockhausen or Bob Moog or Wendy Carlos (though it may be that Carlos hadn't recorded by this point, and they do use Bach inventions for demos). A pretty good introduction to basic analog synthesizer concepts here, but some time spent trying to wow us with how awesome music becomes when you take ordinary boring old trumpet, sax, and bass, and crap them up with ring modulation and VSO filters. They also claim to take a jetplane's engine sound and run it through filters and play it on a keyboard, though this is a bit disingenuous as that sort of sampling was not possible and the sound was just the white noise generator on the synthesizer. So, we have late 60's era technology, then BAM, suddenly we're introduced to the Fairlight CMI by a guy with an obviously early 1980's cut and he's demonstrating the instrument, using 8" floppies, a penlight-touchscreen monitor, and QWERTY on top of free-standing keyboard controller - he proceeds to use the little 1-bar pattern-maker to demo some all-too-familiar early '80's sequenced music (aka porn music). It's just too great of a leap in terms of technology, and the film tries to put them all in the same basket. Timewarp ? boomaga 2009-02-25 04:25:30 2009-02-25 04:25:30 3 1 3.00