When the phono needle first touched down on Switched On Bach (Columbia MS7194) there really wasn’t a shot fired around the world. It was an esoteric few, locked behind laboratory doors or piled under records, who first picked up on the sound of the synthesizer. Our electronic beast of a friend just had no friends and even fewer were the numbers willing to expend the phenomenal cash to develop and popularize this weird concoction pT a musical instrument. In its primeval stages of development, the wall which separated the musicians and the technologists was high, but each day brings them closer.

With the goal of producing any sound imaginable to the infinite degree, the technocrats undauntedly spurted forward into that mass most easily identified with 2001, A Space Odyssey, in search of musicians to use their creation. Ah, but yes, science meets* music. It happened first in the early Fifties, even before Bill Haley started curling his waterfall y when RCA constructed the first Electronic Music Synthesizer, called Mark I (mind you, this was before Star Trek). The Mark I had enough bugs to please even the leastprofit-minded of electronic pest exterminators. Thus paving the way for Mark II. (If at first you don’t... etc.)