FRKWYS Vol. 13: Sunergy is a cross-generational modular synth navigation of oceanic scope anddeepkly personal proportions, orchestrated by Buchla pioneer Suzanne Ciani and her modern counterpart and Californian neighbour, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith.

Californian neighbours and doyens of the modular synthesiser, the pioneering Suzanne Ciani and her modern antecedent, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, orchestrate a vivid synthetic panorama on Buchla, Moog, and other gadgets for FRKWYS Vol.13: Sunergy.

After only relatively recently realising that they lived in the same town, Bolinas, just north-west of San Francisco, the pair made the logical next step to collaborate on a record of improvisations inspired by their shared environment and mutual modular visions.

Over the course of a week in midsummer, 2015, against a backdrop of the Pacific ocean and the Californian coast (that’s Suzanne’s window you’re looking thru on the LP sleeve), they patched together two sublime streaks of searching and highly colourful synthetic expression, freely improvised on a Buchla Music Easel and 18-panel unit Buchla 200e with a multi-dimensional kinaesthetic input port (a set of tactile touch pads), with some processing help from Ableton and Eventide

The results are as majestic, gripping and windswept as the coast they’re perched above; spilling 23 minutes of mineralised melodies and billowing, lush harmonic complexity with a headlong momentum in A New Day, before dissolving themselves into the quieter contrast of Closed Circuit on the flipside, where they conserve the breathless energy of the A-side in a more delicate, deft manner before removing the walls and blooming out into sidereal lushness and calving off into a chaotic finale.