Today we are leav­ing our tra­di­tion­al gen­res for a while with a pro­gramme of music pro­duced with the aid of elec­tron­ic devices, stretch­ing right back to the ear­ly days of the genre, with tape manip­u­la­tion and “found sounds” and the use of dig­i­tal to ana­logue con­vert­ers attached direct­ly to main­frame com­put­ers, as in the land­mark album “Music From Mathematics”.

We take a lis­ten to ear­ly uses of the Moog and oth­er syn­the­sis­ers and albums that mixed musique con­crete with synths for a light-heart­ed melod­ic sound, from the likes of Per­rey & Kingsley.

Mov­ing for­ward you’ll hear clas­sic albums like “Switched-On Bach” and oth­er record­ings by pio­neer syn­the­sist Wendy Car­los, and oth­er quite dif­fer­ent clas­sic albums from the “Berlin School” of syn­the­sis­er music.

You’ll hear Ton­to’s Expand­ing Head Band. Jean-Michel Jarre. Jean-Phillippe Rykiel. Tan­ger­ine Dream. Tom Dis­sevelt and Kid Bal­tan. Tomi­ta. The BBC Radio­phon­ic Work­shop. And many more. All in all, plen­ty to get your teeth into.

“HDR Mod­u­lar Syn­the­siz­er Macro” by Peter Gorges is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0