Within the world of electronic music production, the modular synthesizer has become a trendy tool for underground producers to use in recent years. For those who seek a more experimental sound and control over exactly how these sounds are produced. A modular synthesizer is a synth where the cables and modules that create and filter the soundwaves within in the machine, can be physically altered by the user, as cables can be repatched to open up for greatly expanded sonic possibilities.
Modulars, as most users call them, have a heritage very much rooted in academia. As first off, the experimental sounds that they often produce were by most not considered to be fodder for popular music, plus when the first modular systems
started appearing in the early 60’s they were huge monsters, with equally huge price tags attached, which meant academic institutions were usually the ones the could afford them. As time went on certain manufactures become better known for creating extraordinary modulars that became grails for modular enthusiasts. One such brand was '
Buchla', created by
Don Buchla from
Berkley California in 1963, and for anyone who knows their
counter-culture history, knows that this time and place in history was a particular epicenter for the
explosion of LSD use. Don Buchla became involved in this psychedelic wave and was a big advocate for its use in expanding both the spiritual and sonic mind. Over the decades' rumors started circulating that it had even gone as far as Buchla dipping the infamous
‘Red Panel’ oscillators in LSD. No one really thought these stories were true and the tales drifted into the stuff of psychedelic legend, until now.
When a technician, Eliot Curtis, at Broadcast Operations Manager at KPIX California was recently fixing a vintage Buchla 100, he came across a crystalline substance underneath a red module within. After cleaning away the powder with his bare fingers, the unsuspecting technician slowly started feeling the onset of what would ramp up to a 9-hour acid trip. The substance found on the instrument was later tested and identified as
LSD dating back more than 50 years. No one precisely knows how the acid got there, though it’s known that Buchla synthesizers did find their way onto the infamous
“Further” school bus which drove around the United States in the '60s by
Ken Kesey to spread the psychedelic gospel, becoming the inspiration for Tom Wolfe’s famous novel,
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Buchla was also a friend of the band, the Grateful Dead's, sound engineer, Owsley Stanley who was known to manufacture a particularly potent strain of LSD.
KPIX 5 has made a statement that there will be no more trips with this Buchla. As the instrument has now been thoroughly cleaned of all LSD. But who knows how many Buchla’s out there could be holding an unexpected drop of psychedelic history.
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