ISAO TOMITA - SYNTH HERO

" I saw a synthesizer on the record jacket, behind Bach.

For the first time, I discovered that the synthesizer is not an instrument to compose music by using the sounds of existing instruments, but a new instrument or new machine which creates unlimited sound sources".

So recalled Isao Tomita in 1977 on having heard Wendy Carlos' seminal 'Switched-On Bach', the record which brought the awareness of the public to the synthesiser in 1968.

Carlos' academic attention to detail and virtuoso musicianship clearly impressed Tomita as much as the listening public, and he was to take delivery of his first modular Moog synthesiser, along with a sequencer, in 1971.

Less than three years later, the world was to be bowled over once again by the strange, still-novel timbres and tones of analogue synthesis with the release of Tomita's worldwide debut, 'Snowflakes are Dancing'.

From Isao Tomita website http://www.isaotomita.net/biography_one.html