Suzanne Ciani

Improvisation on Four Sequences
Live Buchla Quadraphonic Performance in Geneva, Switzerland
at Festival Antigel January 25, 2020

I didn’t know at the time that concert touring would disappear and that a pandemic would suddenly end my live Buchla performance era that had had a resurgence in 2016. For those years, I flew around the world, toting my Buchla 200e in checked baggage and prayed that it would survive the trip: Melbourne, Tokyo, London, Santiago, New York and on and on until this year when the world changed.

So now, I have the time to release some of these quadraphonic performances. It’s not entirely feasible to release a quad performance on vinyl --- I did it, with help ---the first quad vinyl release in at least 30 years, complete with enclosed hardware decoder. As a collector’s item, that’s fine, but I want to make the quad files available in a more practical way.

This Geneva recording is my first release solely on my Atmospheric label. The piece is titled “Improvisation on Four Sequences” and those four sixteen-stage sequences have been the “raw material” of most of my Buchla concerts since the early 70’s. We’re making this performance available in several formats, including quadraphonic, 5.1, stereo and ambisonic.; all at 44.1 and 88.2.