Suzanne Ciani was born on June 4, 1946 in Indiana, USA, and began her musical career at the age of 7. After her mother bought a collection of classical music, she became interested in music, and from then on she began to teach herself to play the piano and learn music theory. While pursuing her classical music education at Wellesley College, she began to focus on acting and composition. After a field trip at MIT, she became interested in the use of music technology. After graduation, she continued her master's degree in composition at the University of California, Berkeley. During this time, she met John Chowing, the "father of FM synthesis", as well as top masters such as Max Matthews, a pioneer in computer music, and Don Buchla.
It was then that she began composing music using a computer in combination with synthesizers and sequencers, and she often went to the San Francisco Music Center founded by Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender. And worked in Buchla's factory, just so that she could use his studio in order to use Buchla's modular instruments.
During this time, Suzanne Ciani had no other way to monetize music than to earn revenue from record deals. She ran into other problems when trying to put her acting ideas into practice. In 1974, she moved to New York and, without money, slept on the floor of her friend Phil Glass's apartment. Eventually, her talent in electronic music was recognized, moving into advertising, producing soundtracks for TELEVISION commercials, and of course saving money to build her own studio and her beloved Buchla 200. She named her production company, Ciani Musica.
During this time, Suzanne Ciani mainly worked on the soundtrack for albums, films and commercials by other musicians. She puts her Buchla together with a rack full of processors, which she calls a "speech box, which is primarily used to process speech and other sounds, and has a Vododer vocoder, a Freequency Follower frequency follower, an Eventide Harmonizer transpose effect, and a Marshall Time Modulator time modulator.
Leslie Mona Mathis was one of the studio engineers who recorded her first solo album, Seven Waves (1982). She was self-funded, and it was very expensive to record an album at the time (about $100.000) and most of the content was recorded in other studios, so the cost was overspended. Working with top musicians and producers in her job as an advertising soundtrack has given her a lot of experience. But Suzanne wanted her own album to be different from the pop style of the market at the time. She wanted the album to be more of a work of art, so she used a lot of different approaches. Seven Waves eventually became one of the world's early electronic music icons.
The album made Suzanne Ciani one of the icons of the "New Age" music movement. She produced seven records in a row as healing music. But at this time, she encountered some kind of obstacle and had a nervous breakdown. The Buchla 200 that accompanied her was also broken. Then she could only stop using the Buchla 200 and reuse the piano as her main instrument.
Don Buchla
Suzanne Ciani moved back to Los Angeles in 1992 and went on to produce more albums, where she wrote many successful albums that she received widespread acclaim. Her second album, The Velocity of Love, won the 1981 Award for Best Film Score for her participation in the film Chariot of Fire. He also performed with the album "Antarctic Story" and has a high reputation in the world for the new century music film soundtrack master Fan Jilis (Vangelis). The album's eponymous title track, "The Rate of Love," became her most popular masterpiece. In addition, the album also made it on the on-demand chart of the famous New Adult Contemporary radio station in the United States.
But then, fate took a turn for the worse; electronic music became popular again, and modular synthesizers entered some kind of renaissance. Suzanne Ciani also became interested in electronic music again, in part due to the success of Finders Keepers Records' compilation album Lixiviation, which began moving on to 30-year-old analog records and reissuing them as a re-release.
That's when Suzanne Ciani met Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, another musician living in the same town, best known for her recent album EARS, and together they collaborated on FRKWYS, a series from experimental label RVNG Intl.
Suzanne Ciani formed a company called Seven Waves and released the Dream Suite album in 1994, her first attempt at working with a major orchestra. She then recorded the album Pianissimo II, her second attempt at the album's solo genre, and was nominated for a Grammy The following year, her fourth Grammy nomination.
Beginning in Europe in 1997, Suzanne Ciani embarked on her worldwide concert tour, in addition to her spin-off of the concept album Truest Dreams – Live Recordings of Concerts. To this day, she still has a good life in the world of music.