Pioneering composer, sound designer and synthesist, Todd Barton, has remixed  a stunning version of ‘Monopoly’ from Kids3 for Das Spezial released today.

Best known for his deep explorations of Buchla synthesisers and West Coast synthesis,  Barton has spent decades pushing the boundaries of sound, from composing for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to mentoring the next generation of sonic explorers. His ability to blend improvisation and rich timbral landscapes has made him a key figure in the evolution of modular synthesis. We spoke to him about his lifelong obsession with sound,  taking him from Baroque to Buchla.

What's your earliest memory of music or sound ?

Well my earliest memory of sound was probably when I was 3 or 4 - my parents had a Magnavox Record player, so they’d get their 78 LPs out and  I would just sit in front of that thing, listening quite happily and they could go and get things done. It was mostly orchestral and opera stuff -  I'm not an opera fan but at the age of 3 and 4 it was really fascinating, these huge sounds, melodies and instruments that I could hear. Then, what was interesting was, a year or so later when we moved house, my mum had a tiny study she’d work from that also had a little black and white TV and a tube radio. On Saturday mornings when it was too early to wake my parents, I would get up and go into that room. Back then there was only about half an hour of kids’ tv shows before the boring adult stuff came on, so I would turn the sound down on the TV but then turn the little radio on. The TV would be showing a sports or exercise programme or a boring interview, but I would slowly turn the dial on the radio to make it do funny things or sync up with whatever I was seeing on the TV -  which had no sound on it. So that was really fun to me, to play with sounds like that even from a very early age.

The next thing we had was an upright Steinway piano, which was beautiful. But it was only a few years after having it when my mum hired a piano tuner that I suddenly really got it.  He pulls the bottom off and exposes all the strings, and I thought, “oh my God - what the hell's that?”  So he tunes it up and fixes it, but the next thing I do is pull that off again and then just start playing the strings and putting the pedal up and down to see what sounds would come out of it. I've just been obsessed with sound for as long as I can remember.

It seems you were interested in experimenting with sound from a very young age, do you have a background in more traditional music making or playing an instrument?

Musically I started studying trumpet when I was 8, as back in the 50s there was actually music programs in elementary school, so they asked you what instrument you wanted to learn, you’d choose and then be able to get some tutoring in your chosen instrument. So I started out playing trumpet, then in Junior High I had a jazz combo and by the time  I was in High school, I was studying trumpet under the principal trumpet for the San Francisco Symphony. I was also going to summer jazz camps with Stan Kenton band members which was a great experience, so I was doing a lot of jazz and classical music as well as composing.

But then in High school they had a thing called ‘career exploration’ and it was suggested to me that I could teach music appreciation to elementary kids, around 6-8 years old, and I thought well okay this could be interesting. My parents had given me a little tiny reel to reel, so I learnt how to edit in on the reel. I wanted to figure out how to get into the minds of these little kids so they would really engage with it all. So I recorded loads of sounds - the alarm clock going off, bacon sizzling on the skillet,  brushing my teeth door, opening getting in the car, going through a tunnel, honking the horn. I even went to the dentists that day, to cover the whole sound spectrum. When the kids heard the dentist drill bit their faces screwed up and they were squirming, and then they relaxed when they could hear other sounds that they recognised. It was fascinating to see them connect to sound both emotionally and physically.

Where did your love of synthesis and experimental electronica came from?

That happened a bit later on at the end of high school and into my college years in the late 60s. At that time, I really wanted to play the flute, but I couldn't afford one. A musician friend told me I could buy a tenor recorder where the finger placement is almost the same as the flute, but it’s a lot cheaper to buy. So I saved up for a month and got a really cheap tenor recorder which got me really into baroque and renaissance music. I ended up studying with a guy that lived just a couple miles from me, who was one of the best baroque recorder players around. So I got really into early music, classical and jazz music and it just went on from there. Jump ahead to the mid 70s and by that time I’d performed a lot here and Europe, studied baroque trumpet in Europe, came back to the US and then I got a call from a guy called Doug Leedy (American composer and music scholar) asking me to play at one of his concerts.  He had just finished producing his triple LP ‘Entropical Paradise’ on a Buchla and also had a Buchla studio set up in Berlin, Venezuela and UCLA.  He worked with Morton Subotnik and David Tudor and was a real part of that whole San Francisco tape music scene.

I didn't know anything about them at the time, but we all  became friends and one day he said, “you can take this Buchla music easel -  you might enjoy it”. I was staying in the upstairs apartment. Well, I had never heard or explored anything like that and since I'm so into sound, I was up there for 3 days straight. It was amazing, just making sounds I had never heard before, couldn’t imagine making before, that was it for me right there. So I thought “ how can I get one?!” Well this was 1976, they cost about $10,000  which at that time would have been the equivalent of  maybe $30,000 now. So for a twenty-something that was a huge amount of money. So I started saving money and heard about this thing called the Serge – much less than the Buchla but it  still took a couple years to save up! So I got a Serge built for me in San Francisco and used that for decades before I could afford to buy a Buchla – and I still use both.

You work spans a diverse range of musical projects over many genres in both experimental and more traditional composition. Does your creative process change depending on the instrumentation or context of the project?

That's a good question. To be honest,  having done this for more than 60 years now I’ll take it as it comes! But really, composing means ‘to put together’. So, if I'm composing a string quartet or an orchestra, I may be thinking in terms of range, timbre and what sounds I want to get out of it and that’s not necessarily that dissimilar to how I might approach creating on Buchla. Someone once said composing is just improvising slowed down, and improvising is composing sped up. I mean, acoustical instruments and electronic instruments are all just vehicles for sculpting sound. For me, my definition of music is sculpting energy.

Do you see the digital technologies and development  of AI for musical composition impacting your work or sound design process?

There can be no argument that technology has changed a lot -however in the 60s, I was cutting tape, and I still go back to tape now. I like being tactile with sound – a bit  like putting pen to paper, there is something satisfying about that.  I like the easel and the Buchla, as it has body capacitant touch plates -  in other words, I am completing the circuit, so its really immersive. If you're using midi or any of these other technologies you are removed from them. The new technologies really remove you physically from the process in some ways.

You remixed ‘Monopoly’ for Das Spezial – how did you approach it?

Well this was only my 2nd ever remix, so fairly new territory, which was exciting but pretty challenging for me.  I spent several days going back and forth with ideas, just going  into the studio daily to experiment and set up a feedback patch within the Buchla’s spring reverbs which created this really interesting sound. I had listened to all of the tracks on the EP many times by then to try to get a feel for them and see which ones I could do something different with. ‘Monopoly’ spoke to me and so I put those initial sounds down as a sort of intro, and then it all sort of went from there and I was able to create and build something.

One of my favourite programmes to use is called MetaSynth,  which a friend of mine in Paris created. It’s a sound design tool that allows you to draw on the screen and then it renders it into sound.  So I took one of the vocal takes from Monopoly, turned it into a pictogram and treated it a bit like you would an image in Photoshop; blurred and edited sections that I then had played back by a string orchestra. There’s also a lot of Buchla in the remix as you can probably hear. I'm a big one for recording ‘wild’, whereby I mean you need first to understand the tune but then record without listening. I trust that instinctive process -   and more times than not it seems to work for me.

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Interview by Caroline Everitt for SPEZIAL