Dennis wrote in to let me know about a book he just started reading called Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling. To his surprise a couple of passages referred to the synthesizer. The following are two passages."A second woman knelt silently with her back to the right-hand wall, facing the garden's image. Lindsay knew at once that she was a Shaper. Her startling beauty alone was proof, but she had that strange, intangible air of charisma that spread from the Reshaped like a magnetic field. She was of mixed Asiatic-African gene stock: her eyes were tilted, but her skin was dark. Her hair was long and faintly kinked. She knelt before a rack of white keyboards with an air of meek devotion.
The yarite spoke without moving her head. "Your duties, Kitsune." The girl's hands darted over the keyboards and the air was filled with the tones of that most ancient of Japanese instruments: the synthesizer."
"Linday slept, exhausted, with his head propped against the diplomatic bag. An artificial morning shone through the false glass doors. Kitsune sat in thought, toying quietly with the keys of her synthesizer.
Her proficiency had long since passed the limits of merely technical skill. It had become a communion, an art sprung from dark intuition. Her synthesizer could mimic any instrument and surpass it: rip its sonic profile into naked wave forms and rebuild it on a higher plane of sterilized, abstract purity. Its music had the painful, brittle clarity of faultlessness.
Other instruments struggled for that ideal clarity but failed. Their failure gave their sound humanity. The world of humanity was a world of losses, broken hopes, and original sin, a flawed world, yearning always for mercy, empathy, compassion... It was not her world."
Schismatrix on Amazon
Update via Loren in the comments: "Another book that has an electronic music theme is Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. In the story a bar across the street from Stanford University has a jukebox that has nothing but electronic music on it (since its the 1960s it has mostly stuff like Cage, Stockhausen, Henry, etc). The story revels that this bar is actually a famous hang out for electronic musicians who come and actually perform in the bar, which has its own equipment for such events."
First off, tell Dennis he's in for a wild ride. SCHISMATRIX really brings the wow, and if he likes it, he may like the other Shaper/Mechanist short stories collected in Bruce Sterling's CRYSTAL EXPRESS.
ReplyDeleteAnd I remember smiling when I first read it, too, shocked that Bruce Sterling got a minor fact wrong... synths were an American invention, whether you're Team Bob or Team Don!
"synths were an American invention" I don't think he was saying they invented it. He's just playing SF games... changing it from what is, for us, futuristic-- into a thing of the past; japanese folk music relic. It's cyberpunk, dig it?
ReplyDeletewavingpalms: Actually the edition I have is called "Schismatrix Plus" which claims to have every word written in the Shaper/Mechanist universe, with selected stories from Crystal Express.
ReplyDeleteAlso I think he went with the Japanese angle because it fits with the setting he was going for, with the use use of terms like zaibatsu, kabuki, geisha, etc.
Another book that has an electronic music theme is Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. In the story a bar across the street from Stanford University has a jukebox that has nothing but electronic music on it (since its the 1960s it has mostly stuff like Cage, Stockhausen, Henry, etc). The story revels that this bar is actually a famous hang out for electronic musicians who come and actually perform in the bar, which has its own equipment for such events.
ReplyDelete