Forty Years Since TONTO, the first Modern Electronic Group

A thread in the Progressive Ears Forum, got me thinking again about Tonto’s Expanding Headband, the pioneering electronic band that preceded Kraftwerk, Jean-Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream and Schulz Klaus by a few years in creating a sequencer driven music.  It made me realize that this is the 40th Anniversary of their first album, Zero Time.  So with that in mind,  I bring you a 15 year old Echoes interview with Tonto’s Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil.  You can also read my even earlier interview with Malcolm Cecil in the book, Synth Gods.

Malcolm Cecil & Robert Margouleff with TONTO

[This is an Uncorrected Draft Script]

It has been 25 years since Tonto first took flight on the 1971 album, “Zero Time.”  you may have never heard the CD, but it’s influence reverberated throughout space music and popular music. Just look at the credits on 70s albums by Quincy Jones, The Isley Brothers, Minnie Ripperton and many others and you’ll see the names of Malcolm Cecil And Robert Margouleff, the creators of Tonto. But their most important connection remains Stevie Wonder.  Wonder’s brilliant mid-70s quartet that includes Music Of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervision And Fullfillingness’ First Finale was mid-wifed by Malcolm Cecil And Robert Margouleff along with the Tonto synthesizer. We go  back to zero time with Tonto’s Expanding Headband.

SFX

In the Mutato Musica studios of Devo In Los Angeles, 60 year old Malcolm Cecil is negotiating a spaghetti of wires, cables and keyboards, hunched under the imposing presence of Tonto, an acronym for The Original New Timbral Orchestra.

SFX

It’s difficult to believe that this lumbering behemoth of knobs, buttons and blinking lights set off in 10 modular curved cases produced the sounds of the influential album, “Zero Time.”

MUSIK Cybernaut

British born Malcolm Cecil was a classical trained bass player, turned jazz musician turned studio engineer. Robert Margouleff was a lapsed operatic tenor turned film producer.  When he needed music for his self-produced movie, Ciao Manhattan, he bought a Moog synthesizer and became the house synthesist at Media Sound Studios in New York where he met the house engineer, Malcolm Cecil. They began working together and slowly began acquiring electronic modules.  The Moog synthesizer was still a novelty in 1971, and Margouleff And Cecil, coming from straight music backgrounds, weren’t sure their first piece was even music.

MC: Yeah. Originally Aurora was 27 minutes long and it’s one of the pieces that Bob was working on when we met

RM: I said to him , Malcolm, I’m not even sure if this is music.

MC: It turned out to be a really, I suppose a very sort of primal piece. It’s sort of ageless.

After getting a label deal, Robert Margouleff And Malcolm Cecil began composing the music for Zero Time.  By now, their synthesizer had a name:  The Original New Timbral Orchestra or TONTO.  And that spawned the name of the group, Tonto’s Expanding Headband.  It was a reflection on the psychedelic culture at the time.

MC: Oh definitely. It was, that’s where the expanding headband concept was. I mean the play on words and that was the right out of the silver 60s. We were totally in to the psychedelic culture.

Musik

TONTO

Many of the elements we take for granted with synthesizers today, took painstaking and circuitous paths to accomplish with tonto.  Both Margouleff And Cecil would play the instrument simultaneously, one performing the melody, while another shaped the notes. Firing up TONTO, Malcolm Cecil gets Echoes producer Jeff Towne to play a bongo that is electronically linked to the synthesizer, while Cecil plays a keyboard.

DEMO, TALKS So [31:55 plays]. Very Tontosish I should say.

This is a rough and ready demo, but a more precise example can be heard on the piece “riversong” on which Cecil And Margouleff synthesized a voice.

MC: It was our attempt at voice synthesis where the, see Bob is trained as a tenor. He’s an operatic tenor. And he, so he has all the understanding of the vocal. The melodic lines were, I was playing on the keyboard and Bob was creating the words and we worked together to create the sound that ended up being the vocal which is somewhat unintelligible but it was sort of like, but we had terrible difficulty making consonants and Ks and the one thing that still irks me to this day that I’ve always wanted to fix was the line in there which is the whole major line of the whole thing. It says I’m the river, I’m the river, but I’m not the current. And, it comes out I am the errant. [Laughs]

MUSIK

TONTO would probably be a tiny foot note in modern music if one day, Steve Wonder hadn’t walked into the studio after bass player named Ronnie Blanco played Zero Time for him.

MC: He played the album to Stevie and who, he told Stevie that this was a keyboard instrument that he needed to check out….. Anyway, there was a ring at the bell and it turns out to be Ronnie Blanco. He says, come down here I’ve got somebody who wants to check out Tonto…. And anyway so we went into the studio and who walks in on Ronnie Blanco’s arm with our album on the other arm is Stevie. And he came into the studio.  And that first weekend we put down 17 songs.

MUSIK

Robert Margouleff And Malcolm Cecil would produce and play on the four quintessential Stevie Wonder albums, “Music Of My Mind,” “Talking Book,” “Innervision” And “Fullfingness First Finale.” They went on to produce hit albums for The Isley Brothers And  Minnie Ripperton, and then Margouleff went on to produce Devo’s “Freedom Of Choice” and Shadowfaxes “The Odd Get Even”.  Cecil had a longtime producing relationship with Gil Scott Heron.

Now they’re firing up TONTO again, trying to capitalize on the techno sound that they helped inspire.  Malcolm Cecil And Robert Margouleff are well abreast of contemporary technology, but they still think, 25 years later, there’s something special in TONTO.

RM: It’s an instrument, okay? And it’s one kind of an instrument. There’s no other instrument like it. It has its own process and its own thing and after all, there’s a few things you can say about instrument that was designed on a tablecloth, you know? It has its own kind of magic.

The first Tonto’s Expanding Headband album, Zero Time was re-released in its entirety along with tracks from a second album that came out in europe.  The collection is called “Tonto Rides Again” On Viceroy Records.

MUSIK OUT

Wikipedia also has a very good entry on TONTO.  Look for a Tribute To TONTO in the fall on Echoes. 

John Diliberto ((( Echoes )))

MoogFest Day 1: No Devo, MGMTdoes Karaoke

Devo Cancels.  MGMT does Karaoke. King Britt travels the Spaceways. Mutemath does Back-Flips

The first day of MoogFest consisted of tough choices made easy by disappointment.   The disappointment was the late-news that Devo would not be performing. They canceled their entire US tour after guitarist Bob Mothersbaugh sliced his thumb to the bone.  But disappointment yielded opportunity.

Octopus Project @ MoogFest

I missed Dan Deacon so I could go to the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium and catch all of The Octopus Project, a band out of Austin.  They set the bar precipitously high with an energized, mostly instrumental set that was a bit like Devo meets Mono, sans vocals.  They rocked through songs with complicated,  head-snapping time signatures, minimalist patterns and that soft-loud guitar attack favored by Mono.  But they do it with an ear toward pop infectiousness.   All the musicians switch off on keyboards, guitars, bass and drums, although the focus seems to be Yvonne Lambert, stage center at her keyboard station.   It was Halloween weekend but Lambert didn’t have to wear a costume.  She was dressed in her usual stage attire of an exaggerated flip hairdo and 50s-era party dress.  She played the minimalist keyboard riffs and on a couple of songs caressed the air around  a Moog Theremin.  Unlike most contemporary bands who use it for whooping space effects, Lambert did her best Clara Rockmore impression.  While her band mates bobbed across the stage, she stood stock still, making tiny hand movements to play simple but precise melodies.  But she whooped it up a few times as well, to good effect. The Octopus Project manage to be effervescent even when sending out industrial chaos with metal beats and buzzsaw synthesizers.

At the end of their energized set, TOP was joined by Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerry Casale, the two frontmen from Devo.  On short notice, TOP inventively backed them on “The Girl You Want” and “Beautiful World.”

Next door at the Ashville Civic Center, I caught a bit of Big Boi’s groin pummeling live set with multiple rappers, horn and rhythm section and lots of dancers.  The full house was bouncing to their precisely rendered rap although it carried a lot of dark undertones.   I thought the black power salute was an interesting touch to deliver to an all-white audience.

I stepped out of that into the more peaceful redoubt of Bonobo.  He  did a DJ set in place of Devo and he was spinning some entrancing down-tempo moods when I stopped in, but with Devo out of the picture, I was more in the mood for live music, so  I opted for the 15 minute hike down to the Orange Peel for King Britt.  The experimental hip-hop artist has been working a kind of electronic homage to the spirit of Sun Ra for the last year called Saturn Never Sleeps.  He’s played this in Philadelphia with a large band and extensive multimedia productions but he brought a stripped down version to MoogFest.  It was just Britt on various electronic manipulators and Rucyl, an original member of The Goats, singing, playing keyboards and processing her sound.  Based on tracks that Britt seemed to have in his laptop, they moved through slow dirge beds of turgid, glitched scrawls with Rucyl singing mostly wordless vocals, tossing her voice into reverb and echoes and occasionally breaking into a chanted chorus singing lines like, “Give me love,” making her sound like Donna Summer in a fever trance.

Twenty minutes in, Rucyl informed us it was all improvised on the spot.  But that was no news as the music marched engagingly over shifting moods and textures with Britt mashing up tracks in real time. Rucyl is a compelling singer with a smokey, sensual voice, but her vocalise often meandered with a limited palette of wordless vernacular.  Yet, they entered some fascinating spaces including one haunting piece with a train whistle, alien crickets and the growling approach of a dark dawn.  Much of the music attained a certain zombie-lounge groove, perfect for Halloween.

After their set, we rushed back to the Civic Center to catch about half of MGMT.  It was evident immediately that they hadn’t adjusted to the cavernous space.  Their sound bounded off the walls with muddy bass, indecipherable vocals and highs that scalped your head off.   The highlight of the second half was the 12 minute “Siberian Breaks,” the magnum opus from their Congratulations CD.  The song alternates between dreamy exposition and slamming grooves and is their most ambitious composition with a heavy dose of 1960s Brit pop including The Hollies vocal harmonies, The Small Faces pastoral idylls and a nice touch of Pink Floyd space guitar.  They followed it up with one of their two big hits,  “Kids.”

MGMT reportedly had lofty goals from their second album, refusing to release singles from it and claiming there weren’t any  radio friendly hits, as if that was something to be disdained.  So were they being ironic in playing “Kids” as a complete Karaoke song with all of the musicians abandoning their instruments except for a couple who banged on percussion while the synth track played on.  Even the vocals sounded artificially reinforced.  The audience didn’t care.  Decked out in their Halloween makeup and costumes, they bounced up and down, spinning and waving the supposedly-banned glow sticks in the most carefree rave fashion while the infectious rhythms pounded out from the speakers.   MGMT took the song home, however, with a pure psychedelic rave-up of twisting guitar.  There was a mass exodus after that, the crowd apparently having gotten their two hits, with “Time to Pretend” played earlier.

We skipped Van Dyke Parks.  Was that wrong?

Instead we took a break and then settled back in at the Orange Peel for Mutemath.  This New Orleans quartet has been around since 2003 and should be garnering more attention, if for nothing else, their electric live set.  Frontman Paul Meany looks a bit like Perry Farrell and has the same kind of energy, extolling his earnest songs with a showman’s sensibility and a jazz pianist’s chops.  He played mostly Fender Rhodes but also stepped out on a battered Keytar, but with none of the showboating usually associated with fuzak bands.  Guitarist Greg Hill was a wonder on guitar, creating the textures behind Meany, ripping out bluesy space slides,  power chord leaps and Byrds-like jangle.  Darren King is a power house drummer, slamming his undersized kit while wearing headphones with a chin-strap to keep them on his spinning head.  With his below-the-shoulders-hair, beard and 70s sunglasses, bassist  Roy Mitchell-Cárdenas looked like he stepped off the cover of The Allman Brothers Live at the Fillmore.   And he laid down an intricate and booming foundation just as solid as that band.  Mutemath careened through their set culminating in Meany doing handstands and backflips on his Rhodes.

Day one is over.  On to day two.
John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

Devo Cancels.  MGMT does Karaoke, King Britt travels the Spaceways, Mutemath does Back-Flips
The first day of MoogFest consisted of tough choices made easy by disappointment.   The disappointment was the late-news that Devo would not be performing. They cancelled their entire US tour after guitarist Bob Mothersbaugh sliced his thumb to the bone. http://www.billboard.com/news/devo-postpones-2010-tour-dates-due-to-injury-1004124223.story#/news/devo-postpones-2010-tour-dates-due-to-injury-1004124223.story
But disappointment yielded opportunity.  I missed Dan Deacon so I could catch all of The Octopus Project, a band out of Austin.  They set the bar precipitously high with an energized, mostly instrumental set that was a bit like Devo meets Mono, sans vocals.  They rocked through songs with complicated, but head-snapping time signatures, minimalist patterns and that soft-loud guitar attack favored by mono.  But they do it with an ear toward pop infectiousness.   All the musicians switch off on keyboards, guitars, bass and drums, although the center seems to be Yvonne Lambert at her keyboard station, a stage center.   Although she wore a mask atop her head as a Halloween concession, Lambert was dressed in her usual attire of an exaggerated flip hairdo and 50s-era party dress.  She played the minimalist keyboard riffs and on a couple of songs, played a Moog Theremin.  Unlike most contemporary bands who use it for whooping space effects, Lambert did her best Clara Rockmore impression.  While her band mates bobbed across the stage, she stood stock still, making tiny hand movements to play simple but precise melodies.  But she whooped it up a few times as well, to good effect. The Octopus Project mange to be effervescent even when sending out industrial chaos with metal beats and buzzsaw synthesizers.
At the end of their energized set, TOP was joined by Bob Mothersbaugh and Bob Casale., the two frontmen from Devo.  On short notice TOP inventively, backed them on “The Girl You Want” and “Beautiful World.”
I caught a bit of Big Boi’s groin pummeling live set with multiple rappers, and horn and rhythm section and lots of dancers.  The full house in the Civic Center main room was bouncing to their precisely rendered rap although it carried a lot of dark undertones.   I thought the black power salute was an interesting touch to deliver to an all-white audience.
I stepped out of that into the more peaceful redoubt of Bonoboo.  He  did a DJ set in place of Devo and he was spinning some entrancing down-tempo moods when I stopped in, but with Devo out of the picture, I was more in the mood for live music, so  I opted for the 15 minute hike down to the Orange Peel for King Britt.  The experimental hip-hop artist has been working a kind of electronic homage to the spirit of Sun Ra for the last year called Saturn Never Sleeps.  He’s played this in Philadelphia with a large band and extensive multimedia productions but he brought a stripped down version to MoogFest.  It was just Britt on various electronic manipulators and Rucyl, an original member of the Goats, singing.  Improvising based on tracks that Britt seemed to have in his laptop, they moved through slow dirge beds of turgid, glitched scrawls with Rucyl singing mostly wordless vocals, tossing her voice into reverb and echoes and occasionally breaking into a chanted chorus singing lines like, “Give me love,” making her sound like Donna Summer in a fever dream.  Twenty minutes in, Rucyl informed us it was all improvised on the spot.  But that was no news as the music marched engagingly over shifting moods and textures with Britt mashing up tracks in real time. Rucyl is a compelling singer with a smokey, sensual voice, but her vocalise often meandered with a limited pallette of wordless vernacular.
Yet, they entered some fascinating spaces including one haunting piece with a train whistle, alien crickets and the growling approach of a dark dawn.  Much of the music attained a certain zombie-lounge groove, perfect for Halloween.
After their set, we rushed back to the Civic Center to catch about half of MGMT.  It was evident immediately that they hadn’t adjusted to the cavernous space.  Their sound bounded off the walls with muddy bass, indecipherable vocals and highs that scalped your head off.   The highlight of second half was the 12 minute “Siberian Breaks,” the magnum opus from their Congratulations CD.  The song alternates between dreamy exposition and slamming grooves and is their most ambitious composition with a heavy dose of 1960s Brit pop including The Hollies vocal harmonies, the Small Faces pastoral idylls and a nice touch of Pink Floyd space guitar.  They followed it up with one of their two big hits,  “Kids.”
MGMT reportedly had lofty goals from their second album, refusing to release singles from it and claiming there weren’t any  radio friendly hits, as if that was something to be disdained.  So were they being ironic in playing “Kids” as a complete Karaoke with all of the musicians abandoning their instruments except for a couple who banged on percussion.  Even the vocals sounded artificially reinforced.  The audience didn’t care.  Decked out in their Halloween makeup and costumes, they bounced up and down, spinning and waving the supposedly banned glow sticks in the most carefree rave fashion while the infectious rhythms pounded out from the speakers.   MGMT took the song home, however, with a pure psychedelic rave-up of twisting guitar.  There was a mass exodus after that, the crowd apparently having gotten their two hits, with “Time to Pretend” played earlier.
We skipped Van Dyke Parks.  Is that wrong?
Instead we took a break and then settled back in at the Orange Peel for Mutemath.  This New Orleans quartet has been around since 2003 and should be garnering more attention, if for nothing else, their electric live set.  Frontman Paul Meany looks a bit like Perry Farrell and has the same kind of energy, extolling his earnest songs with a showman’s sensibility and a jazz pianist’s chops.  He played mostly Fender Rhodes but also stepped out on a battered Keytar, but with none of the showboating usually associated with fuzak bands.  Guitarist Greg Hill was a wonder on guitar, creating the textures behind Meany, ripping out bluesy space slide guitar, power chord leaps and Byrds-like jangle.  Darren King is a power house drummer, slamming his undersized kit while wearing headphones with a chin-strap to keep them on his spinning head.  Bassist  Roy Mitchell-Cárdenas laid down an intricate and booming foundation, With his below- the-shoulders-hair, beard and glasses, he looked like he stepped off the cover of The Allman Brothers Live at the Fillmore.   They careened through their set culminating in Meany doing handstands and backflips on his Rhodes.
Day one is over.  On to day two.
John Diliberto ((( echoes )))

MoogFest-Too Many Choices

Getting ready for MoogFest tonight and already faced by insurmountable choices with overlapping bands in venues separated by anywhere from 5 to 20 minute hauls.

Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh in Echoes Interview

The pleasant pop of Kuroma and The Octopus Project each overlap by half an hour, so I’ll start out with TOP but Kuroma will have to depend on how good or bad TOP perform.

I’d love to catch Nortec Collective but TOP ends at 7:30 and Nortec starts at 7:15 at the Orange Peel, a venue about 20 minutes alway, which would mean I’d miss Devo at 8.    I first saw Devo 33 years ago at The Hot Club in Philadelphia.  It was a memorable set and I’m looking forward on both a nostalgic and artistic level at seeing them again.

But then I have a choice between Saturn Never Sleeps, King Britt’s ambient surreal Sun Ra project and MGMT doing their big-time Indi pop, again at venues separated by about 20 minutes with overlapping time.  The only way I’ll catch that is if Devo really sucks, and I don’t have that expectation.  I think it will be a game-time call whether I want another dose of electro-Pop or if I want to have my mind blown.

I’ll probably catch Van Dyke Parks at 11 although I’ve never been a big fan of his arch take on pop.  Then it’s a tough choice between Girl Talk, Panda Bear, and Mutemath.  I’m leaning towards the power pop of Mutemath even if he does play a keytar (one of those keyboards you sling around your neck so you look like a dork).

Anything I should see that I’m overlooking?  Big Boi?  Dan Deacon? Clare & the Reasons?

John Diliberto ((( echoes )))