Suzanne Ciani

Suzanne Ciani stands as an American composer and sound designer whose contributions, above all her engagement with the Buchla synthesizer throughout the 1970s, helped shape the evolution of electronic music. Widely recognized by the nickname “The Diva of the Diode,” she ranked among the earliest women to secure a trailblazing position in the field, owing to her command of Buchla synthesizers renowned for their otherworldly bleeps, grunts, pings, oscillating drones, twangs, sonic washes, and watery burbles.

The pianist, composer, synthesist, multi-instrumentalist, and sound designer who had received classical training first drew widespread attention when her signature “swoosh” sound reached listeners via a commercial outlet: it was incorporated into the Starland Vocal Band’s blockbuster single “Afternoon Delight.” Beyond her personal discography, her material has appeared in television, advertisements (“Coke Adds Life”), cinema (the original Stepford Wives), and pioneering video games (Liberator). Across more than five decades, Ciani’s recorded output has encompassed sound-library projects, film scores, new-age and ambient works, and experimental, industrial, and rhythm-oriented sessions. She has appeared at music festivals, technology summits, and on broadcast outlets, and she has shaped the approaches of two generations of electronic artists, among them Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, with whom she joined forces on 2016’s Frkwys, Vol. 13: Sunergy. Her career and recordings also supplied the focus for the documentary A Life in Waves. She has sustained an active pace into the 2020s, releasing live documents such as Improvisation on Four Sequences (Live at Week-End Fest) and the studio collaboration Golden Apples of the Sun with Jonathan Fitoussi.

Ciani obtained a master’s degree in composition from the University of California at Berkeley, studying there with the electronic-music innovators Max Mathews, John Chowning, and Don Buchla. Relocating to New York in 1975, she entered the Soho art community and collaborated with minimalist Philip Glass. Commercial prominence followed the founding of Ciani Musica, Inc., which became one of the nation’s leading production houses for advertising music. She subsequently moved into film scoring, earning notice for her contributions to Lily Tomlin’s The Incredible Shrinking Woman and the award-winning documentary Mother Teresa.

Her path as a recording artist followed a less direct course. The 1982 Japanese edition Seven Waves circulated as an underground favorite, leading to its domestic release on Private Music in 1984. Velocity of Love arrived in 1986; its distinctive synthesizer textures, offset by memorable melodies and pop-oriented sensibilities, helped establish the template for contemporary instrumental music and the emerging new-age genre. Ciani continued to record for Private through the remainder of the 1980s and into the following decade, issuing Neverland (1988), History of My Heart (1989), the solo-piano collection Pianissimo (1990), and Hotel Luna (1991). In 1994 she launched the Seventh Wave label and released the orchestral album Dream Suite. Two years later Pianissimo II appeared, succeeded by a live recording in 1997. The title track of the 1999 album Turning included vocals by Chyi Yu.

Following the third installment of the Pianissimo solo-piano series, issued in 2001, Ciani stepped away for a period before returning in 2005 with the expansive studio project Silver Ship, which received the Best New Age Album honor at the fifth annual Independent Music Awards. In 2008 she partnered with videographer Robert Grimstone on the DVD Galapagos: A Musical Odyssey and the remastered collection Natura Poetica, which paired her best-known pieces with footage from cinematographers including David Fortney and Ken Jenkins.

Finders Keepers issued Lixiviation 1969-1985 in 2011, assembling previously unreleased archival recordings and initiating an intensive reissue program. The next year brought Logo Presentation Reels 1985—a cassette anthology of electronic advertising music created for clients ranging from Atari to Pepsi—and the CD reissue of Voices of Packaged Souls (originally pressed in an edition of fifty copies for a Brussels gallery exhibition shared with visual artist Harold Paris), issued alongside a separate vinyl edition of Seven Waves. In 2013 the limited release NeoTantrik presented improvised performances captured in art galleries and cinemas in Los Angeles and Belgium, placing Ciani alongside Andy Votel and Sean Canty of Demdike Stare. The archival set Buchla Concerts 1975 appeared in 2016, followed by the new RVNG FRKWYS collaboration Sunergy, documenting an in-studio encounter with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith.

Ciani’s long-unavailable 1980 score for Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera Help, Help, the Globolinks! was issued by Finders Keepers in 2017. The following year she released the vinyl-only Live Quadraphonic, captured during a Buchla 200e System performance at the Machines in Music synthesizer fair in New York City on October 8, 2016; the package contained a hardware decoder enabling playback of the two-channel vinyl as the original four-channel recording. Flowers of Evil, a previously unheard 1969 composition, surfaced in 2019. Music for Denali, gathering early pieces from 1973, followed in 2020. Two additional contemporary live documents, Improvisation on Four Sequences at Festival Antigel and A Sonic Womb: Live Buchla Performance at Lapsus, also appeared that year. Her output continued in 2023 with another concert recording, Improvisation on Four Sequences, captured live at the 2021 Week-End Fest in Cologne, Germany. Later the same year she joined French composer Jonathan Fitoussi for the collaborative studio album Golden Apples of the Sun.