Archive of the former Yahoo!Groups mailing list: MOTM

Ken Tkacs ("Tax"), Connecticut, USA. I have a web page, but there's not much
on it these days except a picture of my ugly mug. Will post modular photos
once I get a cabinet made (how are those rails coming...? :) ).

Born in very early '60s... I remember excitedly watching first-run Star Trek
with my grandfather, and remember clearly the first moon landing. Old, huh.
Didn't feel my age until my son was born six months ago.

Have a BS in Industrial Design. Some of my design projects were
electronic-music-related because it's all I could think about (like my
"Orca" orchestral keyboard that looked like a killer whale... no one got the
joke... or my 'organic' underground music studio). I used the wood & metal
shops after hours to build my own stuff, including a hand phaser and a
never-completed modular whose front panels were masonite with about 1000
hours of hand-rubbed Letraset lettering & Chartpak tape. While I was in
college, heavily into Roger Dean's organic design style, the movie 'Alien'
came out, and suddenly all of the buildings, furniture, cars I was designing
got very scary. My line of "Bone(TM) Furniture" just about got me expelled.

Built a lot of Paia stuff, made a lot of smoke. Made friends with engineers
who could fix the stuff. Was in some weird bands with ideals of being "the
new YES" with modern orchestral tendencies. But strangely... no one liked
that kind of stuff enough to make us rich... or even stay for the second
set...

After college I worked for a bit for Nitsuko America, on contract at the
time for TIE Communications (they made TIE fighters, I think). I designed
lead-bending tools for them... somehow ended up as quality control manager
writing and illustrating manuals to show the inspectors what a well-soldered
transistor should look like.

After that I went off with a friend to try to make a stab at video
production. We invested a boat-load of borrowed cash (but not enough) into a
video editing suite. We made training videos, documentaries for the "Marble
Collector's Society of America" (yes, the little glass balls), created a
comedy show for area public TV called "The Salty Joe Show," and some other
stuff. During this time I was commissioned to write a bizarre 'opera' in a
"pseudo-gamelan style" which was performed in Hollywood by a little
theatrical company. I never got out to see it during its run. It was a
Robert Wilson-esque thing based on an ancient Chinese poem cycle, with five
women on a sparse stage each representing a facet of a mercurial woman's
heart. Got extremely wide-ranging reviews... the more enthusiastic ones
spelled my name wrong.

When the video thing wasn't paying enough to keep my partner and I in fine
imported ales, I did a brief stint doing capital projects design for one of
May Company's Visual Merchandising departments (anyone ever see G.Fox's
'Fendi Roma' or 'California Raisins' promo's? Yup, yours truly).

For most of the Nineties, I have been doing the computer thing as network
administrator and now have a cushy setup doing graphic design, web design,
ASP & Javascript programming, and multimedia stuff for a great little
international company (J.E. Robert Company, but don't judge me on our public
designed-by-committee-and-boring web page... I'm overhauling it this year).
At the same time in that decade, the same creative friend and I produced a
very well received, surrealistic radio play for public radio called "HIVES,"
which I'm pretty sure was the first radio drama to use surround sound using
an encoder that an engineer friend make for us before anyone had
surround-sound in their homes. The HIVES project is still on, but we're in
hiatus mode as we both recently got married, houses, and have families
occupying a lot of our time.

Five of us also do these periodic extended organic sound creation sessions
live at a local listener-supported radio station... 5 hours at a time
(without pause) of wall-of-sound weirdness, ringing, loops, poetry, and
sometimes even static. It's therapeutic. And strangely, people call in
loving the stuff. Blows my mind! Funny thing is the five of us can't agree
on a name for the 'band,' so we call the process 'noise-jamming' and do our
own mixes for ourselves.

Throughout all this, have built a nice personal studio (I only ever sold one
piece of equipment---a Casiotone 202---in order to buy a Korg CX-3 organ).
The studio doubles as my server room for my 6-PC LAN (for gaming!). But as
nice as the digital MIDI stuff I collected was, I kept pining for the heady
college days of modular synthesis. Finally last year I heard a rumor that
companies like Paia were making modulars again, so I started planning my big
dream system and ordered their filter (my old engineer friend said "oh no!
Here we go again!"). Their VCO wasn't out yet, so I was moaning to someone
about that when they said, "check out this MOTM thing. I hear their VCO is
the best ever made." So I checked it out, ordered a PS & VCO to start, and
now I'm 100% hooked and am looking forward to a modular that will satisfy
all my childhood dreams! And I have never smoked an MOTM module kit!

Personal tastes: Music & sound design, science-fiction & horror, film in
general (I have almost 7000 video tapes, a huge laserdisc collection, and
now the DVD thing is here...), computers, bashing computers, computer games
(currently Quake III and Age of Empires), Starbuck's coffee, space science,
gin martinis, MST3K & Red Dwarf, home beermaking, chaos 'theory,' the
Western Esoteric Tradition, animation (Japan's making the only good stuff),
photography & videography, Monty Python, Walt Disney World, paying the oil
bill... (yeah, right), spending time with my family, and fixing the house.
And I love radio drama, from "X Minus One" to "Moon Over Morocco."

Musical tastes: Classical (Bach, Bach, Bach, Debussy, Honneger, Wagner, &
PDQ Bach), "New Classical" (Ligeti, Ginastera, Lutoslawski, Shostakovich,
Penerecki, Birger-Blohmdhal, Varese, Messiaen, Stavinsky), Progressive rock
([old]Yes, Pink Floyd, ELP, Jethro Tull, Thinking Plague, Art Bears,
Birdsongs of the Messozoic, Forever Einstein, Tangerine Dream, etc.),
Soundtrack music in a big way (Goldsmith's "Planet of the Apes" score (one
of the best pieces of music ever written), Goldenthal's "Alien 3," the
Barrons' "Forbidden Planet," Pouledoris' "Conan," Badalemente's "Twin
Peaks," &c.), and of course, Electronic Music (Carlos, Tomita, Synergy,
Subotnic, Vangelis, Machover, Danna, Bhatia, Garson, &c.). I also like to
get tastes of ethnic stuff to help break out of the hellish 4/4 diatonic
monotony of contemporary popular music.

Some of my friends and I hang around Yale University to go to "free
concerts" of "new music," basically the recitals and premiers of their
graduate composition program. One of my friends tapes them (with permission
of course) and broadcasts them on WPKN radio.

The stuff I write is generally unusual but listenable---like soundtrack
music I guess. I usually end up with prime-numbered time signatures and
chromatica, but it's not head-splitting stuff. I don't think. When I get my
fully-functional monster modular up and running (I have or have on order one
of everything MOTM makes now, plus two extra VCOs and an extra EG), I plan
on taking a deep trip into the origins of electronic music, back to a time
when Electronic Music wasn't just a way of getting a funky bass sound, but
was a compositional idiom of its own, with musical structures that are as
unbounded as the sounds themselves. As with the modular process, I want to
rediscover compositionally what was lost, and bring the best of the Golden
Age of Electronic Music back to the present, with the benefits of clean hard
disk recording and 5.1 channel sound.

This is my life, in brief, and my goal. Long live modular synthesis. Long
live MOTM!

Sorry for bending your 'ear' for so long, but if it bothered you too much,
you probably didn't read down this far anyway. Back to your
regularly-scheduled workday.