Turtlerock Forum

Tristram Cary passed away yesterday, aged 82. Tristram is considered one of the founding fathers of electronic music and besides composing a lot of electronic music, was the designer of the VCS3 synth ( think Dark Side of the Moon ) and wrote some award winning film soundtracks.

He was developing echo machines before the days of tape. He had a disk cutting lathe in his studio set up with multiple playback heads staggered across the disc, every session of echo generation left behind a pile of cut disks, never to be used again.
I remember him telling me about getting his first tape machine....it was a revelation!
Tristram could cut and splice tape like no one else. In his library are whole pieces of music created by splicing tiny segments of tape together, each reel would contain thousands of splices.

Tristram gave me my first "real" job at the Electronic Music Studios at the University of Adelaide. The job interview largely involved me demostrating that i knew how to correctly wind up a mic lead.

I hope they still have tape where ever he has gone

Rob

Neil Kelly, my friend and mentor from Latrobe uni, was a student of Cary's in Adelaide... i interviewed Neil a few years ago for a journal article, Tristram's name popped up regularly as a huge influence on Neil during his Adelaide Uni days. Neil was particularly fond of the VCS3 so when Cary turned up at Adelaide, well i think it was a pretty big deal for a lot of people.

this was happening around the time that keith humble was setting up a similarly avant-garde music program at Latrobe (about 1974). without ever having met Tristram Cary, i feel that i benefitted from his influence in a number of ways. i'm no longer involved in that experimental circle but i cherish my exposure to it and love the fact that there are guys like Rob Fox who have run with it, and incredibly succesfully too.

we all owe some kind of debt to people like Cary, even if we don't know it.

Poor old Tristram. He was certainly an innovator and a leader in the Electronic music field.
There was a wonderful documentary on the ABC not so long ago called "What the Future Sounded Like"
and Tristram featured prominently in it. Like so many Australian pioneers, he was almost forgotten, but did so much for the field worldwide.

Also, on Sean Micallef's crazy "Newstopia" last night, they dedicated the show to Tristram, which I think was a nice touch.


rachel

I thought I'd remembered this - Tristram was the recipient of a famous synth birthday cake.

http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2005/06/synth-cakes-part-4-now-were-getting.html

Rick - if you ever want a birthday cake in the shape of a Neumann lathe, you're gonna have to post some photos