David Chesworth
50 Synthesizer Greats
CD re-issue of original vinyl recording
CD $25 inc. postage
Still, over 25 years after its initial release, 50 Synthesizer Greats stands up as one of the essential electronic records of Australia's recorded music history.
Lawrence English - Cyclic Frost review
In the summer holidays of 1978 a young David Chesworth was earning some extra holiday cash toiling away in a small hot, and smelly plastic hifi knob factory listening to the boss’s preferred 3AK version of Beautiful Music for 8 hours straight each day. Therapy took the form of late night doodling on a borrowed synthesizer on the parent’s dining room table. Not a significant event at the time but an occasion none-the-less from which emerged a unique body of work comprising 50 short compositions layered up on a domestic reel-to-reel tape recorder.
These emotive Lo-fi pieces have a curious ambiguity about them. Where does this music come from? Some pieces are impossibly happy, others devastatingly sad. They can be viewed as a kind of proto synth pop.
At the time 50 Synthesizer Greats was recorded there was no record deal in the offering and the music didn’t even sound anything like a professional recording should. It should have been unthinkable to release this record. Fittingly it was released on the appropriately named independent label Innocent Records that was set up by David Chesworth and Philip Brophy.
50 Synthesizer Greats has had ‘classic’ status bestowed upon it. It is a recording that has stood the test of time. Not only is the LP packed with beguiling musical ideas, it is also a record that helped mark the birth of the independent alternative music scene in Australia. 50 Synthesizer Greats was re issued on CD in 2005.
A charming selection of pop jingles and featuring some of the best sleeve notes ever.
The Wire – UK
Track List:
The Great Yawn
Have Beat Will Travel
Could You Repeat That?
Green Lady
33-1/3
Malignant Humour
Give Em Heaps
Kraut Mich Mit Einer Daschund
Do The Boogaloo
CHCMC
Homage To Billie Holliday
A-Sat
The Shady Elements
I Told You So
Etc
Necrophilia
Forbin Project
Bi-Pole Antenna
Oh! Wow!
Flea Circus
Synthetic NeoClassic Promenade
Joe Fubernacci-Private Eye
?
Inverted Commas Space Outlaw
Co-Co-Nut Smooth
Feelings Diminished
Alternatively Yours;
Just About;
It's All Done With Headphones
Mind You Expander
Making Waves
No Strings
100
It Don't Mean A Thing
Then I Transmitted
Feline Twice The Cat
Tropical Fruit Salad
Clinton Walker on 50 Synthesizer Greats:
After punk flushed out the putrefaction that rock had largely become by the mid-to-late 70s, the three-chord thrasharama quickly became insufficient and the do-it-yourself imperative of punk adapted itself to a number of new alternatives/explorations. One of the most enticing was in a new strain of electronic music. Electronic rock had been prominently pioneered in the early 70s by the likes of Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream and Eno, and it was the infusion of this avant-garde tradition into the do-it-yourself ethic that gave rise to a worldwide wave of post-punk electronic music (that ended up at the extremes of New Romantic synth-pop and experimental industrial noise). Yet while we always hear all about, say, Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire in the UK or Suicide and the Residents in the US, less is heard of the contemporaneous Australian electronic music movement, even though it may be more enduring than the others.
In Melbourne in the late 70s/early 80s, things were so wide open that even the pub rock venues were awash with radical, electronic bands. In Sydney bands like the Severed Heads, Systematics and Machinations were isolated outposts, but in Melbourne, electronic music was thriving to such an extent it was even able to sustain several distinct and quite oppositional scenes within a scene. Leaving behind the hippy meanderings of Melbourne's own Krautrock outfit Cybotron, the so-called North Fitzroy Little Bands scene grew out of post-punk electro-rock pioneers Whirlywirld and the Primitive Calculators, and was characterised by its wild, instinctive, very visceral sense of experimentation. If this was expressionism, the scene centered around the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre was contrastingly cerebral, abstract. Although the CHCMC also embraced older guard musicians like David Tolley, its stars were the likes of tch-tch-tch and David Chesworth, who had taken to the mini-Korg like it was the key to a whole new kingdom. David Chesworth in particular set a new standard when, in 1979, he released his debut album 50 Synthesizer Greats.
Nobody had ever made a record like this before. Totally devoid of the slickness of, say, Kraftwerk, the album nonetheless had a K-Tel-like sense of kitsch to it that undermined any saccharine sweetness, giving the 37 trax an atmosphere of disquiet that still catches in the ear. This was (and remains) no mere muzak for moderns but something altogether more insidious, and haunting, and is an indication of the vibrancy of post-punk electronic music in Melbourne that the world might only now be catching up with.
Clinton Walker is a Sydney writer whose non-fiction books include Inner City Sound (1981), Highway to Hell (1994), Stranded (1996), Football Life (1998) and Buried Country (2001), Golden Miles (2005)
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