To call the EMS Synthi 100 a bulky piece of music gear would be an understatement: it easily takes up an entire wall. No wonder that only a few of the groundbreaking hybrid synthesisers were produced and that they are now in great demand. Berlin-based composer Midori Hirano travelled to Serbia to do a residency at Radio Belgrade’s electronic music studios—where the first EMS Synthi 100 was commissioned—to explore the possibilities of analogue and digital sound synthesis. »Distant Symphony« is the name of the result, released as MimiCof. Hirano first created distinct sounds that represented the particular aesthetics of the synthesizer and arranged them as three long compositions in a presumably very elaborate process. The pieces draw on the undecidability between musical and purely sonic qualities on the one hand and from subtle arcs of tension on the other: while the first piece mainly foregrounds different tonalities, Hirano already builds a kind of post-minimal pulse in the second one with the means of pointillistic trance breakdowns and then lets the album end on—indeed—symphonic and yet ominous sounds. All of this is primarily intended to illustrate the possibilities of the tool used, but it also testifies to the compositional skills of its user.
Distant Symphony
