Rich Aucoin – Synthetic: Season 1 LP We Are Busy Bodies (Canada)

Rich Aucoin is announcing his next album entitled Synthetic. The record is a rare Quadruple Album with its 4 seasons/LPs being staggered in 6 month intervals over the next 2 years. The album, which began at The National Music Centre in Calgary, Alberta in March 2020, houses one of the world’s most extensive collections of rare and historic synthesizers. There, Aucoin was doing the Artist In Residence program and recorded 51 synthesizers to begin the project. The project was paused with the start of the pandemic and Aucoin shifted back into film scoring and worked on the critically-acclaimed and short-listed New Yorker – Films of the Year documentary, No Ordinary Man, about the trans-masculine jazz musician Billy Tipton

This record is a good demonstration of Aucoin’s scoring potential as well as it’s a quadruple instrumental album; a huge contrast to United States, Aucoin’s previous, and most vocal-heavy album to date. “Lyrics just take me so long to write that I just want to take a couple years to make other kinds of albums before going back to lyrical music as I can write instrumental music much faster.”

This first full-length features Aucoin as the solo musician playing some 37 synthesizers including: Arp 2600s, the Supertramp owned Elka Rhapsody 610 String Machine, Formanta Polivoks, Novatron T550, Oxford Synthesizer Company Oscar, Selmer Clavioline CM 8 and the legendary TONTO which the first release off the record was made on.