Book Chapter: The Buchla Music Easel

Book Chapter

“The Buchla Music Easel: From Cyberculture to Market Culture,” in Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People, edited by Ezra J. Teboul, Andreas Kitzmann, and Einar Engström. In this book chapter I map the short life and long afterlife of one of the most mythologized instrument designs of the late Donald Buchla, the Buchla Music Easel, from its emergence in early 1970s Californian cyberculture to its re-emergence in the “analog revival” of the 2010s. In addition to documenting the genesis of the instrument, this chapter also offers a critique of the instrument’s libidinal economy in the neoliberal synthesizer marketplace.

Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People

Writing