XM SATELLITE RADIO

As they say on their site at www.xmradio.com, first there was AM, then there was FM, and now there is XM. You can think of XM as an entirely new radio band of direct broadcast satellite radio blanketing the North American continent with up to 100 separate programming channels--each broadcasting like a distinct radio station with a specific format. You'll need a new radio or adapter for the old one, and these will start appearing in new cars and stores inow.

So what does Synergy have to do with this? I'll be providing the "sounders"--the sonic logos that you'll be hearing on all of the 100 channels as well as the unifying sound logo for the entire XM broadcast service network. It's a very exciting project which will change the way that radio works. It also brings me back to my roots in radio which included college radio at WJRH FM in Easton, Pennsylvania in the late 1960s and early 70s and the now-defunct WSAN AM 1470 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Synergy is considered to be one of the "XM Originals" Creative Partners in developing this new broadcast entity. (I predict that XM will become a power in internet broadcasting, too.)

PETER GABRIEL REMASTERED CDs RELEASED

Peter's back catalog has been reissued with enhanced audio and packaging. I provided a lot of the photos that appear in the new releases since I had a pretty good archive of images that I shot while we were making all of these records. Some of the images are a little small in the CD booklets, so when I get a chance we'll post bigger versions of them on the Peter Gabriel page at this site. For now, you'll have to use a magnifying glass. There's information about these reissues at Peter's site.

NEW SYNERGY MUSIC CREATED FOR DISNEY

The project is called Tokyo DisneySea. It's a $4 billion new theme park at the Disney complex in Tokyo and now it is open. I walked the construction site about 4 months before completion and it's absolutely breathtaking. The theme as you might have guessed is nautical. The park is hard to describe, but it combines the best of Epcot, Jules Verne, and the world's seafaring cultures past and future.

From late 1999 through the summer of 2001 I worked with Walt Disney Imagineering creating all the music that will be heard in one of the DisneySea's enclaves, an area called Port Discovery. A total of 3 hours of new music in various arrangements and mixes was delivered to the team that created the park's environments. There is new Synergy music heard inside and outside of buildings in this part of the park as well as music connected to one of the water ride attractions that will be visible throughout the Port Discovery village. Imagineering had described to me plans to tie together the music with the movements of the rides and kinetic visual details of the park.

Other well-known electronic composers will also be contributing to DisneySea. It is unknown right now whether Disney will release the music on CD, I have been asked to provide a few of the pieces as CD ready mixes so I'm guessing that there might be a compilation CD of sorts of music from the whole park. If we find out about availability at some later date we'll post the information here.