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.

AN INTERESTING NEW CD WITH SYNERGY MUSIC

BACK IN TIME, A SPACE ODYSSEY produced by Chris Abbot (http://www.c64audio.com). This is the third in a series of full orchestra arrangements of video game soundtrack music which was originally performed on the SID synthesizer chips of Commodore C64 computers. "Ancestors" from AUDION was often appropriated for C64 game themes back in the 1980s. Chris Abbot has provided three outstanding full orchestral versions of "Ancestors" on this British CD released in 2001. Visit their website, or email them (cd@c64audio.com) for information about purchasing the CD.

DAVID BRYAN "LUNAR ECLIPSE" (RE)-RELEASED

Rounder Records has finally issued in the United States the solo piano and synthesizer album that I co-produced for Bon Jovi keyboardist David Bryan. The CD has two new solo piano tracks and a new name "Lunar Eclipse" in place of the old title "On A Full Moon". Otherwise it's the same great record that got overlooked a few years ago getting the new chance that it deserves. David is a terrific pianist and uses this CD to perform in ways that just don't fit into his role in Bon Jovi. There's one piano track with Synergy synth orchestra arrangement, and a few more electronic pieces which we both worked on. e openminded.

MACWORLD 2000 NEW YORK

I was asked to give the music and audio keynote talk at the July 2000 MacWorld in New York. There might still be information posted at this site: www.apple.com/creative/musicaudio/showcase/ It went so well that It's possible that I'll be talking more about my computer platform of choice at future conferences. Maybe even a little virtual synth live performances off of a PowerBook. Stay tuned for more info in the coming months.

TONY LEVIN "THE WATERS OF EDEN"

Recording work on Tony Levin's solo album "The Waters of Eden" is complete and released on Narada Records. Though there are nine songs on the CD, I'm only on five doing synth arrangements on Tony's new songs. Many different musicians appear on the album, but the interesting thing for my own personal history is that Tony, Jerry Marotta and I worked together on more than half of the tracks. This was the first time the core of the "classic" Peter Gabriel band has worked together since some sessions we did for another artist, Pamela Golden, in 1986. (We haven't all worked together with Peter since 1983).

Tony has a lot of background about the project up on his site including photos during the recording. Visit Tony's web site at www.tonylevin.com for general information, or visit papabear.com/passionatebass.htm for pictures and Tony's diary of the recording.

The way the album was recorded was interesting, too. It was done entirely on computer hard disk--no tape rolled during the record--using Macintosh-based Emagic Logic Audio (Tony's recording in Woodstock, NY) and Mark of the Unicorn Digital Performer (at the Synergy Studio in New Jersey). I spent a few days in the studio in Woodstock with Tony, his co-producer Artie Traum, and guitarist David Torn planning the tracks. Then I took clones of the multitracks from their Mac back home on CD-R, loaded the tracks into my computer and worked on the arrangements. Tony had another project to complete in California so every day or two I made MP3 reference mixes and emailed them to him. Tony could listen on his Powerbook and email his comments back to me. When all was okay, I made submixes of my parts to CD-R and sent them up to Woodstock to be conformed to the master. If we had higher bandwidth available at both ends we probably would have used the internet for that last stage too. Next time...