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Larry Fast

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Larry Fast
OriginEssex County, New Jersey
GenresElectronic music
InstrumentKeyboard
Years active1975–present
LabelsPassport, Atlantic, Voiceprint, ABC Classics
Websitehttp://synergy-emusic.com/

Lawrence Roger 'Larry' Fast (born 10 December 1951 in Newark, New Jersey) is a synthesizer expert and composer. He is best known for Synergy, his 1975–1987 series of synthesizer music albums, and for his contribution to a number of popular music acts, including Peter Gabriel, Foreigner, and Hall and Oates.[1]

Biography

Fast grew up in Livingston, New Jersey and attended Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, where he obtained a degree in History. There he took his previous training in piano and violin and melded them with computer science to become interested in synthesized music and to build his own primitive sound-making electronic devices.

He was introduced to Rick Wakeman, the keyboard player from the band Yes during a local radio interview, and traveled to the UK to work with Yes on their 1974 album Tales from Topographic Oceans.[2] It was there that he got a recording contract with Passport Records.

The Synergy project

Fast recorded a series of pioneering synthesizer music albums under the project name Synergy. Some of this work was used as the basis for music in Commodore 64 and Amiga computer games, notably Rob Hubbard's score for the C64 version of Zoids, which was an unofficial cover of Synergy's Ancestors from the 1981 album Audion.

The first album in the series, Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra, was released as an LP in 1975. Like the following albums, it exclusively makes use of electronic instruments, mainly synthesizers. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Fast released eight more Synergy LPs on Passport Records, all of which were later re-released on CDs. The 1998 re-release of Semi-Conductor, a compilation album originally released in 1984, was a remastered version of the original, and contained ten additional tracks. The eleventh album in the series, Reconstructed Artifacts, was released in 2003, and contained completely new performances of select compositions from the previous albums, using modern digital synthesizers, as well as the new digital recording technologies.

Synergy's first album states "..and nobody played guitar." The second album, Sequencer, says "...and still no guitars." These are rumoured to be a tongue-in-cheek response to statements that appeared on albums by the rock group Queen that they used no synthesizers, which were made to inform listeners who assumed otherwise. Fast's third Synergy album, Cords, states "Finally, guitars...sort of," which references the use of a Russ Hamm Guitar Synthesizer played by Pete Sobel.

The albums by Synergy are:

  • 1975: Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra #66 Billboard 200 (18 weeks)
  • 1976: Sequencer #144 Billboard 200 (11 weeks)
  • 1978: Cords #146 Billboard 200 (6 weeks)
  • 1979: Games
  • 1981: Audion
  • 1981: Computer Experiments, Volume One
  • 1982: The Jupiter Menace (soundtrack for film The Jupiter Menace)
  • 1984: Semi-Conductor (compilation containing two new tracks)
  • 1987: Metropolitan Suite
  • 1998: Semi-Conductor, Release 2 (re-release of Semi-Conductor, remastered and containing ten additional tracks)
  • 2003: Reconstructed Artifacts (compilation consisting of re-recorded versions of old tracks)

Currently Fast is slowly developing a new Synergy album, which is likely to come out in 2012. This will be his first studio album consisting of new material in over twenty years. According to Fast's website, it will make heavy use of software synthesizers (one of which is, fittingly, Sample Logic's Synergy synthesizer) rather than the hardware equipment he had been using so far. He has amassed a lot of new thematic material and plans to rework some old, as yet unreleased pieces for the new album as well.

Other music projects

  • Fast worked sporadically with Nektar,[3] providing much of the dominating synthesizers on their 1975 album Recycled.
  • Fast is also known for his work with Peter Gabriel. He played synthesizer on records and on tour, and rounded out the production team on Gabriel's albums from 1976 to 1986.
  • Fast produced Canadian progressive rock group FM's 1980 album City of Fear.
  • Fast toured and recorded with bassist Tony Levin (himself an alumnus of Peter Gabriel's band) as part of Levin's Waters of Eden band.
  • Fast collaborated on the 1980s pop music project Iam Siam, which produced the hit She Went Pop.
  • Fast helped create the music for Tokyo DisneySea, a new Walt Disney theme park.

Other interests

He has done some work with designing listening devices for the hearing disabled. His wife had been working in the field for some time. He owns several patents[5] for optical distribution using infrared audio technologies.[6] Fast is also part of a government group aiming to protect some of New Jersey's historic assets against developers.[citation needed]

References

  1. ^ Bush, John. "Biography: Synergy". Allmusic. Retrieved 21 May 2010.
  2. ^ "Audion CD details". Voiceprint Records (Floating World label). Retrieved 14 February 2013. {{cite web}}: Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  3. ^ Eder, Bruce. "Biography: Nektar". Allmusic. Retrieved 21 May 2010.
  4. ^ Prasad, Anil. "Evolutionary snapshots". Retrieved 12 January 2012.
  5. ^ http://www.google.com/patents?id=RtYfAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false
  6. ^ http://www.google.com/patents?id=lPIkAAAAEBAJ&zoom=4&pg=PA1#v=onepage&q&f=false

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