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Artist
Shasta Cults
12+ albums
droneambientsynthexperimentalbuchla
about
Shasta Cults is the musical project of Canadian electronics technician Richard Smith. For almost two decades, Smith was the official Buchla & Associates go-to repair person for studios, collectors, and musicians around the world, having worked with artists such as Aphex Twin, Suzanne Ciani, Mort Subotnick, and institutions such as The Library of Congress and Mills College, Smith has had the unique experience of restoring and interacting with nearly every model of Buchla instrument constructed over the past 50 years. "Recording demonstrations of the rare equipment that found its way on to my work bench," is how Smith describes the origins of Shasta Cults. Although sounds have been trickling out for decades, it wasn't until 2017 that Smith recorded his first album using one of these rare instruments: the Buchla 700. Configurations, released in September 2019 by Important Records and the catalyst for this latest release, features eight tracks of heavily-modulated, wave-shaped explorations drenched in effects. Recorded over the span of three months in the fall of 2018, this album was programmed using the only fully-functional Buchla Touché. Developed in the early 1980s with hardware by Don Buchla and software programmed by musician David Rosenboom, the Touché features waveforms generated internally by twenty-four digital oscillators and uses frequency modulation along with sophisticated digital and analog signal processing to produce complex timbres. This LP is a continuation of
