The Many Lives of Suzanne Ciani

This spring, one of the most talked-about electronic records of the year came out on Werkdiscs: Concrète Waves, ninety minutes of live improvisation recorded at the Barbican and Sónar, pairing Actress, the high priest of smudged UK techno abstraction, with a woman who turned eighty in June. Boomkat called them two titans in their field. The Quietus and DJ Mag covered the release week like a headline event, because it was one.

The younger half of that duo has been famous for fifteen years. The older half has been famous three separate times, under three different names for the same person, to three audiences that barely know the others exist. Suzanne Ciani has put it plainly herself: it's a dual identity, and the sides don't speak to each other. This is an attempt to introduce them.

Ciani grew up in Quincy, Massachusetts, one of five daughters of an Italian-American surgeon, playing piano from age six on the classical track that was supposed to carry her politely through life. The derailment happened at MIT. While studying at Wellesley in the late sixties, she took an evening class across town and encountered a professor who had blown his budget trying to synthesize the sound of a violin, decomposing it into raw elements and rebuilding it inside a computer. Hearing that a machine could make such sounds, she said later, set off a light bulb that never switched off.

It led her to Berkeley for a master's in composition, to a summer at Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Lab under Max Mathews, the literal father of computer music, and then, fatefully, to Don Buchla, the Berkeley instrument builder whose modular synthesizer refused on principle to have a keyboard. She rented time with one at Mills College for five dollars a visit. To afford her own, she went to work in Buchla's shop, soldering joints and drilling holes for three dollars an hour, and later said that when the finished machines shipped out she felt like she was losing children.

Buchla let her join the class he taught his employees, then took her aside after the first session: "We've decided that we don't want women in the class." She was the only woman in the class. She kept coming.

Everyone knows some version of the next decade; it's the part of her life that gets retold. Nineteen years in New York, arriving in 1974 with clothes and a Buchla. The floor of Philip Glass's basement studio. Walking out of Lincoln Center over quadraphonic sound. Barging into Billy Davis's control room at McCann Erickson, filling the blank space in a Coke jingle with the pop and pour heard round the world: a sound with no bottle in it, performed on the Buchla, because a real bottle doesn't sound that good. Columbia Pictures. Atari. The voice of Xenon. The first woman to solo-score a major Hollywood film.

By the eighties she was running Ciani/Musica out of her apartment at 40 Park Avenue, a no-shoes studio where fifteen pairs of client loafers would line up outside the door. The office was at 1650 Broadway, next to the Brill Building, where American pop songs used to be manufactured. The woman the record business couldn't categorize had simply built a category around herself.

Here's the chapter the synth histories skip. Having financed and released Seven Waves (rejected by every American label, released by Victor in Japan in 1982, later a six-figure seller), Ciani spent the late eighties and nineties becoming genuinely, chart-verifiably famous. The Velocity of Love, with Vangelis guesting, produced her signature composition, a radio staple that still turns up in wedding anthologies. Five Grammy nominations. Keyboard magazine's Keyboardist of the Year in 1992. And in 1990, Pianissimo, an album of solo piano with no electronics whatsoever, became her best-seller to date.

Read that again: the Buchla pioneer's biggest record had no synthesizer on it. The industry had finally embraced synths, but as preset boxes imitating other instruments, the opposite of everything she believed the machine was for. So in one of the great ironies of her career, the woman who electrified American ears drifted back to the piano, and her beloved Buchla spent years gathering dust. New age radio adored her. The experimental world that would later canonize her wasn't listening. There was, once again, no listening for it, just in the other direction this time.

In 1992 she was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer. She recovered fully after surgery and radiation, but she took the diagnosis as a message. She has told the story of a therapist asking her, "Suzanne, are you trying to say that you would like to have a personal life?" Only then did she realize she didn't have one. Winding down her New York life was not graceful; she tried to leave the company to her employees, discovered nobody wanted to run it, and sold the studio gear at auction.

"I left the big city and came to the end of this dirt road," she told Tape Op. The road ended in Bolinas, California, a famously hidden coastal town where residents tear down the highway signs, in a house above the ocean. It was, she said, what she used to dream about when she was sleepless in the city.

In 1994 she founded Seventh Wave, the label named for the album everyone rejected, and has owned her catalog ever since. She married; it ended in 2000. In a recent interview she reflected that she was raised on fairy tales, met the perfect prince, watched it crash and burn, and found the wreckage liberating. "I'm no longer a romantic," she says now, without a trace of grief.

The fourth life began with a letter from Manchester. Around 2012, Andy Votel's Finders Keepers label, archaeologists of lost genius, asked to release her vaulted commercial experiments and archival tapes. She assumed an obscure release on an obscure label. Instead, Lixiviation and Buchla Concerts 1975 landed on a generation raised on modular synths who recognized her instantly as the missing ancestor. The reaction, she has admitted, caught her completely unprepared.

What followed was less a comeback than a coronation: the Sunergy collaboration with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith in 2016, the documentary A Life in Waves in 2017, Live Quadraphonic in 2018, and then a return, after decades, to the Buchla itself. She once swore she'd never go back to it, then swore she'd never go back to the piano. Her current position: she doesn't believe herself at all.

Which brings her to now. Nearly eighty, she tours constantly, from festival stages like Sónar to Semibreve, and her lifelong quadraphonic ultimatum has flipped from career obstacle to rider clause: venues install four-channel systems before she arrives, because they know she will not play otherwise. She teaches, including a women's class at Berklee she initially resisted ("What's the difference? We're all in this together") until its first session, spent processing exactly what she'd faced fifty years earlier, changed her mind about how much has actually changed.

She collaborates across generations: Smith, Jonathan Fitoussi, and now Actress, with more Concrète Waves volumes planned. She went to Berghain, got her whole entourage past the door, enjoyed herself thoroughly, and concluded on the record that it's not the greatest venue for sound. She was even converted to club music itself, won over by a masked DJ from Detroit whose set ambushed her at a festival and whose name, delightfully, she can never remember.

Asked about retirement, her answer never changes: "As soon as I feel I can quit, I will quit." And every time she gets close, she sees something that still needs to be done.

In 1974, she says, early electronic music couldn't even be heard. There was no listening for it. She never adjusted the signal. She just outlasted the silence, four or five times over, until the world finally grew ears. The world is still catching up: the most forward-looking electronic record of spring 2026 has a 79-year-old at the controls.