TONTO's Expanding Head Band Orchestra
Tonto Rides Again

The Essential History of Electronic Music

IV. At the Court of King Moog

In 1934 Robert Moog was, and music became heretical.

Electronic music was, even before Wendy Carlos's Switched-On Bach, an alien object to common understanding: the legendary theremin was a weak, insubstantial embellishment, the preserve of a research entourage incapable of spreading the electronic gospel ecumenically. In 1963, the Moog came to be, at the hands of its creator, and heresy became a score in Wendy Carlos's phalanxes: Switched-On, in 1971, erupted as a mass phenomenon thanks to Moog's synthesizer, free of frills and devoid of "modern" identity. But Moog's artistry was not destined to end with a simple pamphlet on Bach, a sheet of cultured but lifeless style: thus, in 1969, Malcom Cecil and Robert Margouleff, on suggestion, with the work and instrumentation of Robert Moog, gave birth to the first true homogeneous exemplum of electronic music. 1969, and the TONTO's Expanding Head Band Orchestra saw the light.

The intention was to reproduce in all its dazzling heterogeneity the Moog-sound, to propose to the international threshold the timbral innovation introduced in music by the artificial element, to launch the first entirely original electronic production in form and content. Where Wendy did not reach, Cecil and Margouleff arrived: through Zero Time of 1971, the era of modern electronic music was inaugurated. The album, now a celebrated rarity for era collectors, was released quietly, destined to remain concealed from the global scene for advertising reasons: it would reluctantly become an essential model, conscious or otherwise, for the progressive English and Italian schools, for the electronic Kraut-Rock of Kraftwerk and Neu!, for the minimalist glitch era of the '90s in the hands of artists like Autechre, Aphex Twin, Mu-ziq. Zero Time is a little gem of primordial glitch, a marvelous example of electronics before electronics, a decoupage of the '70s that, restored like a Lang film, would sound like a record from the '90s or today.

The work opens with "Cybernaut," which immediately refers to Jarre's Oxygene, even before Squarepusher's recent "Planetarium"; "Jetsex" seems to tear open an entire anamnesis of Throbbing Gristle, while the more euphoric "Timewhys" has a funky-cosmic scent that would put Four Tet and Schulze in agreement. Hence, after the experimental collage of "Aurora," right at the end of the ideal first half of the work, the long psychedelic journey of "Riversong" bursts in its muffled raga, where in an Indian theory parade the Popol Vuh of Hosianna Mantra, the Enigma of "The Principles of Lust", and a young Franco Battiato, foresighted in quoting an excerpt in "Goûtez et comparez" of M. elle le Gladiator. The frowning "Tama" concludes the work.

The painstaking work of Cecil and Margouleff would have another chance to shine with the more experimental "It's About Time," a work wherein, through other small flashes like "Ferryboat," amid the Pan flutes of Cretu and Steve Roach, "Freeflight," amid the neurosis of Orb and Georg Deuter, the absolute value of new electronic music is affirmed. It is TONTO's Expanding Head Band Orchestra that is the musical conscience of the vast majority of past and present electroacoustic music authors, the maturing due date to be charged to memory when it retraces its indispensable prodromes. After "It's About Time" the two would turn to an honest career as supporting artists, appearing alongside a young Stevie Wonder. Today, The Original New Timbral Orchestra lives off its unknown past, of a posthumous success in life matured in the electronic works that indirectly drew sustenance from it.

More than ten years after the collection comprising the two disks of Cecil and Margouleff, "Tonto Rides Again" seems to tell us that the myth still lives, that one day the smoke of the Narghilè of Riversong will return to intoxicate the conscience, because TONTO's, in the elegiac drama of an apocalyptic Aurora, endlessly, still runs.

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