The Pop Corporation

The amount of incredible music that’s buried by time or happenstance is criminal, and one such LP that deserves all the love you can muster is Planetary Peace’s ‘Synthesis’… but what is it?

For fans of modular synths, DIY charm, acid folk and heartbreakingly gorgeous music, this needs to be on your radar. A husband and wife – Will and Kalima Sawyer – cut their own album, racing against the birth of their child, and crafted one of the most wonderful and charming albums you’ll ever hear.

Initially pressed up on a limited run of cassettes, it almost vanished without a trace before it was repressed, again, on a super limited run.

Recorded in 1980, you get modal instrumental passages, folkie vocals, charming spiritual music and bubbling, moody synths. Brett Becker is the mad who tripped over this album in New Mexico.

Love All Day tracked the couple down and spoke to them. They said: “we recorded it ourselves in London, fall 1980, on a TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck, in our living room. We had arrived in London with all of our equipment, intent on making this recording before the arrival of our first child in Mar, ’81. Through grace or luck, we found a small cottage near Hampstead Heath (right in the heart of London) that was quiet enough in the evenings to do the work. “

“Because we were into harmonic tuning, rather than equal temperament, we had searched out an instrument that we could tune ourselves; there was an engineer, Serge Tcherepnin, in San Francisco who had developed a kit for an analog synthesiser which fit our specs. We spent a few months prior to leaving for London laboriously building it, soldering it together and learning how to play it. It required patch cords that manually routed the signals in various configurations, connecting oscillators, filters, etc. Now of course, this is all done digitally.”

“We used a TEAC reel-to-reel tape deck, Shure mics and maybe some other stuff, like reverb, all of which we brought over with us. The funny part is that as we left S.F., our flight was delayed for several hours while they de-planed everyone in a remote area on the tarmac and looked through everyone’s luggage. They said there had been a bomb scare, and we figured out quite a bit later that it was our synthesiser that had likely triggered the alert!”

It truly is a one of a kind album – the kind that’s so great that you wonder if someone’s recorded it last week, come up with a great story about it, and is having us all on.

Rest assured, that’s not the case and this is such a beguiling and special thing that you should get yourself into it as soon as you can. It’s really magical stuff.

You can have your own copy of the LP here.