Electronic Music Studios
The impresario, trapped by the light, comes across as moth-like and religious. You are to hear, he announces, what you are here to hear. It is all perfectly English, upper-middle class. Picture the audience below him in their sixties gear of various colours of vomit: the women’s hair like turbines, their eyelashes curved like steel; the old gentlemen with their arms crossed; the middle-aged music journalists with pencil stubs. The beige curtains part, and on the wooden floor of the stage is the C‑O‑M‑P‑U‑T‑E‑R. Purchased with a wedding tiara, the price of a house in Putney, it is unprepossessing as a box. A man in mismatching trousers and blazer, and a woman in a mini and skivvy, press buttons and walk away. It begins. Hesitantly there appear cinematic visions of the future: the absurdity of R2D2; the flashing emergencies of James Bond film sets; the paranoia of HAL. Finally, there is boredom. The three partners of the Electronic Music Studios claim on TV that music is nothing but an arranged pattern of sounds. Pink Floyd and a lesser-known band, led by a bus-driver who transformed himself alongside bare-breasted women on stage, buy the VCS3. But then the company’s benefactor—she of the sold tiara—leaves for a sex-toy manufacturer. (That last bit, unfortunately, is made up.) EMS go bust. In a gesture of utopian largesse they donate their collection to England. The government stiffly declines. Removalists dump the lot in a cellar prone to flooding, where the hulking post-war machines date faster than time. In despair, one of the members retires to Adelaide, South Australia, where he resigns himself to writing symphonies and string quartets. In the end: Americans get the credit for inventing the synthesizer.
