After the passing of Klaus Shulze and listening to some of his amazing recordings i went back to Tomita.
Realised he died in 2016 but couldn’t find a thread here saluting his contribution to electronic music. So here we are.
What i enjoy about Tomita is his sense of synth humour delivered so slickly.
Scott/Dockstader/Carlos all shared this in certain recordings.
He recorded loads of material, share/discuss here.
Majority of his albums include the equipment used list on the back which is always fascinating.
The sort of artist that brought modular to the masses alongside Wendy Carlos. You can find Tomita’s RCA catalog throughout flea markets in the barren tundra of art that is Arkansas and Oklahoma
Tomita’s early albums (I was in high school at the time) drew me more into both classical and prog rock. Pretty sure I borrowed them (on vinyl, of course) from the local public library branch.
If you like Tomita, you should listen to this incredible, crazy and perfect album, Odyssey by David Bedford (Mike Oldfield’s collaborator/orchestral arranger…)
Gosh. I won a contest at my school and the prize was a gift certificate at a record store and this was one of the two albums I bought with it. I don’t believe I’ve heard of it or thought of it since about 1980.
Edit: listening now (linked videos have geographical restrictions). I have no aural memory of this, unlike Tomita. We had such little information at the time. This was on display in the store, and the back of the sleeve had the musicians and equipment used; that was my entire context. I knew Mike Oldfield, of course, but not Andy Summers, yet.
My cousin played Dungeons & Dragons with a group of his nerdy friends. Their dungeon master was the nerdiest of them all and one time he gave my cousin a bunch of cassettes which had been previously recorded by him. My cousin took them home and recorded his own heavy metal albums on top of the synth stuff but one cassette for some reason did not comply. You could still hear the synth music from underneath the Kiss & W.A.S.P. -songs. My cousin gave that tape to me as he knew I liked Jarre, Vangelis and such.
The tape had one heavy metal synth cacophony track (made by my cousin by trying to wipe it) in the beginning but after that the weirdest most intriguing music started to play. It was Pictures At An Exhibition by Tomita. For years I listened to that tape and Mussorgsky and that particular composition became my favourite classical composition. I’ve later bought it on vinyl (without the Kiss mashup in the beginning) and bought some other works from him too. A lot of my sound design ideas still come from listening to that tape as a kid. It had a profound effect on me.
