Restoring the Buchla 100

The following is a guest post by Andrew Northrop of the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London (UCL).

In March 2024, the Library of Congress’s Buchla 100 synthesizer was restored through a project between the Library’s Music Division, technician Andrew Northrop from Slade School of Fine Art/UCL, the MEMS Project (Chip Flynn & Mark Milanovich) and the Nova Labs makerspace in Fairfax, Virginia. This blog by Andrew Northrop provides an overview of the repair.

Around 2008, the Library of Congress acquired one of the earliest Buchla 100 synthesizers through musician and teacher Michael Czajkowski, a friend of composer Morton Subotnick. The system was purchased by Subotnick in 1966 for his Bleecker Street studio in New York City, where he composed “Silver Apples of the Moon” (1967) and the “The Wild Bull” (1968). The first Buchla 100 system had emerged a few years earlier, during Subotnick’s time at the famous San Francisco Tape Music Centre, where he and Ramón Sender commissioned inventor Don Buchla to realize something that bridged the gap between tape music practice and the future capabilities of computers.

When Subotnick moved back to the West Coast to help setup CalArts in 1969, Czajkowski inherited most of the Bleecker Street system and set up the Composers Workshop at New York University (NYU). There he provided access to notable musicians including Laurie Spiegel and Éliane Radigue. The Buchla 100 then moved to Aspen Music School, where Czajkowski and Spiegel periodically taught on it. When “Silver Apples of the Moon” was being inducted into the National Recording Registry, Subotnick suggested the system be gifted to the Library of Congress.

In March 2024, the system was bought back into operation by Chip Flynn and Mark Milanovich of the MEMS Project – a group devoted to studying Don Buchla’s instrument designs, examples of which are often scarce and in private collections. The restoration took place across four days, with the invaluable help of the Nova Labs makerspace in Fairfax, Virginia, who provided space to work because of security restrictions around electrical work on Capitol Hill.

The repair was realized as part of a broader ‘knowledge exchange and innovation’ project funded by University College London, where I work as the Film and Media Technician for the Slade School of Fine Art. I had filmed the system on a 16mm film camera in July 2022, and received a lot of encouragement from the Library’s curator of musical instruments, Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, to think beyond that initial visit. I wanted to build a project around the Buchla 100 that would make the most out of its restoration and the opportunity to see behind its panels.

With Chip and Mark’s knowledge playing a vital role, we sought to research and document the system as much as we could whilst also repairing it, and we’ll be sharing our findings through various blog posts and initiatives in the coming months. The Bolex camera, of a similar age to the Buchla 100, was by my side throughout the trip, and I’ll be editing that 16mm footage into a short film.

Once we transported the Buchla 100 out of the Music Division’s Flute Vault and set up shop at Nova Labs, we began testing each module one-by-on, setting aside those requiring further attention. The team only replaced components when it was necessary for bringing a module back to historically correct operation. We did replace the power supplies with a more modern, sustainable alternative however, because the originals didn’t feel safe to keep in use.

A big part of this project was capturing front and back photographs of each module on a 50 megapixel stills camera, whilst we had the opportunity. The metal traces and solder joins on the circuit boards of each Buchla 100 module are works of art in their own right, transporting you back to the material processes of the 1960s, and giving insight into Don Buchla’s design philosophies.

Many of the circuit boards feature a spine-like pattern down the center, due to most of the modules having two of the same function. This results in Rorschach test-like layouts that may well have been inspired by the incoming psychedelia of the period. You might see a mantis on the back of the Dual Square Wave Generator Model 144, or perhaps a muscular figure if you view it upside down.

The front panels of the modules evoke their past use. In certain places you can see wear marks and bits of pencil that Subotnick and others left behind when using the system, and it was important for us to keep them there. Subotnick built the system up over time, and there seems to have been some substitutions made after its time in Bleecker Street, so you can see slight differences in the coats of paint and silk-screening on each module, indicating different points of manufacture.

There’s a move to displaying ‘Buchla & Associates’ as the manufacturer on a few modules, as well as a later module with the CBS Musical Instruments nomenclature and blue screen-printing. Those versed in the urban legends around Buchla equipment will notice one of the notorious red panel modules, though a chemical test run by the Music Division saw no evidence of LSD on the system as a whole.

Czajkowski had reconfigured the system for teaching purposes, and when we began the layout matched patchsheets he had made at Aspen Music School, corresponding with the label-maker labels on each module. When repopulating the cabinets, we wanted to strike a balance between both Subotnick and Czajkowski’s use of the system, whilst also making the system feel intuitive to new users. We used images from the ‘Famous Musicians at Work: Morton Subotnick’ filmstrip, produced by Jane Beethoven in 1968 for understanding how Subotnick had laid out the system at Bleecker Street.

The new layout gives sequencers a prominent position in the bottom row, mirroring Subotnick’s original configurations. We then work upwards with function generating modules and oscillators, towards mixers and filtering modules. Frequently paired modules are kept close to each other, so that there’s some encouragement for those approaching a Buchla 100 for the first time.

Around 2010, a few of the system’s modules had been put into a smaller case so that Subotnick could convey the key principles of the system at events. This is outlined in an article by Steve Antosca – who was instrumental in the Buchla’s acquisition – here. We put those modules that back into the cabinets and used that newly freed up case to house two Buchla 200 series modules from the collection of Vladimir Ussachevsky of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Those modules act as a bit of contextualization for where Don Buchla’s designs went next.

At various stages during the repair, we were combining modules and testing them, the soundscapes of which invited and intrigued Nova Labs’ members and volunteers. It was rewarding to see the interest the system caused, and to have Chip and Mark there telling stories about how certain aspects of the system were designed or inspired. We received the same enthusiasm once the system was back in the Flute Vault, where we showcased it to a group of Library of Congress staff.

The equipment is now available for researchers to play (by appointment, and subject to approval by the Music Division). We’re excited for people to discover the system. I’m thankful for Carol Lynn’s trust and encouragement and hope that others will be inspired to think about how they may engage creatively with different objects in the Library of Congress’s collections, of which the Music Division has many!

We’ve a handful of people to thank: Steve Antosca, Stephanie Akau, Cait Miller, Morton Subotnick, Tom Beyer, Dave Brown, Ted Gordon, the volunteers at Nova Labs, Larry Confino, Jane Beethoven, Robert Gluck, Thomas Jenkins, Jayne Parker, Jon Nensén, Elektronmusikstudion (Mats Lindstöm, Mats Erlandsson), and the Ernst Krenek Institut (Alethea Neubauer, Clemens Zoidl and Martina Pröll). Thank you to Robert Rabinowitz, Cynthia Webster and Genelec for equipment donations. We’d like to dedicate this project to the late Michael Czajkowski.

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Upcoming Special Event

Morton Subotnick and the Buchla 100
Thursday, December 5, 2024, 5:00-7:00 p.m.
LJ-119, Thomas Jefferson Building
Free, tickets required (available Wednesday, October 2 at 10:00 a.m. ET)

Featured Speakers: Morton Subotnick, composer; Steve Antosca, composer
Members of the Modular Electronic Music Systems (MEMS) team: Chip Flynn, MEMS Research Associate; Mark Milanovich, MEMS Research Associate; Andrew Northrop, Film and Media Technician, Slade School of Fine Art/UCL

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Enjoy these event videos from the Library’s collections. Morton Subotnick most recently appeared at the Library in concert on November 9, 2012.