Beau Sorenson & Maryam Qudus

Interviews

Danny Elfman

Interviews

Blak Emoji’s Future R&B

Interviews

Shoes

Interviews

Loma

Interviews

Shearwater and Recreating David Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy Live

Interviews

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JULY 23, 2025 INTERVIEWS
Suzanne Ciani

Suzanne Ciani: The Fourth Wave

Suzanne Ciani is one of my neighbors (who has become a good friend), so it's almost too easy for me to overlook how massive her contribution to music and record production is. That is also due in part to the fact that she is a very warm and open person, and is offhandedly modest about her life's work. She's quite happy to let me store my surfboard at her house, as it's right next to my favorite surf break. When I see her, we're just as likely to talk about cooking Italian food as making music, so this interview is long overdue. When I was in college, I read interviews with Suzanne in Keyboard and dB magazines. Given all of this history, I was pretty psyched to finally be able to interview her for Tape Op. Suzanne has a wide circle of friends and professional colleagues; as such, she is always busy and on the go. She holds a dual citizenship passport, traveling yearly to visit her Italian family. I'm continually impressed by how much activity she can pack into a year. One of the main things that really impresses me about Suzanne is that she is essentially now on her fourth career. She began as a composer, working in the then very new electronic music field. From Boston, she came out to U.C. Berkeley for a master's degree in composition, moonlighted at the San Francisco Tape Music Center at Mills College in the early 1970s, and worked closely with seminal electronic music designer/builder Don Buchla. Next, after a brief stop in L.A., she moved to New York City and opened Ciani/Musica, Inc., one of the busiest commercial music studios of the day and one of the first to use synthesis to generate sounds for radio and TV commercials. Her synthesized sound of a bottle of Coca-Cola being opened and poured became one of the most iconic sounds in TV commercial audio. During this period, she scored the Lily Tomlin film The Incredible Shrinking Woman, played on a classic Star Wars disco album (Meco's Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk), designed the sound for Bally's Xenon pinball game, and even appeared on Late Night with David Letterman demoing her vocal processing "voice box." Next up, Suzanne embarked on a solo music career, becoming one of the most successful artists in what came to be called "new age" music. During those years, she recorded with artists such as Vangelis and Elliott Randall, and released many albums. She's been nominated for Grammys, taken home Clio Awards (for advertising work), and was presented a Lifetime Achievement Award by the Women in Audio Section of the Audio Engineering Society. She's also had a full-length feature documentary created about her, A Life in Waves, released in 2017, as well as being featured in the new, highly-acclaimed documentary Sisters With Transistors. And this is still only scratching the surface of all she's accomplished. In 1992 she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and, after a full recovery, she decided to move to a small home in West Marin County, California, overlooking the ocean and to simplify her life. That didn't last long, however, as a new, younger audience discovered her music in the 2000s, and she's now an in-demand lecturer and concert performer on her modular Buchla synthesizer. Beau Sorenson and I managed to catch up with her at her home in early fall of 2021, a few days before she left for concerts in Europe and a visit with her Italian family.

JULY 23, 2025 INTERVIEWS
Finding Their Way

Finding Their Way: Making Kowloon Walled City’s Piecework

Longtime Tape Op contributor Scott Evans has played in a band called Kowloon Walled City for many years. In October of 2021, KWC released their fourth LP, Piecework. Recorded by Scott at Oakland's Sharkbite Studios, and mixed at his own Antisleep Audio, Piecework has been described as, "Intricate, room-mic'd, and mean," by the Chicago Reader. We asked Jack Shirley [Tape Op #115] and Scott to sit down to discuss the making of this record.

COLUMNS

Rob Christensen, a Big Star to Me
END RANT
Gear Geeking w/ Andy…
GEAR GEEKING

GEAR REVIEWS

Gear Reviews

Clarett+ 8Pre Interface

by Clarett+ 8Pre Interface  |  reviewed by Daniel Ryan Morse

I’ve been fiercely loyal to my older computer audio interfaces, ignoring the glut of new options over the years. Yes, I’ve had to buy a host of over-priced Apple connectors to keep my legacy devices hooked up, but that seemed a small price to pay to defy the culture of planned obsolescence! As...

Gear Reviews

EQ52 500 Series EQ

by EQ52 500 Series EQ  |  reviewed by Scott McChane

Calling the EQ52 from Ingram Engineering a plain old “EQ” is like calling a rocketship a paper airplane – not correct. You can’t just insert this module into your 500 Series rack, twiddle a few knobs, call yourself a genius, and go home early on your first try. This EQ is one of those pieces of...

Gear Reviews

Galaxy 32 Synergy Core Interface

by Galaxy 32 Synergy Core Interface  |  reviewed by Geoff Stanfield

The new Galaxy 32 Synergy Core 32-channel interface from Antelope Audio is something special. Advances in technology have made almost every converter on the market a viable option for professional studios. Of course, they all have a thing or two that makes them a little unique, but overall,...

Gear Reviews

HD 400 PRO Headphones

by HD 400 PRO Headphones  |  reviewed by Tom Fine

Sennheiser, a German business run today by the founder’s grandsons, took a new direction last year. A longtime player in consumer and professional headphones, microphones, and other technologies (in addition to owning Neumann since 1991), Sennheiser spun off its consumer electronics division to...

Gear Reviews

Lever Nuts 221 Series Splicing Connectors

by Lever Nuts 221 Series Splicing Connectors  |  reviewed by Garrett Haines

Most studio owners have to do some electrical wiring. Always check local codes to make sure you’re follow safety and legal guidelines. Traditionally, spliced wires are twirled together and bound by wire twist nuts. The twist types are problematic because a good bond requires the correct sized cap....

Gear Reviews

P-414 Microphone

by P-414 Microphone  |  reviewed by Slater Swan

Modeled after the sought-after AKG C 414 EB from 1976, the Peluso Microphone Lab P-414 is reviving a cult classic with a few upgrades to help it thrive in the modern world of recording. Just as original C 414 EBs are becoming increasingly hard to find and used prices are skyrocketing, the team at...

Gear Reviews

PSP InfiniStrip WIND Plug-In

by PSP InfiniStrip WIND Plug-In  |  reviewed by Garrett Haines

When digital audio workstations were in their infancy, third-party plug-ins were scarce. Even more rare were ones that sounded good. But in those early years, Poland’s PSPaudioware released a masterpiece: The PSP VintageWarmer [Tape Op #29] combined compression and analog emulation to make computer...

Gear Reviews

Rum Room Simulator Plug-in

by Rum Room Simulator Plug-in  |  reviewed by Dave Hidek

Rum (pronounced “room”) is an interesting effect from Klevgrand, a Swedish developer that’s been cranking out innovative plug-ins for the last handful of years. Rum provides room simulation for recorded audio or software instruments. As stated on Klevgrand’s website, Rum is intended to provide...

Gear Reviews

Sub One Active Subwoofer

by Sub One Active Subwoofer  |  reviewed by Scott McChane

It may be a rhetorical question, but when did it become necessary to integrate a subwoofer into our monitoring setups? I can remember a time in the early 2000s when subs seemed more of an inconvenient “option,” one that seemingly interfered with session efficiency instead of offering a helpful look...

Gear Reviews

TAIP Tape Emulation Plug-In

by TAIP Tape Emulation Plug-In  |  reviewed by Dave Hidek

BABY Audio’s TAIP is a unique plug-in. Lately, we’ve been exposed to some fantastic tape machine plug-in emulations, but TAIP takes it one step further by offering an AI-powered emulation that is incredibly intuitive, musical, and inspiring – perfect for sound designers, mixers, producers, and...

Gear Reviews

Volt 276 USB-C Interface

by Volt 276 USB-C Interface  |  reviewed by Dana Gumbiner

This handsome little wood-sided box houses what is effectively Universal Audio’s first entry into the low-cost USB audio interface market, representing a bit of a paradigm shift for the company’s approach. Unlike UA’s audio interfaces in the past, the new Volt range has no onboard DSP to run their...