Also this issue: Lefty Hooks Lefty’s Deceiver picks up new tricks and throws down the rock on Cheats. -John Vettese The Folksman The music world pays tribute to Philadelphia’s living legend Gene Shay. -Mary Armstrong Mary Bichner -Patrick Rapa Haley Bonar -M.J. Fine Mastodon -Paul Burress Fruit Bats -Sam Adams Adrian Crowley -Sam Adams The Party of Helicopters -John Vettese

May 8-14, 2003

music

Mallard Rising

Synth music avatar David Borden updates the Moog cookbook.

by A.D. Amorosi

Glitchcore heads, electronic classicists and trance-ambient DJs owe a debt to David Borden.

Back when Philip Glass was still driving a cab -- before Kraftwerk got rhythm and Peaches was even born -- Fulbright scholar David Borden was hanging in upstate New York with Dr. Robert Moog, the man who invented the synthesizer. It was 1967, and Borden had an all-access pass to Moog's factory and his latest invention, the voltage controlled electronic analog Moog. This single piece of equipment inspired Borden to form Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co. -- the "first all-synthesizer band" -- and create creepy, melodically complex albums. The rest is history. Or, rather, it should be.

"Phil and Steve [Reich] urged me to move to Manhattan for career reasons, but there was never any question of leaving Ithaca. I [had] found my place," says Borden, contentedly. Currently director of the digital music program at Cornell U, Borden has had his solo Counterpoint series and Mother Mallard classics reissued in recent years. He's touring with a new Mother Mallard lineup due to renewed interest in analog music. ("An up-and-coming DJ visited me to ask permission to use pieces for remix. Paid me a great compliment by telling me he thought pieces like my Easter' was ahead of its time.")

Frustration is not in his blood. Neither is the self-hype it took to drive Glass and Reich -- pals of Borden's whose works he has performed -- into the mainstream. "Though I was influenced by Phil's 1974 Town Hall concert, experimenting harmonically from just doing the drone-like stuff, musically I was much more influenced by Terry Riley than Phil or Steve. But their work then gave me a boost. I didn't feel so alone."

Borden is modest. And most human. Music degrees from Harvard, Eastman and Hochschule für Musik didn't mean as much as having a janitor father who was an amateur pianist. He may have been influenced by friends who mentored him -- the "meticulous" John Cage, the "spiritual avant-garde Spike Jones" that was David Tudor -- and Buckminster Fuller's radical theory of doing more with less. "I thought three players performing on synthesizers could make as many interesting sounds as an orchestra."

But Borden was as enlightened by humor as invention upon meeting and befriending Dr. Moog. "We're introverts with quirky senses of humor. We get hysterical with laughter while others scratch their heads," he says.

Mother Mallard -- having only released 1973's eponymous album and its '76 follow-up, Like a Duck to Water -- did not experience much in the way of initial success. But Borden is calmly aware of what it is he and his initial blast of synth wrought. "I didn't think it was monumental. But we knew we were doing something no one else was. I thought of it as an invention that would probably rival the piano in the history of musical instruments. I didn't anticipate the combination of computer technology and synthesizers, though engineers at the Moog Co. speculated that everything would eventually be zeros and ones. It seems so strange to think that synthesizers were once such a rare thing that people would travel miles just to see and hear one."

Both Mother Mallard albums seem only a bit kitsch now. Borden's music is meant to be ironic and humorous, while also technically serious. "Teresa Brewer's tape loop [on the song ŒMusic'] was my Warhol Campbell Soup Can," he jokes about his glacial, repetitious symphonies. Less blunt than Mother Mallard, Borden's bright solo work (not counting a series of jazz piano CDs dedicated to Gershwin and Ellington, or his work on the soundtrack for 1973's The Exorcist), is introverted but with a sense of dynamic timbre and solitude.

The result of all this is a uniquely open, American synthesizer sound, very unlike Glass and Reich. "We were anxious to shed the ŒEuropean' influences embodied by academia," says Borden of Mother Mallard. "We modeled ourselves on Ives and Cage and drew on painters like Chuck Close and Jasper Johns as well as philosopher/writers like Fuller and Henry David Thoreau."

Designed primarily for live performance, Mother Mallard has quietly re-entered the live arena, where one can "empathize with musicians taking chances, stretching their abilities to make the music sound meaningful." Now that analog has been made warm through new software and synths, Borden sees a chance to re-establish the live synthesizer performance and its bubbling stoic sound as an art, not mere entertainment.

"We were lumped together with Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream," he says. "Truth is, we never considered ourselves to be part their world at all. We never thought of ourselves as entertainment, or alternative pop/rock. It's just that we used synthesizers and were influenced by mass culture that this perception came about. The various [other] genres meant nothing to us."

More than ever, Borden wants to express the dignity and beauty of Mother Mallard's electronic art in a live forum. "Without that, it may simply fade away."

The Gathering presents Mother Mallard's Portable Masterpiece Co., Sat., May 10, 8 p.m., $10-$20, St. Mary's Hamilton Village, 3916 Locust Walk, 610-734-1009.