| Larry Fast | |
|---|---|
| Origin | West Essex, New Jersey |
| Genres | Electronic music |
| Instruments | Keyboard |
| Years active | 1975–present |
| Labels | Passport, Atlantic, Voiceprint, ABC Classics |
| Associated acts | Synergy, Nektar, Peter Gabriel, Yes, Tony Levin Band |
| Website | http://synergy-emusic.com/ |
Lawrence Roger 'Larry' Fast (born 10 December 1951 in Newark, New Jersey) is a synthesizer expert and composer. He is best known for Synergy, his 1975–1987 series of synthesizer music albums, and for his contribution to a number of popular music acts, including Peter Gabriel, Foreigner, and Hall and Oates.[1]
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Fast grew up in Livingston, New Jersey and attended Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, where he obtained a degree in History. There he took his previous training in piano and violin and melded them with computer science to become interested in synthesized music and to build his own primitive sound-making electronic devices.
He was introduced to Rick Wakeman, the keyboard player from the band Yes during a local radio interview, and traveled to the UK to work with Yes on their 1974 album Tales from Topographic Oceans. It was there that he got a recording contract with Passport Records.
Fast recorded a series of pioneering synthesizer music albums under the project name Synergy. Some of this work was used as the basis for music in Commodore 64 and Amiga computer games, notably Rob Hubbard's score for the C64 version of Zoids, which was an unofficial cover of Synergy's Ancestors from the 1981 album Audion.
The first album in the series, Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra, was released as an LP in 1975. Like the following albums, it exclusively makes use of electronic instruments, mainly synthesizers. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Fast released eight more Synergy LPs on Passport Records, all of which were later re-released on CDs. The 1998 re-release of Semi-Conductor, a compilation album originally released in 1984, was a remastered version of the original, and contained ten additional tracks. The eleventh album in the series, Reconstructed Artifacts, was released in 2003, and contained completely new performances of select compositions from the previous albums, using modern digital synthesizers, as well as the new digital recording technologies.
Currently Fast is slowly developing a new Synergy album, which is likely to come out in 2012. This will be his first studio album consisting of new material in over twenty years. According to Fast's website, it will heavily make use of software synthesizers (one of which is, fittingly, Sample Logic's Synergy synthesizer) rather than the hardware equipment he has been using so far. He has amassed a lot of new thematic material and plans to rework some old, as yet unreleased pieces for the new album as well.
On Synergy's first and second album, the following statement appears: "This album was created with absolutely no guitars." This is an apparent counter-reference to repeated statements appearing on albums by the rock group Queen that "This album was created with absolutely no synthesizers."
The albums by Synergy are:
He has done some work with designing listening devices for the hearing disabled. His wife had been working in the field for some time. He owns several patents[3] for optical distribution using infrared audio technologies. [4] Fast is also part of a government group aiming to protect some of New Jersey's historic assets against developers.
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