Customer Reviews

Metropolitan Suite

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Ah, electronic music! Quite possibly the most misunderstood music form.

That's the problem, isn't it? Today you mention Electronic Music and most everyone assumes that you're talking about techno, trance or any of the other so-called "modern" music forms who's composers employ synthesizers(mostly softwared based) as their main instruments.

The casual music fan hears or reads about Larry Fast being an electronic music pioneer and they probably expect to hear early Tangerine Dream or Jean Michel Jarre(both of whom contributed GREATLY to modern dance music). The reviewer that highlighted the missing "filter sweeps" from Metropolitan Suite proves to me that some listeners have NO CLUE to what Larry was trying to do.

Synergy is NOT dance music, so please don't expect filter sweeps and pleeps, pops and vocoders. Fast's solo Synergy projects have never been about tricks and gimmicks. He's focused, from the very start of his carreer, on creating symphonic simulations using synthesizers. His seminal Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra is one of the most important recordings in the history of electronic music.

To classify MS as "80s New Age music" is an insult to Larry Fast and everything he stands for. Larry is one of THE MOST influential artists in the history of modern music and Metropolitan Suite is his magnum opus.

You will reap the recording's full and intended impact if you live in a large city and have an opportunity to listen to the CD on head phones while walking around and viewing the skyscrapers. The genius of Larry Fast will hit you square between the ears!

Larry Fast's magnum opus was saved for last--"Metropolitan Suite". I'm not going to deny its Copland and Gershwin influences, and probably neither would he. For all of its derivative nature, we have a great 5-movement work here--the Gershwin comes in the form of its recurring theme that sounds like something out of "Porgy and Bess". Other notable pieces are "Prairie Light", which has a Richard Burmer style melodic New Age feel, and "Redstone", whose Fender Telecaster guitar timbres not only serve as a nostalgia trip through '60s surf rock, but suggest that Fast may well have written the synth patch on his handmade synths that I take for granted on my Yamaha TX module.

A musical story by the inventor of truly musical electronic music. Don't miss the re-release CDs of all the Synergy albums on the "Third Contact" label. This music never gets old.

I'm going to start off by saying, shame on the guy who wrote the "too much DX7" review. Go read Larry's page and what was used. For when this was recorded, he was WAY ahead of his time! You think about how much work and programming went into the MIDI composition. 5 days to record the actual track from the MIDI back then, that's a lot of data being translated by a Commodore VIC!

I listened to this album on cassette from 1987 when it came out, to 1989, on my old Walkman, till it gave out. I walked from Union Station to the Apparel Center (now the SunTimes building) every day for those two years and would start listening to the Suite from the time I was coming up the escalator and I would exit the building when the crescendo would occur. It was the perfect backdrop to the whole musical fest that was occurring in my ear. I picked up the CDs when they came out, for all of Larry's albums, and now I'm going to purchase the MP3 files, because I want them for my phone. (the CD was lost in the shuffle of my last move), so now, I'll save them to the cloud so that I always have them. I can't recommend this enough.

My only wish (if Larry ever reads these), is that the MIDI files be released someday, for musicians to tinker with, or that Mr. Fast actually takes these wonderful pieces to a full orchestra and has them play his music and record it. I think it would be phenomenal!

Amazon would use the true Original release date. I bought this on cassette in 1989. Was thrilled to find it on CD over a decade later, but the Amazon release date of 2005 (If I remember correctly) gives a different expectation of this and many other releases.

As a fan of Larry Fast from his "Sequencer" album, I was even more delighted to hear this album. His arrangements are expanded beyond the mere emulation of symphony orchestration through the use of analog and digital synthesis, which offers seemingly boundless sonic possibilities. The musical pieces that are covered under the umbrella of "Metropolitan Suite" are truly tone poems that paint vivid mental pictures of city life during the early 20th century. The remaining pieces on the album are more upbeat, and yet still produce the excitement of mental imagery through Fast's creative use of electronic instrumentation. Only track eight, "West Side Nights," seems to lack a bit on the production end as it is not as tight as the rest of the album. On the whole a thoroughly enjoyable album that I will play over and over.

The thing that separates Larry Fast from the rest of the solo instrumental synth composition pack is his strong sense of melody and composition. Anyone can string together random filter sweeps, bleats, bleeps, blats and find the arpeggiator on/off switch. Hell, you don't even need a synth for that -- MOTU's Digital Performer will do that for you.

But one thing neither Digital Performer or ANY synth out there will do is create stunningly beautiful and evocative sound landscapes, as Fast has done with this release. Less classically inspired than earlier Synergy releases, "Metro Suite" evokes a jazzier, Gershwin-esque sound, not only melodically, but in the patches Fast uses to model his virtual orchestra. Intentional or not, to me it brings to mind the coincidental rise of jazz and city skyscrapers in perfect metaphor; the excitement of city life as new buildings and artforms sprang to life in the 50s.

This is simply great stuff...I wish Larry Fast would treat my ipod to some new material!

This is a fine CD of instrumental music on average. The first half (probably corresponding to side one of an LP) is excellent and worth five stars hands down. An integrated synthesizer symphony in five movements, it has an 80's soundtrack feel (one glance at the album cover should give away its decade of origin) and yet evokes in the listener (this one anyway) the rise of industrial metropolitan cities in early twentieth century America--both the energy and power and the loneliness and anomie, and shades of moods inbetween. Skyscrapers rising, streetcars criss-crossing, and crowds swelling all in sped-up time-lapsed visuals. The music is extremely moving and contains about as much darkness and hope as you could've gotten from the electronic instruments of the day, and without getting sentimental or wishy-washy. These latter traits were reserved for the latter half of the CD, I guess, which may have been included because it seems to mildly and quietly utilize some of the same themes as the first half. And it's not all that bad, probably worth three stars, but gets uncomfortably cheesy and melodramatic for stretches of time, and in any case doesn't have the integrated feel of the first half. The last track is pretty much new wave rock music without lyrics, sounding a lot like the Cars performing while Ric Ocasek takes a coffee break--not a bad thing in and of itself by any means, but a somewhat weird and discordant way to end the CD. But enough rambling. Despite a few shaky points, this album is a fine specimen of instrumental proto-electronica with an oddly double nostalgic charm.

This gem of an album I happened upon while in a used music store. After really getting more aquianted with these unique synthesizer melodies on cassette, I broke down and orderd the CD. There is alot of rich sounds imagination and ingenuity in these recordings. Primeaval force behind these compilations. An ultra modern factory of the future, or a prehistoric landscape.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but I hate the sound of the Yamaha DX-7. Unfortunately, Larry Fast apparently got a DX-7 circa 1983, and used it all over this album. So while I would wholeheartedly recommend his timeless earlier work, to my ear this album hasn't aged well at all--it sounds like Miami Vice soundtrack outtakes.

Of course, if you like DX sounds and mid-80s flavor synth drums, you might love this album. It's an aesthetic judgement, and your mileage may vary.