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Don Buchla in the Cybernetics Moment: Exploring Buchla's Place in 1960s San Francisco Featuring Ted Gordon and Marcia Bassett
This lecture and performance event will focus on Buchla's place within the cultural milieu of 1960s/1970s San Francisco. Note that we are also offering an afternoon screening of Subotnick: Portrait of an Electronic Music Pioneer, a film that helps set the stage for this lecture/performance. If you wish to attend that, please register separately here.
Join us at 8pm as musicologist Ted Gordon, author of The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America (University of California Press) presents a lecture and Q&A session on the origin of Buchla’s ideas and technologies within the cultural milieu of 1960s/1970s San Francisco. His talk will incorporate archival material that has never before been presented in public, including audio recordings and other documentation of Buchla’s first system built for the San Francisco Tape Music Center (now held at Mills College) and a system built for the Anonymous Artists of America.
Following his lecture, Gordon will be joined by Marcia Bassett, a frequent collaborator and NYC noise legend who regularly performs with Buchla instruments and guitar, to perform an improvised duo, articulating some of the ideas developed in the talk.
There is no admission fee but donations are encouraged. Seating is limited, so please contact us if you have signed up and can no longer attend so we can make your seats available to others.
8:00 pm Lecture/Performance
Ted Gordon, author of The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America (University of California Press) will present a lecture on Don Buchla in the 1960s Bay Area counterculture—as well as its nascent cyberculture—exploring the development of Buchla’s first Modular Electronic Music System at the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Connecting Buchla with Subotnick, the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, NASA, the Trips Festival, Richard Alpert, the Hell’s Angels, and other major figures in the 1960s Bay Area, this lecture will feature archival material that has never before been presented in public, and will articulate both a historical and a theoretical understandings of Buchla’s earliest design philosophy. A brief Q&A period will follow the lecture.
Finally, to conclude the evening, Gordon will be joined by Marcia Bassett, a frequent collaborator and NYC noise legend who regularly performs with Buchla instruments and guitar, to perform an improvised duet performance that articulates some of the ideas developed in the talk.
THEODORE (TED) GORDON
Theodore (Ted) Gordon is a musicologist and musician whose research combines the study of experimental music/musical instruments with general concepts in science & technology. He has created program notes and interpretive texts for several previous exhibitions including Sounding Circuits, a 2019 exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. His first book, The Composer’s Black Box: Making Music in Cybernetic America, was published in December 2025 by the University of California Press, and his writing has also appeared in Modular Synthesis: Patching Machines and People (Routledge), the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Contemporary Music Review, Organised Sound, Current Musicology, and other publications. Gordon regularly performs and improvises with Buchla instruments, often collaborating with NYC noise legend Marcia Bassett. He is assistant professor at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. More info can be found at ted-gordon.net.
MARCIA BASSETT
Marcia Bassett is a musician and artist based in NYC, known for her innovative, unconventional approach to music. Her work explores sound collage, improvisation, and audiovisual environments. Working with electronics, guitar, and voice, Bassett creates otherworldly narratives that are equal parts trance and critique. She is the founder of Yew Recordings and is also known for her solo work as Zaïmph, a project she initiated in 2005. She first made an impact with the Philadelphia outfit Un in the 1990s, releasing on Siltbreeze Records, before forming the experimental drone group Double Leopards. She frequently collaborates with others, including Samara Lubelski, Chuck Bettis, Taralie Peterson, Ted
Gordon, Thomas Dimuzio, and Ursula Scherrer. Recent solo recordings include Midnight Xpander LP recorded at EMS (Stockholm); Repeater cassette; Undulating Arkasboning cassette released on Artsy Records (2022), and a Digi-EP, Altering The Form, on the Belgian KraakRecords label KRUT. Collaborative recordings include Sunview (Live recordings with Chuck Bettis); Dream of Autumn Electrified Blues I & II (Live recordings with Ignatz), and Indexical/Rhizome live recordings with Samara Lubelski (Relative Pitch Records).
This event is part of EMEAPP/MMT's special exhibition Instruments That Talk Back: Celebrating the Legacy of Don Buchla. Funding for this exhibition has been provided by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. We are deeply grateful for their support.