Deep Breakfast, deep memory

This might sound a little out of character, but I've been listening to Ray Lynch's new age classic Deep Breakfast a lot lately. It's some of the first electronic music I ever heard. Some of the earliest music I remember listening to, period. I'd essentially forgotten about it. Then I watched, of all things, Gentlemen Broncos, which has a few tracks from Deep Breakfast. I recognized them instantly, but thought they were Manheim Steamroller. Some Googling landed me on the Wikipedia entry for Ray Lynch and it all came back to me. This wasn't a Fresh Aire album, but it's own (better) thing.

The album was made largely with a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, which uses a distinct and somewhat unusual type of audio synthesis (at least compared to subtractive and wavetable synthesis) called FM synthesis. The Knife used FM synthesis extensively on their album Silent Shout, which I think is part of what made it feel like it pulled me into an eerily familiar yet utterly alien world when I first heard it back in 2006. They were using the same sonic pallet of Deep Breakfast, which by that time had slipped almost entirely from my conscious memory but which I still strongly associated with my childhood. But The Knife was using that pallet in a very different way.

Rediscovering Deep Breakfast led me to explore some other new age music, which was apparently cool for a while in the early 2010s but is probably very uncool again by now. I'm particularly interested in the late Richard Burmer because his nephew is an old friend.