ÍÑ¿ã°É

It’s rare to touch a piece of history.

The Mona Lisa smirks from behind glass, enticing tourists to trespass. The pyramids of Teotihuacan squat in solitude, protected from clumsy hands.

But what if a historic artifact was within arm’s reach?

In 2019, Eliot Curtis was fortunate enough—or unfortunate—to touch history when he accepted a restoration gig for ÍÑ¿ã°É Bay’s Music Department.

The object was a 1960s Buchla (BOO-kluh) Model 100, one of the world’s first modular synthesizers, invented by Berkeley resident Don Buchla. With few remaining and one preserved at the Library of Congress, it stands among modern music’s great innovations.

While cleaning, Curtis came upon a crusted substance and worked it loose with a finger dipped in rubbing alcohol.

Almost immediately, a tingling sensation coursed through his body as pressure built in his head. Startled, he sought help. A hazmat team arrived.

Tests revealed he had absorbed what the Woodstock Generation once called Blotter, Pink Robots, Yellow Sunshine. Today, we know it as LSD.

The Buchla had arrived on campus decades earlier with the help of Bay Area composer Anthony Gnazzo, a friend of Buchla’s.

Professor Emeritus Glenn Smith (B.A. Music ’68), a senior at the time, recalls getting his hands on the new machine in the summer of ’68.

“It was an analog computer… you’d turn the button on, the pitch would go up… and you put the resulting sounds into a mixer.”

Buchla hand-built each Model 100 from chains of oscillating and filtering modules that passed sound from one to the next. Any input was warped and reshaped. Rearranging the modules changed everything, making permutations feel infinite, novel, and strange.

The instrument was so cutting edge that Smith and Gnazzo were the only two entrusted with keys to the room. Like mad scientists, they fed sounds through it and listened to what came back.

Eventually others had access. From the fever dream of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Illuminations to the mechanical breathing of Darth Vader, the Buchla helped define the sound of the 1960s and ’70s.

Today, artists like Billie Eilish, Stereolab, and Linkin Park still draw on those techniques, filtering everyday sound into music.

The contaminated module that sent Curtis on a trip was one of the earliest Buchla built. Strikingly red, legend places it on tour with Led Zeppelin.

Some believe the residue dates back to that era, when absorbing LSD through the fingers was not uncommon. In the Bay Area, where experimentation thrived, it isn’t hard to imagine sound and psychedelics moving together.

“The West Coast version of the avant-garde was taking place here,” said Smith, pointing to a wave of composers working nearby.

There was also chaos—the Vietnam War, social unrest. For Smith, the response was simple.

“I thought the best thing I could do for the world would be to continue writing music.”

Dr. Ines Thiebaut, Associate Professor of Music, now oversees the instrument. She sees it as both artifact and access.

As part of Sound Design II, students are able to work with it in ways that would be impossible elsewhere.

“We're getting students who have never been able to access these resources in their lives,” she said.

Nearly sixty years later, the same small room still holds it.

This time, without the LSD.