[S05E03] September 2023 - Mike Buffington

 




In the September 2023 episode of the Theremin 30 podcast, host Rick Reid plays theremin music from Australia, Finland, Spain, and the USA. Rick's guest is Mike Buffington of Forgotten Futures. 

FEATURED MUSIC*

  • "Trance Encounters" - The Night Terrors (Melbourne, Australia)
  • "Harmony with Planet X" - Xan Hughes (Kokomo, Indiana, USA)
  • "Watersnake" - Annaglyph (Crockett, California, USA)
  • "In the Heart of Winter, part 2" - Kepa Lehtinen (Helsinki, Finland)
  • "Texturas de pan, a peneira" - Paulo Pascual (Vigo, Spain) 

*The full-length recordings featured in this show were used with the knowledge and permission of the artists and composers. Please support the artists by visiting their websites, purchasing their recordings, and attending their performances. 

ADDITIONAL MUSIC

INTERVIEW GUEST

CALENDAR OF THEREMIN EVENTS

MEDIA LINKS

CONTACT

CREDITS 

Copyright 2023 Rick Reid 


--------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT

Please note: This transcript was created with the help of speech-to-text AI.  It may contain some errors.


David Brower  0:04  
This is Theremin 30. 30 minutes of Theremin museum news events and interviews with a new episode about every 30 days. Now here's your host from Denver, Colorado, USA, Rick Reid.

Rick Reid  0:18  
Hey, welcome to the September 2023 episode of the Theremin 30 podcast. It's the Labor Day holiday here in the USA as I finished the show today. In America we celebrate workers by taking the day off. Well everyone but me I'm working on 30 minutes of Theremin music from around the world. Plus an interview with RCA Theremin expert Mike Buffington will be talking about what he has been working on lately. Let's start the show now with an exclusive world premiere of the new single from Australian duo the night terrors featuring Myles brown on Theremin and synthesizers and Sarah Lim on even more synthesizers. Their fourth album is called hypnotic composition for Theremin and electronic music synthesizer. The first single is set for release on Tuesday, September 5, that's tomorrow, but we've got it a day early. This is trance encounters

Rick Reid 9:27  
We started this episode with trance encounters the first single from Hypnotica the brand new album by the night terrors set for release on November 3. After that we heard from Xan Hughes performing harmony with Planet X. Xan is based in Kokomo, Indiana, USA and he has his own channel on Twitch where he live streams, Theremin performances, and even plays along with old horror films. You can learn more about the night terrors and Xan Hughes by clicking on their names in this month's show notes after the breakup got the Theremin, 30 calendar of events and an off field logical tune from Annaglyph look that up in the dictionary. And later in the show I'll visit with Mike Buffington about his limited edition reproductions of vintage RCA Theremin documents. So stay tuned

Rick Reid 10:23  
It's time now for a look at that Theremin 30 calendar of Theremin events. Marla Goodman's Theremin themed art show continues at Kirk's grocery in Billings Montana through September 23. With the concert performance set for September 22. You can see Marla's paintings of their ministry you probably know by following the link in this month's show notes on September 9 as Shelley own hosts and other music and chat live streaming show on YouTube are scheduled guests are Harvey star and Danny dodge, who will be chatting about the STAR Labs ZTR MIDI guitar controllers. Lydia cabina will be performing sci fi favorites on Saturday September 30 For science fiction day at the historic papplewick Pumping Station in Nottingham, England, and synth fest UK takes place October 7 in Sheffield, England. For more details about these events and many more, check out the interactive calendar on Theremin thirty.com. If you have a Theremin related event you'd like me to list on the calendar send me a note with all the details. You can reach me with the contact form on the Theremin 30 website. Let's get back into the music now with the latest single from Annaglyph she sings and plays Theremin and synthesizers on this slithery song called watersnake.

Rick Reid  16:49  
We started that music sent with watersnake by Anna glyph. She has made a very clever stop motion animation music video for that track. Check it out on that Theremin 30 YouTube playlist. After that I played in the heart of winter Part Two from the Helsinki based Film and Television composer kept by LinkedIn and it's from the in the heart of winter EP that came out in March of this year. You can hear all seven tracks on Spotify and other streaming services. Coming up after this break I'll visit with Mike Buffington about some cool new RCA Theremin stuff. So stay right where you are.

Rick Reid  17:52  
Mike Buffington is one of the curators of the RCA Theremin registry. He is also one of the go to guys for restoring RCA Thurman's, his most recent restoration project is worth a lot more than the paper it's printed on. Hey, Mike, welcome to Theremin 30

Mike Buffington  18:09  
Hi, Rick. Thanks again for having me back on. It's great to be here again, 

Rick Reid  18:13  
your previous appearance on the show or you talked about restoring RCA Theremin. But now we have another project we're going to talk about where you're restoring. How do we describe it ephemera? Is that the right word?

Mike Buffington  18:26  
Yeah, I think that's a great word for it because these things are so rare. These are documents that were printed around the time of the RCA Theremin we have an owner's manual. We have a service notes and we have two brochures one just says the RCA Theremin and the other one says the victor Theremin. The goal was to get these things professionally printed and to make them look as authentic and original as possible as if they were new. 

Rick Reid  18:56  
So they don't look old. 

Mike Buffington  18:58  
Right we do have a little tagline that says you know reproduced by Mike Buffington and whatnot. When I say we I have been working with my friend Wally to packer is probably better known under his musical moniker as gocta. He has an interest in most things, vintage and Theremin fall into that category. I've been working with him on some other stuff. He has an interest in a musical instrument called the ondioline. 

Rick Reid  19:24  
Yeah, I caught his concert at Moogfest a few years ago. It was amazing. 

Mike Buffington  19:28  
Yeah, so he's really delve deep into audio lanes almost exclusively at this point. He's still working on new music and he has interest in other instruments but he went kind of crazy on the on the aliens and found all these great documents that were all in French. And so this is sort of the backstory of how I came to do this Victor theorem and stuff is that while he had this 40 Page printed sort of manual book that was a collection of radio journal articles that the inventor George Jennie put out and sort of as a monthly thing, and so they combined all of these articles into one printed document was only available in French. And while they had that document, professionally translated, and then I was given an English copy. And he's like, let's make an English version of this document. So I laid it all out. I did all the work, basically. And he was sort of the project manager of this. So I'd be showing it to him as it's not quite right at present there. And it's partially that extra 20% Because he's a no half measures kind of guy. And I'm a no half measures kind of guy, but he's even more so picky and detail oriented. So it's been really a good working kind of relationship where we're kind of challenging each other to do the best we possibly can. So this was maybe about six or seven years ago that I started this, I became friends with Floyd angles, the OG Theremin community will remember this guy is the guy who restored a lot of Theremins and made missing parts like replica antenna, I became friends with Floyd as I was building my own replica Theremin and starting to fix up them and Floyd and I would talk and I visited him a couple of times. And one time that I visited him the first time he sort of gave me the nickel tour, and we went through basically everything Theremin related in his house over the span of like, two or three days. And he pulled out an original RCA Theremin instruction manual and revisional RCA Theremin service notes. I've never seen either one before the service notes can be found in a compiled book that maybe radio enthusiast will know is an RCA Redbook is what it's sort of colloquially called. So I've seen that document in PDFs of all these things exist, but they're, you know, third generation photocopies, and they're really hard to see and read, and there's pairs and stuff. But these two documents came from the same owner. His name was Ray burrows, he had RCA cabinet number 439. Floyd pulled out the service notes and instruction manual from this and kept it. It's every time I talked to him, he's like, I'm done with it, Theremin stuff. So I would really love to like, buy the original service notes instruction manual from me. And it's like, I'll just send you everything. So a couple months later, I got this box, two boxes in the mail of 1930s. Radio magazines, and all of his notebooks have Clara's stuff. And Henry solomonoff stuff, Bob Moog stuff, just, you know, her literal footlocker worth of all these documents. And of course, in there was the service notes in the instruction manual. So that was really nice to kind of be able to hold this thing and say, Oh, this is mine now. And among this that I didn't notice before was the RCA Theremin brochure. And this is just a little trifold brochure that's black and white. And it says, absolutely new, unique musical instrument that anyone can play. 

Rick Reid  22:54  
It's not a radio, not a phonograph.

Mike Buffington  22:57  
Exactly, exactly. It's, it's the thing that like hypes up the Theremin is being this instrument that if you can whistle, you can, you know, you can play it. It's beautiful. It's got this very Art Deco feel with wavy lines and gradations. And you know, this copies in fairly good shape, but it's kind of been bent in half, and there's creases through it. And so I've got three of sort of the four or five known documents, and I'm saying why it's like, this would be really cool. If we made some reproductions of this. He's like, Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. So we decided to go ahead, because it was sort of my project, I sort of volunteered my time to work on the documents, getting them press ready, and then he would pay for printing them. So I scanned each page at like 2400 dpi, super high resolution, I had, you know, three or four other photocopies from other collections. And if there was some weird like ink spot that kind of, you know, compare all three documents, if all three had them, I would keep it in but if only one added it was kind of a printing error unique to that specific document to the best of my ability I kept in what would have been sort of on the printing plate itself so that it would look as authentic as possible. Even though I got a copy of the service notes from Floyd, it was probably used in a smoke filled house, and it's all crinkly. And somebody used just regular clear tape to tape it up. Because it was basically falling apart.

Rick Reid  24:24  
So you had a big piece of yellow tape fixing a tear in the book. 

Mike Buffington  24:28  
And yeah, there's a rip in the instruction manual that goes like right halfway through the page. And so if you scan that, the tape kind of shows up darker, and you can get that nice, crisp, clean lines of all of all the letters. So what I did was I took you know, if I was re spelling the word the I take a T from one place or if there was an HE together and I move in Photoshop and just sort of rebuilt the whole paragraph worth of damage stuff. We made 500 of these offset printed reproductions and that's kind of a nice number. because there were only 500 RCA therapists when we got them all printed and they were ready to go. I emailed all the people that we've worked with people whose Theron's we've restored and people who are interested in this kind of stuff are owners of nice RCA Theremin. So I know we sold a few and they're going into good hands into sort of the right hands, but we definitely have plenty to sell.

Rick Reid 25:21  
Well, it sounds like it's a perfect companion to an RCA Theremin that's in a museum or in a private collection. Right? Absolutely.

Mike Buffington  25:29  
I have set sitting on one of my RCA s 

Rick Reid  25:32  
you're the only person I know who can say one of my RCAs.

Mike Buffington  25:39  
It's not an obsession. It's not it's not it's not a problem. I'm okay,

Rick Reid  25:46  
how would you answer the question? Like why do these need to be reproduced in the first place?

Mike Buffington  25:51  
You're not going to find a better looking replica instruction manuals, anything you can find out there is going to be laser printed and bound with staples and won't have that beautiful brown cover won't be offset printed won't have that red ink on the cover. And so it's like, Why Why settle for something less than that? And

Rick Reid  26:10  
how does somebody order set of these documents,

Mike Buffington  26:13  
you can go to forgotten futures music.org to check out Wally's project, but at the top there's a link to the store. There's also a link at the top of that store page for the RCA Theremin documents. You can click that and you can choose between a bundle of all four or each object you can buy separately. You can find them on reverb and on eBay. And I believe on Instagram as well. So if you go to forgotten futures, Instagram page, I think they have a store. There you

Rick Reid  26:45  
are a great resource to the Theremin community. Because the work you do keeps history alive the magic of the original theremin alive.

Mike Buffington  26:55  
 I'd love it Theremin community. I love everybody out there. I know so many of you out there and I'm hoping that we're doing something well and doing something good for the community. 

Rick Reid  27:03  
You may never get a chance to own an RCA Theremin but you do have an opportunity to own one or all four of these cool RCA theremin document reproductions. For details follow the link in this month's show notes at Theremin thirty.com. We have just a little bit of time left. So to wrap up the show I'm going to play another brief selection from the documentary score by Paulo Pasquale that I featured in the August 2023 episode from the Negro Purpura soundtrack This is textured just upon a pen Yetta I think I said that kind of right and according to Google Translate that is textures of bread and a sieve.

Rick Reid  29:03  
A big thanks goes to the night terrors Xan Hughes Annaglyph, Kepa Lehtinen, and Paulo Pascual for sharing their wonderful music this month. Please support them by purchasing their albums attending their shows or just sending them a nice note to let them know you appreciate their talents. I also want to thank my special guest Mike Buffington for visiting with me and for all he does to preserve the legacy and history of the RCA Theremin. Also, I'm very grateful to the listeners who support this show with a monthly or one time donations. And finally if you enjoy it, Theremin 30 Please tell your friends about it. There's always room here for more listeners and more recording artists. Until next time, I'm your host, Rick Reid. We'll see you again somewhere in the ether.

David Brower  29:50  
You've been listening to the Theremin 30 podcast visit Theremin 30 on the web at Theremin 30 dot com
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