Buffy the Synth Slayer

by Lindsay Zoladz at Pitchfork - a fascinating celebration of Buffy Sainte-Marie's entire always-against-the-grain, always-ahead-of-her-time career, pivoting around her 1969 album Illuminations which incorporated avant-electronics

"...  in 1969, when she unleashed her astounding, trailblazing sixth LP Illuminations, she became the first musician not only to release an album with vocals processed through a Buchla 100 synthesizer (the very same unit that the electronic music legend Morton Subotnik had used to compose his landmark 1967 album Silver Apples of the Moon), but the first person ever to make an album recorded using quadraphonic technology, an early precursor to surround-sound...

"Because it had the familiar feature of a black-and-white keyboard, the Moog was the most popular and musician-friendly of the early synthesizers. The Buchla, which would become Sainte-Marie’s instrument, was another beast entirely.

“It wasn’t even as though there was an electric keyboard, it was too early,” she recalled. “We just called it a matrix, a bunch of possibilities you could connect in various ways to modify sound waves.”

"... Like many albums lightyears ahead of their time, Illuminations was a commercial disaster when it was first released. “People were more in love with the Pocahontas-with-a-guitar image,” she once said when asked why she thought Illuminations failed to find a contemporary audience...."