Darwin: Okay today, I get a chance to talk to somebody; I will tell you, I have had a number of people kind of beat on me for not having talked to her already. Her name is Lisa Bella Donna and if you are a regular reader of Synthtopia, if you have a freaking Facebook account and admit to being a synth-head, any of these kinds of things, you will have run into Lisa's work. She does some amazing videos works with some amazing people. And so with no further ado, let's talk to Lisa.
Darwin: Now I will say that, for all of the people who have asked me to talk to you, it was actually a Reverb transaction can actually connect at us. So that was actually pretty interesting, but I'm glad it's happened because I have been wanting to talk to you for quite a while. Now, as I kind of mentioned in the intro, I kind of follow your work by seeing you come up on Synthtopia or coming up on my Facebook feed and some of these other things, but why don't we have you talk about what your current work looks like?
Lisa: Sure. Well, I just finished up doing a new album and video that was commissioned by the Sisters with Transistors film and Metrograph films. It was intended to be a post-premiere exclusive concert, for their release of the film, which is brilliant. If you haven't watched it yet, it's really a wonderful, you have really like the first film really made about the pioneering women of electronic music. So I was obviously grateful to be called and to be included. And, yeah, the album turned out really well and the film as a result. So it's just a live in studio concert. And, my partner Tristin Weary helped me do that and yeah, I'm very proud of it. So it's a great collection of music in a 40 minute package. So a lot of people have, seemed to enjoy it, a lot of amazing response on it. So I'm always very grateful. Other than that, doing a lot of sound design work right now and teaching and homeschooling, of course. So it's been a busy spring, but I'm grateful and I'm very grateful that the weather is starting to turn for the better.
Darwin: Yeah, no kidding. Not only the weather, but yeah, I know from your feeds, you have child-rearing to deal with. And so having this whole COVID thing starts to blow over and all this other stuff, I think that's going to actually really change our very positive way. Now, one of the things that I have seen recently is, in addition to your work related to the Sisters with Transistors film, you also have been working a lot with some of the classic synth makers. I mean, I think that if anyone would just sort of like say, what is the visual that you have of Lisa, it would be in a room surrounded by classic synths. How did you get into that?
Lisa: Well, back in the eighties, I started working in jingle studios and the very first one that I really did a lot of steady work with, long story short, had some old equipment at that time, you know, considered to be old, you know, they had all the state-of-the-art equipment at the time DX7's and D-50's and all that, but yeah, my muse was going in its own way. And even though I was, you know, using their equipment for the productions, you know, I discovered their Fender Rhodes and ARP Odyssey, and immediately thought, okay, this is the closest I've ever got to come to, after hearing Switched-On Bach and Sonic Seasonings by Wendy Carlos, which were a huge, huge inspiration to me, very young. So I started to experiment with those synthesizers and then started to find them the best I could at that time and create my own sort of, little electronic music studio as if it was in the seventies, you know. I just got so into that way of working, even though I always did use other digital keyboards for other kinds of work, my personal work always revolved around analog and modular synthesis.
Darwin: Okay. What is the first analog synth that you bought?
Lisa: ARP Omni!
Darwin: Oh, nice. Do you still have it per chance? That's fantastic. That's, there's something about those old string machines that it's really hard to replicate in any other way. Isn't it?
Lisa: That's a special one too. Yeah. I have a String Ensemble that I got shortly after that, but the ARP Omni is cool because it's stereo. So you have, you know, strings on one side and sort of brass on the other, or you can use this chorus spacer that's on it. And then it gives you two different envelope generators after it sort of colorizes the whole sound, which is what I always call the Jean-Luc Ponty sound. Because if you listen to any Ponty album from 1976 to 1982, I mean, he really got his mileage out of that instrument too.
Lisa: It was huge. Huge to why I wanted it. And so, yeah, that's the Omni. You can't can't deny it. I mean, it's a fickle beast and I've, I have two of them actually. And so one's always working and one's always not working. So it balances itself out.
Darwin: It's interesting. You say that though, because actually at one point, you know, just at the very tail end of people not wanting analog gear, I had the opportunity to collect a fair amount. And one of the things I found was that so much of the time the stuff was broken, that it actually ended up kind of affecting the musicality of it for me. Because I barely know which end of a soldering iron gets hot, so, you know, I'm not a person that can repair my own stuff. How do you deal with that part of it?
Lisa: Well, you know, I don't consider myself a technician. However, being a touring musician for many years, I've used a lot of these, a lot of this equipment for many years on the road, because it's all I had. I had to learn how to repair certain things and to, you know, deal with leaky capacitors and, and stuff like that. And, you know, key contacts. And so there's some basic things that I can take care of, but you know, for example, when it came time to have the Omni recapped, that wasn't me, that's where I had to draw the line. And, you know, I hire, you know, I have a couple of different, amazing technicians that are a huge help to keeping this place going.
Darwin: Now we're going to come back to some of this stuff, cause you've already like dropped a couple of nuggets here, then I'm going to want to pick up. But before we do that, one of the things that's kind of a common discussion point in my podcast is talking to people about their background, how they got to be the artists that they are. And especially in the case of my podcast, I talked to people who have a high level of comfort with technology plus a high level of facility with music. And it's always interesting to hear about how people were able to kind of learn both ends of that stick and how they combine it. And so I'm curious in your case, where did the music part of your artistry come from and where did the technical part of it come from and how did you find a way to balance that for yourself?
Lisa: It's a great question. You know, originally I just wanted to be a great musician. You know, I grew up being fortunately exposed to a really wide range of great music, you know, so I was a very studious self-taught musician. I lived at the public library all throughout my teens and just developed systems of musical development that made me a strong musician early on. I mean, there's always room for growth and sure, I would have loved to have had legitimate classical training and things like that, but I did the best I could on my own. And before I was finished being a teenager, I was already working, playing gigs, giving lessons. And again, starting to work in the studios, which at the time I was completely intimidated.
by the technology. And at this time this was, you know, MIDI, you know, doing a lot of these things with MIDI implementation, MIDI mapping, sequencing, you know, all of that sort of thing. And so walking into the studios, I came in as this musician that could handle almost any kind of music, but did not have the technical facility and with the technology. So it was a great place, a kind of bootcamp on how to do tape editing. And like I said, all the MIDI stuff of the era and sequencing, and then that's also where I discovered analog synthesis and, you know, production and mixing and analog recording digital mixdown. It was a great experience.
Darwin: Well, during that period too, there, some of the technology was just like barely held together with duct tape. Right? I mean, trying to do any kind of like synchronization from tape committee that was always a gas. If you were trying to, if you were trying to sync to film or to video, that was a different kind of craziness. And, a lot of times, if you had even a modest amount of technology or technical savvy, you could get a lot of gigs from that.
Lisa: Yeah. That's it is. I mean, back in that time too, I also did like what I do now in store demonstrations of, you know, I got hired by an Sonic back in the day, local representatives of Roland and things like that. So when the workstations and stuff started to coming on the scene and all the Ensoniq pieces that were coming out, you know, I've studied them front to back and programmed them and go and teach them and things like that. And do demonstrations and how to create a MIDI sequence on your workstation - that kind of stuff.
Darwin: Yeah. Well, that's, it's actually kind of interesting to think about how at that time there, there was just like, literally no, "take my computer to the gig" kind of a thing. There was, there was nothing like that. And we, a lot of times dependent on these onboard sequencers and whatever synchronization the keyboard or the workstation itself had. Right?
Lisa: Yeah. I mean, I would be in a situation where like, you know, I used to go to do a lot of hotel work, like, you know, playing in hotel bands and also going and playing fairs and touring with that. And yeah, it was a great experience as funny as it kind of sounds, but I also wound up really relying on those kinds of chops because, okay, "the drummer's not showing up", so what are we going to do? And so I'd have to be in the hotel room all day long.
Darwin: Cobbling together drum tracks, right? Oh, wow.
Lisa: I had to cover a lot of situations like that.
Darwin: Yeah. I remember at the time, really being fascinated, going to like a Holiday Inn or something and seeing, instead of seeing a small combo on the stage, seeing like one person with a computer and a singer and they are trying to, trying to pull together gigs and it was a real change in what live music even look like. I'm actually like kind of fascinated with the whole concept of jingle studios and doing that kind of work. I had a little experience back in the day of doing that, but I really love learning more about how people kind of coped with that at the time. What were you using when you would go into these gigs, what would you be using to kind of do your MIDI sequencing?
Lisa: Oh, let's see here. They had a couple of different things. They had an Oberheim OSX, I think, and a DMX, a LinnDrum, they had the Yamaha TX-816 and the Yamaha... oh God, I hated this thing. But it was like their music computer system. And you could, yeah, it had software that you could MIDI to the TX-816, and then you could daisy-chain that via MIDI. And we had TX-81Z's and Matrix 1000's. And Roland D-50's - all that kind of stuff.
Darwin: You were all sequencing it with that Yamaha music computer system.
Lisa: Well, at least with the, the TX-816 mainly seems like how I would typically work is I would just do something completely on that and then transfer it to multi-channel tape once the arrangement was decided and things like that, because that computer allowed us to not have to deal so much with editing tape, which would save time. I mean, kind of - the computer was also kind of difficult to work with that. We had some sort of Alesis sequencer and there was a Korg sequencer. You caught me off guard, but it's all stuff - and I couldn't wait to forget about once it was done.
Darwin: You know, the fact that you're kind of struggling to remember it tells me that you probably didn't love it in any way, shape or form, right?
Lisa: No, I was more prone to do something like build a basic sequence and then just perform because I was able to have the musical facility, I didn't need to sequence everything and I hadn't been hip to the kinds of sequenced to music that I love to do now. You know, I just didn't, I hadn't had that exposure yet. You know, I had certain things, I always assumed that most everything on Switched-On Bach was played and so on and so forth. So I always relied on my musicality because it was faster for me, but there were things like percussion sequences or marimba sequences, or just certain things that had that sound that made more sense. And again, it depended on the client and when the Yamaha music computer came in, it enabled us to do different size of tracks very easily, you know? And so we could do our minute long jingle. We could do our 30 second bullet. We could do our 15 second bullet, so and so forth. And, and then the amount of time that it took for me to sit there and go through and mix everything down, edit the tape re transfer to Umatic tape. This that was different era. So easy, so easy.
Darwin: You talked about, kind of having had a real exposure to a lot of great music when you were young and then kind of like, self-learning that, what was the music that was most influential and where did you hear it? I mean, so I guess part of what I'm asking is where did you grow up? Were you in a city where you got a chance to interact with a lot of music or, or not?
Lisa: Well, I kind of grew up in two different places. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. And so at that time I was exposed to a lot of WMMS, which is a rock radio station there that were cutting edge for the time and played a lot of albums. And my parents when they were still together, my dad used to bring home a lot of, of the top-40 stuff, you know, the rock and funk and soul music of that era. And then we moved back to West Virginia where my family is from, and my parents separated and my mom remarried. And she married this gentleman who just had this amazing eclectic taste in music. This would have been around my daughter's age. I was, eight or nine. And he just exposed me to just such a wide range of music, you know, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, you know, Stravinsky, Wendy Carlos, XTC, all these things in the very turn of the eighties - it was a great experience.
You know, Oregon, Ralph Towner, things like that had a huge impact on my muse. I came from, I started out loving hard rock when I was little, you know, I was pre-school, but I was also like, I had heard Genesis live when I was seven and it just had this unreal effect on me. So I was already attracted to things that were a little outside the box, but then when my mom married Dana (his name was), just a world of music that he exposed me to, you know, without pressure and without bias, just like, you'll probably like this, if you like that sort of thing.
Darwin: So how did you, how did you translate these things that you were hearing into playing? Because again, one of the things... you know, I grew up in a real rural environment and so a lot of times I could hear things and I had even no concept of what tooling it took to do it. I mean, there was no YouTube at the time or whatever. So there was, it was very difficult to even get access, to understanding the mechanism that this stuff was made. How did, how did you kind of bridge that for yourself?
Lisa: Well, I mean, I basically started with drums. That was all I could get ahold of him and we lived in a very rural area. So there wasn't a lot of music stores or convenience of even being around other musicians for that matter. And then I was able to get a guitar and then an organ. And so, you know, that was the beginning and then I really didn't get to play a synthesizer until I started working in jingle studios, truthfully. So the sounds that I heard in my head, you know, I just had to stick with organ or guitar. And that's basically what I did for several years is just work on those two instruments with all my might and that's it. And so I studied - classical music became a huge passion, you know, and I always wanted to study it legitimately. And I had some great teachers in my schools that would spend time with me after school and study pieces together and things like that in a very unconventional way.
But it was a way that created my own sort of way of looking at it all. You know, I didn't look at things from an immediate reference point or I had all these different things coming at me at once and, and even music of the era, you know, in the eighties I was exposed to everything from new age music that was coming out to underground metal, heavy metal, you know, the dark stuff, film music. So, you know, it's just taking it all in and continuously making it part of my circulation as I developed my skills.
-----Darwin: Right now, it sounds like also, as you develop those skills, you started doing more gigging as well. You talked about being a touring musician and like hauling stuff around. So first of all, another kind of mindblowing thing, just you talking about doing this touring reminded me of going on the road with a group, and I remember hauling the CP-70 out and then the Rhodes and then the Omni and all this kind of stuff. And the enormous, enormous headache dealing with all of the keyboardist gear, was that kind of your era?
Lisa: All the same gear! Now when I left, there was a certain point, or I worked for two different jingle companies and transitioned to - one had finally closed down and I went to work with another jingle studio that had two different studios, one in West Virginia, and then one in Los Angeles - outside of Los Angeles. And so that was a great experience to a point, but there was a lot of things in that environment that I didn't want to be a part of. So I left it sadly and went into being more of a live player. And at that time I was really into seventies, R&B and jazz-oriented stuff. And so I started finding work as a R&B keyboard player. You know, this is early nineties. So I show up to a gig with a Fender Rhodes, an ARP Omni, and either a Moog or an ARP. And that's it, no digital pianos, no Korg M-1, those musicians loved it because it was more authentic to the sounds. And, you know, if you wanted something that sounded like a DX-7, you know, I'd have, an equalizer and a stereo chorus. And so there's your DX-7, you know? And so I toured rigorously with those instruments.
Darwin: Well, a lot of times too, what you had to be in order to be a keyboard player in those kinds of bands is you had to be a rapid fire patch builder, right? Because you would go from a power-pop sound, all of a sudden the next thing is like, oh, I have to do that squealing thing from that Head East tune or whatever. And, you know, you're having to dial these things on the fly. How, how did you get to the point where you had that level of facility? And, I am assuming that you still feel like that plays a part in the kind of music you're doing now.
Lisa: Absolutely. Yeah. I think it just came natural and it was also practice out of necessity. You know, I mean, I eventually turned the Omni in to a for a Prophet 5. I did some subbing for a blind keyboard player who was, just took a very dear liking to me because I could go and fill in for his gigs when he had to do dialysis. And he had this very specific MIDI rig that he had created, and there were sequences and there were sounds and sets that were part of what that touring group's repertoire were. So I would go and get his rig, take it out on the road, do the gigs, bring him back a cut of the money and then have all his stuff in perfect order. Or so he knew that I was at that time, very much passionate about old synthesizers. So he says to go over and open that closet, and there's a synthesizer in there for you. And it could use a tune-up, but it's yours to take on your own gigs. And it was a Prophet 5. So I took the Prophet 5 out on the road for the next two years. And it was very helpful because it had presets and it was what I was used to, but it did have presets and enabled me to work faster in live situations. So, yeah. So then I, instead of having three keyboards, I just took out the Rhodes and the Prophet 5 for many years.
Darwin: Well, it's kind of interesting now that that combination is actually sort of coming back. I just, it's funny you say that my studio is a wreck right now because I just bought a Rhodes that I've been looking for one for years. And I finally found the one I wanted and I just... In a totally separate kind of a deal, I have a Sequential Prophet on the way in, so I'm just sort of like, oh wow, I get to relive the eighties that I always wished actually existed for me! So when, at what point did you translate musically to the things that we hear you do now? Because I would say now, when I, again, when I visualize Lisa Bella Donna and her work, it's not only classic-sounding synths, but also classic-sounding music, and oftentimes with very, a very heavy Berlin School kind of tinge to it. Right? When did you, when did you make the swing into that? What was, what was the thing that propelled you there? And, how did you decide to embrace that as your, as a musical voice?
Lisa: Well, you know, a lot of your listeners probably won't believe this, but I really developed it during those times and being a gigging musician, because what I had developed was this beautiful duality. I had left the jingle studios. And by the time I had done that, I had created quite an ensemble of equipment to work with in my own personal studio. Try to understand that nobody had any interest of this kind of music 30 years ago. They'd just laugh at you for even like, why would you want to even do that? So I was touring as a session player, but I also would create a lot of time for myself to go back to my studio and make my own personal music, which at that time it was a pair of 2600's, ARP Sequencer, Oberheim digital sequencer, and some other stuff on me, String Ensemble, but mainly Arp and Moog stuff was my passion.
Lisa: And I just started doing it. I hadn't really not even heard Tangerine Dream yet. I hadn't heard Jean-Michel Jarre, or it had been years before I heard Klaus Schulze, or, I mean, I didn't hear this stuff until probably 10, 15 years later. And I was just doing what I wanted to do with the instruments, learning the instruments and developing a rapport with them. I mean, now, you know, I've had this great library of all that music, but my beginning inspirations for electronic music came from 20th century classical music, things like George Crumb, Milton Babbitt, Vladimer Ussachevsky, Wendy Carlos, Isao Tomita and some other more obscure names. But those kinds of that kind of music was where my heart was, but you know, who cares because especially then, because there was no appreciation of that history or that kind of music. And so I just did it on my own exactly the way I wanted for 20 years. And it got to the point where I really dove into musique concrete techniques, and then incorporating physics into how I developed my compositions in my work. And all the while, you know, I became more and more interested in playing jazz-oriented music and not just contemporary/R&B/rock music. And so that all sort of blended in with the electro-acoustic music that I was doing. Very strange.
Darwin: I've got to tell you that sounds like one of these things, like when my mom said, "Here we have jello with carrots in it..."; it seems like it's a strange thing to combine the things you learned from jazz or from rock and funk, you have this desire to do jazz. You have this kind of innate love of 20th century music and classical stuff. It seems like a hell of a collision to get all of these things kind of squished into one.
Lisa: Yeah. Well, it's taken a long time to develop that style. And I mean, I know a lot of people probably listen to my music and think, "Oh yeah, great. She heard Klaus Schulze one day and it was all over." But honestly I did, I hadn't heard Klaus until the 2000's. I didn't care. I didn't like, I wasn't interested in just being a direct reference, same with classical music. I didn't just want to play Bach. I wanted to incorporate everything that I heard and do it in a way that felt like my own personal melisma same with electronic music. Sure. There's a lot of things that are derivative because of the nature of the instruments. I mean, it's like saying that, you know, just because you love fingerstyle guitar music, everybody sounds like John Fahy, you know, but that's not the case. There's a lot of, there's the Ralph Towners out there. Yeah. We're very individualistic. And so that's how I feel about electronic music and I'm not claiming anything other than that's just something that I love to do. And I've, I've loved to do it for a very long time.
Darwin: And you know, when I, when I talk about, about your music or at least my, again, in my imaginings of it, when, when I visualize your music, I see it's brilliant school and inspired, but it is not slavish Berlin school. And for me, a large part of that comes from sort of like the structural thing that you add to it. There's a lot more - you'll hear key changes. You'll hear, you'll hear tambour changes in a way that really isn't a lot of people doing Berlin schoolish kind of things are like really adhere to the, you know, Tangerine Dream Sourcer - "I'm going to just redo that over and over again." And, you know, and so you, you build your own structures on top of it. I think that's really great, but I'm curious still about like this, the, the integration of people like Babbitt, in, into your work. I mean, first of all, where did you most people, when they experienced that in their life, they, they hear about it through an academic school, school-based music education. You said that you didn't go that route. How did you stumble into like Milton Babbitt? And that seems like something that even Dana isn't going to introduce you to necessarily.
Lisa: No, no. I lived at the lab. I lived at my public library for all of my teens. I would say that, and it was a really rich, it was very, really amazing library, so amazing audio visual department and, an amazing collection of literature that you could study almost any composer that you wanted. And so I just, I just lived there. I loved it. I was just in love with learning the different lives and different passions and different destinations of composers and musicians. And I always found something that I could take with me, even if I couldn't figure out the music at that age or, maybe not all music repertoire is there for replication, you know, it's there to absorb the spirit and the process and the intentional purpose that goes behind it. Right. Same with jazz. You know, I mean, I love in play jazz music for years, but I didn't necessarily want to be a bebop player. You know, I didn't want to come from that same cloth. I wanted to learn from Deodato. And I wanted to learn from, Steve Kuhn and all these people that had already found their own sort of fusion of sayings of ideas and different...
Darwin: Okay. Cause you're, you're, you're freaking me out a little bit because you're like dropping people that were so important to me. You look Jean-Luc Ponty and Steve Kuhn. I mean, yikes. This is, this is really interesting, but I mean, these are people that, that really did have an effect on other players, you know, that was, there was that kind of there's, there's that kind of mill, you have music that really is inspirational to other musicians too. And I think it's really interesting. Now, one of the things that has started happening, or maybe it actually started happening a while ago and from the sound of it locally, even earlier than that, you started really getting identified with working with manufacturers, and primarily the initial thing that I think got you some, like worldwide notoriety, it was your work with Moog, right? How did that come about?
Lisa: You know, it came about very naturally, it was very a gradual process. It started with this video that I did at MoogFest for Guitar Center. And it was just a very happenstance thing I came in and Guitar Center asked me if I wanted to do like a first impression of the Moog Grandmother. And I hadn't even had a chance to sit down with it at all. I'm like, yeah, absolutely. So I sat down and played this piece with the Moog and some Earthquaker devices pedals, and just improvised. And it was a really successful video, went viral overnight with a lot of different positive comments and that got Moog's attention for sure. I immediately bought the Grandmother and took it back and started doing a few videos of my own and my downtown loft, where I lived at the time. And it was a great opportunity for me because it was, you know, I was able to incorporate it with my 2600's, which, you know, I hadn't really had the opportunity to do that.
Lisa: So it was very inspiring time. And so I started to have a rapport with them in terms of more of a consultant on things. So before the Matriarch came out, I had been just having conversations with them about maybe what it should be, what it shouldn't be, what they should focus on, those kinds of things. And I think just that general sympathetic resonance of those conversations just continued to the phone, continued to rain, you know, and then at a certain point, we did the Matriarch video upon its release. And I tried to just really seize the moment. You know, I only had the Matriarch prototype here for a couple of days when that video was done. Actually I had two of them here, so it was really fun. So during those two days, I made a double album with that Matriarch, with the one that was really working.
And so since I wasn't able to go to that last MoogFast, that happened, I decided to release a track every day on my YouTube that only use the Matriarch. Cause as far as I know, it's the first album to ever come out. That's all made mostly all a Matriarch - Matriarch and Grandmother. And it just allowed me to have that feeling of having rapport with the people at MoogFest, which, you know, I just, I wanted to, I wanted to go there, but just the situation didn't allow me to do it. And that went really well. And I obviously released the album at the end of MoogFest, and it just continued to go. They called me about working with the Moog One synthesizer and doing some education with it, which is no easy feat. That is a very deep, complicated system. But I spent about 60 hours in one week and really got a strong handle on it and then went to Sweetwater Music and did demonstrations and classes for their staff. And that went well. And so it just continues to work in a very natural facility.
Darwin: Stacking successes there too. It sounds like. I mean, it's interesting to me as, as we're talking and seeing how all of the pieces have come together. So in a way it's almost like the skills that you honed in the jingle studio end up many years later being the perfect thing for being able to rip off a double album while you happen to have a couple of Matriarchs sitting in your studio, right. That speed and that self-confidence in your work and your own work. I think that's one of the things that has to happen for, to be able to do releases like that. You just have to be confident in your work. And it seems like that's something that, that you developed and it still sticks with you.
Lisa: Yes. You that to make a selection, you know, even there's times, I don't feel confident, just for the record, like any other musician, who's always self-critical and I could tear everything apart if I really wanted to, but you know, what you have to do is you do have to be in the moment, and you have to make a selection in that moment and commit to it and just go for it and stay focused. That's it. You've got to stay focused and see idea through and often it's that momentum that becomes - the momentum of that process is what becomes a huge gratification more than the end result itself.
Darwin: Sure. And no, recently you've also, if I recall, right, you've been doing some work with ARP as well, right.
Lisa: The ARP foundation. Yeah.
Darwin: Yeah. There's been a, there's been a Renaissance around activity or Renaissance of activity around ARP and the ARP archives and, and sort of like nailing down the historical importance of ARP as a company.
Lisa: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. One of the very first solo albums I ever recorded and released was, from 1993 called Snowy Dreamscapes and it's an album of all ARP synthesizers. And when I started to meet and develop a relationship with, Allen R Pearlman's daughter, Dina Pearlman, it just seemed to make sense that I would offer her an album to be able to use on the website and hopefully generate some sort of excitement and support of the foundation, because I think Dina is an amazing human and she, you know, is I'm trying to keep the amazing spirit of her family alive through that foundation because she comes from a very amazing background with her parents and her dad's work. It's a privilege and pleasure to be a part of it. Anyway...
Darwin: That's fantastic. So unfortunately our time is, is up, but before you go, can you just tell us what's next? I mean, you, you said that you just wrapped up this work that's, that's sort of tied in with Sisters With Transistors, and I would agree with you, anyone who's listening, who hasn't seen that needs to find a way to see it. But, you've just finished that up. What's next for you? What, what did you got on the burner?
Lisa: Well, there's some things I can't talk about, but... Well, I am currently working on more music and I am finishing up essentially my full Eurorack system for right at this moment, which isn't much Eurorack in it, but enough that I have a really expressive, integrated system. So I'm excited to compose and record with that over the summer. And I'm planning on taking it on some locations to just sort of have a different impression of using it in other areas I have first couple live gigs coming up since COVID. So I'm excited to do that and to get to play. These are more jazz oriented, but I'm hoping to get back into the universities and start doing some teaching and doing some concerts. I have another vinyl release scheduled for this year. So I'm excited about that. And of course I have been very busy writing patch books and, sound design right now with Moog. I'm very excited about that. And more videos with them are coming out this year. So...
Darwin: Well, I'll tell you with a workload like that, I am very grateful for the time that you have been able to spend with us. Thank you so much. And with that, I'm going to let you go have the rest of your day. Thank you.
Lisa: Thank you very much, Darwin. Enjoy your day.
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