I’m sitting on the orange couch and listen to my friend who’s right next to me arguing with his girlfriend over the phone. Suddenly, the battery runs out and the fight continues over his cellphone.

Money. This is the issue. And how the need and quality of life is defined by the amount you possess. Money that you haven’t even produced yourself. Money that your parents still feed you with, since you’ve yet failed to break into the employment market despite the fact you’re at the 25th year of your life.

The conversation seems to be having no end in the near future. I get a feeling, just by watching this scene unveil in front of me, that both sides need to take a break. A breath of freedom in the outside world. Four walls and a luminous screen, as big as a window to the real world it might be, cannot fulfill the hollowness that’s there.

There is music playing in the background. At first it’s a saxophone, followed by a couple of guitars, which give way to the piano after that. Random words here and there declare in a humble way that you’re born alone and you die alone and that’s something you should not forget. The world throws a bunch of rules on top of that fact to make you forget, but you must never forget.

I need to write something. I got that need before the quarrel first started. I want to write about the only kind of music I feel that perceives something more than the rest. The pretext is an album of the mid ’70s. Klaus Schulze – Timewind.

(The temperature is rising. One hangs up the phone on the other. After a few seconds, they call each other again. Like children, whose favorite toy is being deprived from them.)

It’s the power that this world has in hand and the events that occur in it that keeps you imprisoned in its cage. Don’t fool yourself. It’s way stronger that gravity or any law of nature that’s been known to mankind.

I’d love to put Schulze’s album to both of them and tell them to stop their confrontation momentarily and just listen to it, but I know this cannot happen. Not because they’re in a tense situation, but because music like this should not be wasted for no reason. When the speakers start pulsing and the synthesizer makes its presence felt, you should be prepared for the trip. Seat belts fastened. There’s no turning back until the whole thing is over. It’s a trip far away from the known world.

In contrast to the beautiful musical instruments we have available, all of which share a physical nature, the synthesizer with its electric nature manages to separate itself from the material world.

I remember Giovanni Giorgio saying at the intro of “Giorgio by Boromir” (Daft Punk) that the synthesizer is the sound of the future. The truth is that for many decades (and probably until today) the sound of the synth was associated with the notion of the future and rightfully so (see the use of synths in sci-fi films). However, I think there’s more than just that. My opinion is that the sound of the synth is the kind of sound that breaks the boundaries of this world not just within the frameworks of time, but space too.

(The phone rings again. The saga continues.)

As a result, the synthesizer in electronic music can freely talk about things outside the mundane, earthly phenomena without the constrains of speech. Same goes to a noticeable amount of ambient music, which with the certain use of arias, extensive reverb and echo bears a big similarity to the “space effect” that the synth can produce. I once asked a friend how he felt listening to the melodies of Schulze’s album and he instantly replied: fear and anxiety. I am really interested in knowing why, but then something happens, the moment disappears and the question remains unanswered. Perhaps some other time.

It’s the merciless reality that beats us constantly with a crowbar on our face. That’s the reason why, at the hearing of an electronic piece of this kind, I let myself entirely free to be dragged away from the familiar environment and be placed in a different dimension, where sizes and conceptions bear no similarity to what we are used to. A portal that lets you travel inside the universe and detect patterns and truths from a safe distance. It’s as if you can distinguish the creator from his/her creation. And this is something I believe derives from the electric descent of the instrument. It is an alternate perspective that emerges from a place where no life exists. Only signals.

Electric signals powered by a generator, translated in various frequencies which can be heard through conversion by the loudspeakers are able to produce sounds that we can’t imitate with any other natural musical instrument. Then there’s the manipulation of these waveforms, which bear so little musicality in them originally, that the process of synthesis is truly an admirable accomplishment. Oscillators, amplifiers, ADSR envelopes and filters are essential to create emotions from just plain signals.

From the times when synthesizers were totally analog till the revolutionary digital era many things might have changed in shaping the look and use of it, but one thing still remains the same. And this is the triumph of collaboration between the human mind and an entity hidden inside electric signals, chipsets and wires.

(And the fight goes on…)