• Blog

• All

Oct 09, 2013 By Austin Trunick

Tonto’s Expanding Head Band were Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, producers and session artists working in New York when this strange electronic album was recorded in the early 1970s. T.O.N.T.O. himself was the duo’s main synthesizer—an acronym for “The Original New Timbral Orchestra”—a room-sized instrument (somewhat resembling the cockpit of a rocketship out of a science fiction film) and among the first of its kind to produce polyphonic sounds.

Zero Time, the first of two albums put out by Tonto’s Expanding Head Band, worked as a marketing tool for the duo and their unique machine, and caught the ear of several big-name artists. Most notably, Stevie Wonder was a fan, and went on to hire Cecil and Margouleff as co-producers for his own synth-centric classics Innervisions, Music of My Mind, and Talking Book. T.O.N.T.O. would later be used by Devo, and currently resides in its own studio near Woodstock.

Nowadays, Zero Time is more notable for its place in electronic music history than the music contained therein. Primarily instrumental—and composed totally with the T.O.N.T.O. synthesizer—the album was ahead of its time, but sounds like many, many other records to have come out since its release in 1971. The final track, “Tama,” is its best and most beautiful, but the other spacey soundscapes sound unfortunately close to mid-tier Tangerine Dream. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting curio, and Real Gone’s packaging—which includes an oral history of the group written by Richie Unterberger—does an outstanding job of putting this influential record into context.

(www.realgonemusic.com)