Leon Lowman

Leon Lowman is a California-based autodidact musician and painter who traces his interest in synthesizers to a specific moment: hearing ELP's Lucky Man in 1970. At the time he was working for various recording studios and sound companies in the state, and with his first paycheck he made a down payment on an ARP 2600 synthesizer and a Mediamix Joystick for pitch bending, equipment he still used at the time of this reissue. Everything he could spare after that went toward more gear. He wrote much of his music from direct personal experience, trying to convey specific events, feelings, and environments through synthesizer tones and the addition of recorded natural sounds: waves, wind, bird calls. The result is something genuinely outside any easy category: mellow, cosmic, melodic, lo-fi surf synth music that Music From Memory compared to library records and PPU-style home-brewed funk, and that VOD described as anticipating AIR's Moon Safari by fifteen years.

This double LP (VOD140-12LP) focuses on Lowman's early recordings from 1980 and 1982, drawing on the highly sought-after LP Syntheseas (1980) and the cassette-only Sound Horizon (1982), plus bonus material from the period. Both releases were produced in very limited quantities; originals are essentially impossible to find. The music has an unhurried, sun-soaked quality that makes it unlike almost anything else in the VOD catalogue, at once deeply personal and immediately welcoming. Edition of 500 numbered copies in a gatefold sleeve.