Appreciating Zero Time
And the recently departed Malcolm Cecil
To hear what captivated Stevie Wonder about TONTO, the elaborate modular analog synthesizer designed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, cue up “Timewhys.” It’s from Zero Time, the groundbreaking 1971 electronic project by the duo, working under the nom de rock Tonto’s Expanding Head Band.
The track begins with tempoless splotches and squiggles, the space-age sound effects common to many early synthesizer recordings. About a minute in, a pulse coalesces. Free-floating keyboard lines align into repeating arpeggio-like patterns that suggest a primitive computer making calculations. There’s a slippery, almost funky bass line – Cecil, who died Sunday at age 84, began his career playing bass in London jazz groups – and on top, inviting lead timbres that have a pillowy, cloudlike quality.
It’s a jam, not a sound effects demonstration. It and other tracks celebrate the musical potential of electronic sound creation that was, in 1971, still exotic. According to legend, Wonder tracked down the duo at the studio where TONTO -- The Original New Timbral Orchestra – was housed. He arrived with a copy of Zero Time under his arm. And some questions.
Just imagine that conversation. Wonder was about to make Music of My Mind, the first of his run of massively inventive albums and the first of several with production help from Cecil and Margouleff. Wonder was up to speed on synthesis and all things keyboard-related (still is!); he was no doubt animated by the possibility of using multiple synthesizers, linked together, to create varied multi-part sonic landscapes. It’s impossible to know precisely what he was thinking, but the astute textures that are at the center of Zero Time can be heard echoing in subsequent Wonder triumphs. Like the megahit “Superstition,” which features nine interconnected clavinet tracks alongside uniquely Wonderized TONTO synth bass and lead tones. It’s meta-meta intricate. But it never sounds that way.
Listening to Zero Time on headphones, the musical sophistication of Cecil and Margouleff’s vision becomes inescapable. There are slow, deliberate sweeps in which hissy white noise travels from left to right like a thunderstorm rolling across the horizon. There are moments of lake-at-dawn tranquility, and pieces like “Tama” that utilize the familiar cyclical harmony of baroque music. There are also considerably less sedate moments, some involving the tension-producing phenomenon of “de-tuning,” in which a synthesizer’s oscillator is manipulated to go out of tune in microsteps. This feature was later used (some would say abused) by scores of prog-rock bands.
Cecil’s obituaries often led with his association to Stevie Wonder – he was involved in Music of My Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness' First Finale and the soundtrack to Jungle Fever and also the Echo Locator favorite Syreeta, the 1972 album by Wonder’s then-wife Syreeta Wright. Those are all towering monuments, but they are not the whole story. The sonic revolution manifested on each of them started somewhere else: With the ageless, aptly titled Zero Time.
