Suzanne Ciani plays Scotland for the first time, in her eightieth year
The synth pioneer closed Sonica in Glasgow on her first ever trip to Scotland, and talked through a career that keeps refusing the expected shape.
BY JOLT Staff · Nov 13 2026 · 1 min readSuzanne Ciani made her first ever trip to Scotland to close the Sonica festival in Glasgow, in her eightieth year. She looked back over her career in an interview published 9:00am on 13 November 2026.
The resume is not one straight line. Classical composition training, then a formative friendship with instrument designer Don Buchla and his synthesizer. Commercial work: idents and sound design for clients including Coca-Cola, where the pop of a can and its bubbles were built from a sawtooth wave, white noise and effects. Underground records too, cutting tracks with the pitch-shifted voice of a gay male alter-ego called Steve over beats by Peter Baumann from Tangerine Dream. A sci-fi opera score, five Grammy nominations for New Age albums, a pinball machine's sound effects.
The drop that shifted her reputation came later, when Andy Votel of Finders Keepers released archive work and a late-career renaissance followed. She went on to collaborate with Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Actress and the Metropole Orkest.
