The Supercomputer That Stole Helado Negro’s Heart
Chatting with Roberto Carlos Lange about the Sal-Mar Construction, the museum-piece oscillator featured on his “Phasor” LP
Gear Me is a column in which we ask some of our favorite musicians about the racks, stacks, and instruments they love best.
Musicians can be obsessive about their instruments, but the right piece of gear can be more than just a tool; sometimes it opens up new avenues of thought, unlocking paths to creative expression that just weren’t possible before. For his Helado Negro project, Roberto Carlos Lange leverages all sorts of tools, weaving various percussive and electronic instruments and gadgets with samples and field recordings to create lush compositions, cosmic lullabies that straddle the line between digital and analog.
While writing his latest LP Phasor, Lange found inspiration in a particularly curious instrument: the Sal-Mar Construction. Billed as “the first interactive composing machine with digital logic circuits,” the machine is a room-sized workstation built by the composer Salvatore Martirano in 1969 with the help of engineers and musicians at the University of Illinois, using parts from the pioneering ILLIAC II supercomputer. While much of its functionality as a compositional tool has since been streamlined by various synths and digital audio workstations, the Sal-Mar is essentially an installation in a museum.
Using it is a unique experience: the performer mans a control panel of 291 lighted, touch-sensitive switches. The switches are used to dial sequences of numbers of various intervals and lengths, which can be driven both manually and by the computer—a collaboration of sorts between the artist and the machine.
