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***For those of you
who'd like a brief intro to the Optigan
without having to do all that cumbersome reading,
click
here for an interview (in
streaming RealAudio format)
that Pea did with Irwin Chusid of WFMU
on Sept. 10, 1997.***
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(NOTICE- I wrote this article several
years ago, and as such it has not been updated with all the copious wonderful information
found on the rest of this site. The article is still a good intro to Opti-Mania,
though, and is worth the read if you've never encountered an Optigan before.)
About ten years
ago I first became aware of the existence of the Optigan. It was
in the tenth anniversary edition of Keyboard
Magazine
(in fact, the first issue of Keyboard I had ever bought). In an
article on the past and future of keyboards and synthesizers,
there was a brief reference to the Optigan, and it stuck in my
mind for years as it was the first time I had ever seen the word
"cheesy" used to describe a musical instrument. Over
the next few years I came across a couple of other references
to this machine. An article about Devo
contained a glowing endorsement from Mark Mothersbaugh, and the
liner notes from Tom
Waits' "Frank's
Wild Years" indicated sporadic use. Aside from this, though,
I don't recall ever hearing anything else about the Optigan. I
had always wanted to find one myself, but given the odd nature
of the instrument I just assumed that very few were made and by
now they had all been collected by collectors (or dutifully carted
off to the dump by non-post-modernists). So I never bothered to
make an active search- I just figured that if I ever found one
it would probably be in some thrift store somewhere waiting to
be revived.
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