In the kaleidoscopic world of electronic music, where synth wizards like Justice and Daft Punk once redrew the map of clubbing culture, Rich Aucoin emerges as the unassuming Halifax alchemist who’s spent half a decade chasing a mind-blowing goal: a quadruple-album saga called Synthetic, clocking in at a staggering 162 unique synthesizers that span history into head-spinning anthems of acid house, krautrock pulse, and baroque-tinged techno. With Synthetic: Season 4 dropping this fall to cap the series—it’s 103 vintage beasts, including the hulking TONTO (that Stevie Wonder staple) and the ghostly Ondes Martenot—Aucoin snags back-to-back Juno nods for Electronic Album of the Year, rave reviews from Exclaim!, Electronic Sound, Brooklyn Vegan, and Bandcamp Daily seal him as the guy who doesn’t just nod to the past but hijacks it for speaker-shredding futures. Fresh off residencies at the National Music Centre in Calgary and sessions at LA’s Vintage Synthesizer Museum, he’s roped in heavy-hitters like producer Cloverdale for the bass-quaking ‘Emu Pt. II,’ synth sage Peter Chapman on the funk-fried ‘Frequency Modulation,’ and his old Dalhousie mentor Craig Sheppard layering FM sorcery into the Justice-evoking crunch of ‘Chroma,’ all while he has toured around the world and played festivals like Mutek, Fusion & Nuits Sonores.

Jump into our conversation with Aucoin, where he unpacks the obsession, the one-of-a-kind collabs, and why this synth apocalypse feels like the future crashing into now.

What sparked that initial obsession with synthesizers back when you first heard Air’s Moon Safari as a kid, and how did it shape the wild scope of the Synthetic series?

I think I really connected with their frequencies. I had heard synthesizers before of course but I think listening to that album over and over really made me love how much they could be so much of the music and not just a pad or synth line from 80s pop music. I have a vague memory of really connecting with that slightly closed filtered Minimoog sound too and really liking that especially. I love how much the synths pulse and breathe on that album too and I definitely remember liking the instrumentals more than the tracks with vocals.

Walking into the National Music Centre for that March 2020 residency must’ve felt like stumbling into a time machine—how did the vibe of all those rare beasts like the TONTO influence the very first tracks you laid down?

I knew, from my Experimental Recording Techniques class from college, that those machines can be difficult to wield as we had a pair of Arp 2600s that were hard to keep in tune and damaged slightly so wouldn’t even hold the position you’d set them in for very long. So I thought for tracks like Tonto, Delta Music Research, Synthi, Roger Luther and a handful of others, that I’d start the session with just experimentation on the synth rather than have a list of parameters I wanted to get lost in the weeds with. So, on TONTO, for example, I just hit record and made music on it for about 5hrs without editing or redoing anything. Months later, I chopped the 5hrs down to the best 20min and then continued to widdle the track down until it was 5min long. I did the same for the other historic synths but with maybe 1-2hrs recording for the others.

You’ve wrangled 162 unique synths across four seasons; if you had to pick just one moment where a machine surprised you in the studio, what was it and why did it stick?

I was going to do a whole big Vangelis sounding outro to the record and I thought I’d start with the Yamaha CS70 at VSM but when I played the chords, I just really loved how they sounded on their own so I made the track be just that first improvised take and thought it’d be nice to end the record with a minimal single synth moment like that. (I overdubbed the final clicking sound of me turning off the synth which Gordon, my co-producer, suggested that we end the record with that). 

Teaming up with Cloverdale on ‘Emu Pt. II’—that bass-heavy banger born from your old east coast connection—how did blending the E-mu Modular’s vintage grit with his modern DJ feel, push the track into uncharted territory?

Yeah that was fun to team up and make a bass-heavy track. I feel like this season really explored Serum which was not even on the first two seasons. I brought him a 10min track of one section after another (including E-Mu Pt I) and he picked the sections he wanted to explore together and the result is a nice blend of modern and vintage for sure; he’s an incredible producer.

‘Frequency Modulation’ kicks off with those funky, Prince-meets-Parliament stabs from stacked Junos and the Polivoks, then veers into Daft Punk baroque—what personal memory or late-night riff inspired that wild shape-shift halfway through?

I’m not sure, I wrote the first version of that track on my Roland JD-Xi. There’s a patch in the brass section that you can hear inspired this track. It’s still even tucked into the stack under the Junos and Jupiters. I was trying to write a song that I thought TWRP would be into and this was the result. I was touring with them quite a bit at the time.

On ‘Chroma,’ channeling Justice’s gritty † era with the ARP Rhodes Chroma and Polaris crunch, plus your prof Craig Sheppard’s SY77 wizardry—how did dialing up that electroclash sleaze feel like a nod to your own Halifax underground roots?

Cross was a huge record for me; about on par with Moon Safari for repeat listens and close listening. I’ve never gotten to make something fully in that sound; 456 was the closest I got on SE1 but I thought I’d go fully with this one with chopped up bass/vocals and smashed drums.

The Ondes Martenot gets its own spotlight after a century of haunting everything from neo-classical to Daft Punk—diving into its eerie cello-like soul for the Synthetic odyssey, what ghosts from electronic history did it summon up for you personally?

The Ondes (and the theremin) have such a lovely singing tone. It’s amazing getting to play an Ondes too: the wood, the split speaker systems, the elegance of it; really feels different from the synths from the latter half of the century.

With back-to-back Juno nods and raves from Electronic Sound calling you the guy who actually pulls off Zappa-level ambition on a shoestring, how has the pressure of capping this quadruple-album beast with Season 4 tested your faith in chasing these untenably big ideas?

I just like to try and make stuff that I haven’t seen someone else do and often the case is that the idea is ambitious because of nature of exploration: cycling across Canada & USA on tour, making a record with over 500 folks, making records that sync up to movies in the Pink Floyd/Wizard of Oz manner.

Synthetic feels like a love letter to synth pioneers from Goblin’s giallo scores to Kraftwerk’s kraut pulse, but amid the modular mayhem, what’s the deeper thread—maybe something about time, obsolescence, or pure sonic rebellion—that ties it all to your own story?

I don’t think there’s a through line for any sort of narrative for the 4 seasons, just a lot of experimentation and exploration and trying not to repeat myself so delving into all the corners of synthesis that I can possibly get to in 4x 42min chunks for the season.

Alright, last one to cool down the heat: If you could beam one synth from the Synthetic vault straight into a dream collab with any artist dead or alive, who gets it and what track do they make?

Maybe jam with Justice or Daft Punk (or Air) on TONTO… that synth’s so big that we could all fit and maybe then we’d have enough hands to play that synth in real-time! 

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