Larry Fast
| Larry Fast | |
|---|---|
| Origin | Essex County, New Jersey |
| Genres | Electronic music |
| Instruments | Keyboard |
| Years active | 1975–present |
| Labels | Passport, Atlantic, Voiceprint, ABC Classics |
| Associated acts | Synergy, Nektar, Peter Gabriel, Yes, Tony Levin Band |
| Website | synergy-emusic |
Lawrence Roger 'Larry' Fast (born December 10, 1951) is a synthesizer expert and composer. He is best known for Synergy, his 1975–1987 series of synthesizer music albums, and for his contributions to a number of popular music acts, including Peter Gabriel, Foreigner, and Hall and Oates.
Fast grew up in Livingston, New Jersey and attended Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, where he obtained a degree in History. There he took his previous training in piano and violin and melded them with computer science to become interested in synthesized music and to build his own primitive sound-making electronic devices.
He was introduced to Rick Wakeman, the keyboard player from the band Yes, during a local radio interview, and traveled to the UK to work with Yes on their 1974 album Tales from Topographic Oceans. It was there that he got a recording contract with Passport Records.
Fast recorded a series of pioneering synthesizer music albums under the project name Synergy. Some of this work was used as the basis for music in Commodore 64 and Amiga computer games, notably Rob Hubbard's score for the C64 version of Zoids, which was an unofficial cover of Synergy's Ancestors from the 1981 album Audion.
The first album in the series, Electronic Realizations for Rock Orchestra, was released as an LP in 1975. Like the following albums, it exclusively makes use of electronic instruments, mainly synthesizers. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Fast released eight more Synergy LPs on Passport Records, all of which were later re-released on CDs. The 1998 re-release of Semi-Conductor, a compilation album originally released in 1984, was a remastered version of the original, and contained ten additional tracks. The eleventh album in the series, Reconstructed Artifacts, was released in 2003, and contained completely new performances of select compositions from the previous albums, using modern digital synthesizers, as well as the new digital recording technologies.
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