text: 'Diva of the Diode' Suzanne Ciani on soundtracking Acne Studios' PFW show - Nuevo Culture
  Until last Wednesday afternoon, Suzanne Ciani had never played a fashion show. The legendary musician is used to packing out gig venues around the world, but the AW22 Acne runway presentation marked the first time she provided a soundtrack for a cast of models stomping down the runway.
  And so, in the middle of a stark white set flanked by brown-carpeted, 70s-style conversation pits where guests sat, Ciani cranked up her Buchla and got to work. Beginning as she always does with soft sounds of crashing waves, the musician artfully twiddled the knobs and wires of the instrument's colourful spider's web of wires, as models paced up and down the catwalk in pieces from the new collection.
  Suzanne Ciani: You know, the thing is just to be in the moment because it's an improvisation. You have the starting points and the materials that you're going to be improvising on, but what you're doing is completely spontaneous. One constant is the ocean. I always start with the waves.
  Suzanne Ciani: The piano was my first instrument and I played that as a child, and then when I discovered the Buchla, I switched. So I went from piano to electronic. Then 20 years later, I came back to piano. And then 20 years later, I came back to Buchla. So it's been kind of a back and forth.
  Suzanne Ciani: Night. I'm just a night person, and all my energy comes then. But if I don't sleep, then I'm in trouble. So it's this battle between sleeping so that you can wake up fresh the next day or working through the night. It's always a battle.
  Suzanne Ciani: I've always been very influenced by classical music. When I was young, I listened to Rachmaninoff and the Romantic composers like Chopin. I was in love with Bach. Those are the ones that I have reinterpreted. If you look at my compositions, I have a piece based on Rossini, a piece based on Beethoven – all those composers were part of my vocabulary from a young age, and really fed me. So even in the abstract of electronics, there's an underpinning and consciousness of pitch and traditional music.
  Suzanne Ciani: I mean, I'm very boring. I tend to listen to Handel's Messiah on repeat. I love classical music. There is some contemporary music that I love. A lot of what I listen to is women electronic composers, like Caterina Barbieri and Lisa Bella Donna. She plays the modular, she's pretty powerful. She has a wonderful sensibility with the machine. I listen to the music people send me. I've just done a collaboration with a French composer, Jonathan Fitoussi. Over the pandemic we sent files back and forth, and I met him because he played the Buchla.
  Suzanne Ciani: He actually sent me a little video of him playing the Buchla and I thought 'Wow, okay a fellow Buchlist'. Then he sent me some of his music and I loved his refined sense of composition. Things evolve over time. I came to Paris and when I would come I'd say hello and have dinner with him and his family, which has happened a couple of times. It's been a surprising and lovely collaboration.
  Suzanne Ciani: Bach's "Goldberg Variations", the first recording. Avalon by Roxy Music. Those are my favourites, I really only have two. The third might be – gosh, I don't know what the third would be really. A lot of things, even though I love them, I don't want to hear them over and over again.