Seastones
by Ned Lagin
“Ned Lagin’s artistic life is the dream of every musician. ”
He is a true 360˚artist who had the chance to be surrounded by inspiring philosophers, mathematicians, and musicians. He wanted to become an astronaut. He ended up becoming a musician, photographer, scientist, and composer.
His multiple capacities are easy to imagine when he spent his early years surrounded by relevant figures like John Harbison, Gregory Tucker, David Epstein, Noam Chomsky, Gian-Carlo Rota, Salvador Luria, and Jerome Lettvin. He had the chance to meet all people while studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Some of them inspired his musical and experimental career. For example, Noam Chomsky's generative grammar concepts inspired Lagin's thinking about creating generative music forms, and Jerome Lettvin connected him to cybernetics.
“He probably could have become anything he wanted with such a background, maybe even the astronaut he initially wanted to be ”
But after seeing the Grateful Dead live in 1969, his career moved to music more consistently. He started a correspondence with the leader of the band Jerry Garcia, and, in May 1970, he helped facilitate a Grateful Dead performance at MIT.
After this event, he visited the band in San Francisco that same summer. Lagin contributed piano to the Grateful Dead song "Candyman" during the American Beauty album sessions. He then played in several jams, and from 1970 to 1975, performed on stage with the group, playing Hammond B3 organ, electric piano, and clavichord.
Lagin, between the first and second sets of the regular Grateful Dead shows, started performing with Phil Lesh and other members of the Grateful Dead, versions of what then became his album Seastones. If you listen to the album and are a musician, it's effortless to understand why Seastones would even form an entire set at some concerts. Its improvised nature makes it the perfect landscape for extended jam sessions. Instead, the band was less inspired to jam; it would eventually segue into Grateful Dead's songs.
Released in 1975, Seastones is divided into instrumental sections from I to VII. It's based on electronically processed traditional instruments and vocals recorded by Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, Grace Slick, and David Freiberg and a cadre of synthesizers such as a custom E-mu Modular Synthesizer, an ARP 2500, ARP 2600, and a Buchla Modular System.
“Lagin was the first musician to perform live on stage with a computer.”
It's so funny to think about it nowadays when most musicians are sick of the presence of laptops on stage and sometimes even hide them on the floor. Seastones is one of the seminal commercial recordings to feature digital computers.
On tour and on the album, he used an Interdata 7/16 computer with a high-speed arithmetic logic unit and magnetic core memory, an Intel 8080 microprocessor system built by himself, and, at the beginning of 1975,, an Altair 8800.
