Information/Write-up
John Mills-Cockell is one of Canada’s most original musical voices — a composer, pianist, and electronic pioneer whose work has bridged six decades of experiment and expression. From his early studies at the University of Toronto and the Royal Conservatory of Music to his groundbreaking use of Moog and ARP synthesizers, Mills-Cockell opened a sonic frontier that merged technology, imagination, and emotion in ways no Canadian musician had attempted before. In 1968 he became the first Canadian musician—and among the first in the world—to perform live with a Moog synthesizer, debuting it at the Art Gallery of Ontario in what is now regarded as the earliest public Moog concert anywhere.
Born in Toronto on May 19, 1943, he discovered music through church choirs and piano lessons encouraged by his father, a passionate amateur singer. His fascination with sound deepened in adolescence when he first heard electronic music at fifteen. At university he studied composition with Samuel Dolin, piano with John Coveart, and electronic music with Gustav Ciamaga, becoming one of the earliest Canadians to explore electroacoustic composition. By the mid-1960s he was already winning national recognition, receiving a BMI Student Composers Award in 1967 for works combining orchestra, prepared piano, and magnetic tape.
That same year, Mills-Cockell helped found the multimedia collective Intersystems, with poet Blake Parker, light sculptor Michael Hayden, and architect Dik Zander. Emerging from the University of Toronto’s 1967 Perception festival, their performances joined architecture, poetry, light, and electronics into immersive, psychedelic environments that defined Toronto’s late-1960s avant-garde. The group issued three remarkable LPs — Number One Intersystems (1967), Peachy (1968), and Free Psychedelic Poster Inside (1968) — all now prized by collectors and later reissued to international acclaim. These projects grew out of installations such as Mind Excursion and Network, where sound, light, and sculpture converged to simulate a sensory voyage through music, poetry, and motion — among the first large-scale multimedia works in Canada.
During this period, Mills-Cockell became one of the earliest musicians anywhere to perform live with a modular synthesizer. After visiting Robert Moog’s workshop in Trumansburg, New York, he returned to Toronto with one of the first production Moogs — purchased on the same day as Wendy Carlos’s unit — and began using it in concert halls, galleries, and experimental theatre productions across North America, effectively introducing the instrument to Canadian audiences.
After brief collaborations with Kensington Market and Hydro-Electric Streetcar, Mills-Cockell formed Syrinx in 1970 with saxophonist Doug Pringle and percussionist Alan Wells. The project had begun a year earlier when Mills-Cockell, his wife, and young child drove west to Vancouver in an Econoline van, bringing the Moog with them. Early sessions at Baroka Studios in Vancouver laid the groundwork for the music that would define Syrinx. Based soon after in Toronto, the trio created an unprecedented blend of electronic and acoustic instrumentation — Moog synthesizer, electric saxophones, congas, timpani, and gongs — to produce music that was meditative, emotional, and free from category. Their self-titled debut (1970) introduced an entirely new sound to Canadian music, while Long Lost Relatives (1971) expanded the palette with orchestra and choir. Syrinx achieved national attention with “Tillicum,” the luminous theme for CTV’s Here Come the Seventies, and the suite Stringspace, commissioned by composer Milton Barnes for the Toronto Repertory Ensemble and broadcast by the CBC. Though the group’s life was brief, its influence proved lasting; decades later, their recordings were restored on RVNG Intl.’s Tumblers From the Vault (1970–1972), celebrated for anticipating ambient and world-electronic fusion long before such genres were named. In 2017, Mills-Cockell revived Syrinx for a performance at Moogfest in North Carolina with percussionist Rick Shadrach Lazar and saxophonist Willem Moolenbeek — a poignant reunion that underscored the timelessness of their sound.
Following Syrinx’s dissolution in 1972, Mills-Cockell spent time in England before returning to Toronto to focus on composition for film, television, theatre, and dance. His music appeared in more than a hundred productions, including the feature films The Clown Murders (1976), Deadly Harvest (1977), Terror Train (1980), Humongous (1982), and Striker’s Mountain (1985), along with television dramas such as The Italians, Stationary Ark, Labour of Love, and Half a Lifetime. For the stage he composed for the National Ballet of Canada, the Toronto Dance Theatre, and numerous theatrical companies nationwide, earning a reputation as one of Canada’s most versatile and expressive composers.
His solo albums of the 1970s — Heartbeat (1973), A Third Testament (1974), and Gateway: A New Music Adventure (1977) — carried forward the spirit of Syrinx in richly melodic, analog-synth explorations that fused electronic color with lyrical, often spiritual themes. Together they form a trilogy later revisited through the Pangalactic Performer retrospective. Later works such as Stella in Black and White (1994, with Blake Parker), Do You Hear the Rushing River? (1995), and the seven-movement Concerto of Deliverance (2004) reaffirmed his devotion to the emotional and poetic possibilities of sound.
In 2019, Toronto’s Artoffact Records released Pangalactic Performer, a comprehensive three-CD anthology collecting sixty-two remastered recordings from his classic 1970s period. The set includes Heartbeat, A Third Testament, and Gateway, together with the final studio sessions by Syrinx, an unreleased single titled “Marigolds,” an entire lost album Neon Accelerando, and the long-sought theme to A Stationary Ark. Featuring new liner notes by Grammy-winning journalist Rob Bowman, rare photos by Art Usherson, and a detailed 60-page booklet, the collection stands as the definitive edition of Mills-Cockell’s solo legacy and a cornerstone of Canadian electronic-music history. Alongside earlier archival releases — Alga Marghen’s Intersystems (2015) and RVNG Intl.’s Tumblers From the Vault (2016) — it forms part of producer William Blakeney’s JMC Retrospective, a three-part restoration of Mills-Cockell’s visionary decade between 1967 and 1977.
Over the years, Mills-Cockell has been recognized with the ProCan Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music for Film (1989), a Genie Award nomination for Terror Train, numerous Canada Council and Ontario Arts Council grants, and commissions across nearly every performance medium. Yet beyond awards, his real legacy lies in the creative freedom he helped open for generations of Canadian musicians — the understanding that electronic music could also be human, tactile, and deeply felt.
Now living on Vancouver Island with his partner Jean, Mills-Cockell remains active as a composer and teacher, writing new works for theatre and opera including Savitri & Sam and Kid Catastrophe. His lifelong pursuit — to explore the conversation between man, machine, and spirit — continues with the same curiosity and compassion that first led him to the Moog. “We were never a pop band,” he once said of Syrinx. “We were part of something expressive and exploratory.” That sentiment defines not only Syrinx, but the whole of his career — a six-decade odyssey in sound that still resonates with wonder.
-Robert Williston
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