Information/Write-up
Long Lost Relatives stands as one of the most remarkable and forward-thinking Canadian albums of its era — a record that manages to sound both handmade and futuristic, organic and synthetic, intimate and symphonic. Recorded by the Toronto trio John Mills-Cockell, Doug Pringle, and Alan Wells, the album expanded on the sonic language of their 1970 debut, diving deeper into the strange, luminous territory where modular electronics meet human breath and skin. If the first Syrinx album introduced the trio’s vocabulary, Long Lost Relatives turned it into poetry.
At the time of its recording, Mills-Cockell was teaching one of the first public electronic-music courses in Canada and performing live with one of the earliest Moog synthesizers ever imported into the country. That restless curiosity carries through every track here: shifting, shimmering tone colors that never sit still for long. Pringle’s saxophones, alternately plaintive and fierce, weave through Wells’s rolling congas, timpani, and gongs in constantly shifting rhythmic conversations. The trio’s improvisational bond gives even their most ambitious work a sense of breath and immediacy.
The record opens with “Tumblers to the Vault,” a warm curtain-raiser that unfolds like dawn light, followed by the suite Stringspace, four connected movements commissioned by composer Milton Barnes for the Toronto Repertory Ensemble. In these pieces — “Syren,” “December Angel,” “Ibistix,” and “Field Hymn (Epilogue)” — the trio’s electronic textures merge with orchestral strings and percussion in a dialogue that feels prophetic, anticipating ambient and world-fusion music by decades. “December Angel,” with its ghostly loon-like synth cry, later became a signature piece, adopted by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet for a pas de deux that kept it alive long after the band’s brief lifespan.
Side two delivers the concise and iconic Tillicum, composed for CTV’s Here Come the Seventies. The story behind it has entered Canadian music lore: the trio scrapped their first, too-somber version, opened a bottle of Mateus Rosé at nine in the morning, and recorded the new take at double speed. The result — barely two minutes of pulsing Moog euphoria — became one of the first electronic pieces to reach the national charts, peaking at No. 38 in June 1971. The album closes with “Aurora Spinray,” a meditative finale whose organ chords and suspended harmonies seem to dissolve into air, leaving behind the quiet hum of possibility.
Long Lost Relatives was nearly lost to disaster. A studio fire during recording destroyed much of the group’s gear, including Mills-Cockell’s Moog Mark II and portions of the master tapes. Toronto’s artistic community rallied with a benefit concert, helping the band rebuild and finish the album — a fittingly communal act for a trio whose music was built on collaboration, intuition, and trust.
Heard today, Long Lost Relatives remains uncategorizable. It’s not rock, not jazz, not classical — and yet it resonates with all three. The sound is deeply tactile: wood against metal, electricity through fingertips, breath across a reed. Mills-Cockell later said, “We were never a pop band; we were part of something expressive and exploratory.” That spirit is audible in every bar. Half a century on, the record still feels exploratory — an intimate conversation between man, machine, and the natural world, humming with wonder and still ahead of its time.
-Robert Williston
John Mills-Cockell: ARP synthesizer, Moog synthesizer, keyboards
Doug Pringle: saxophones, guiro, bongos, bells
Alan Wells: conga, timpani, gong, tambourines
Russ Little: vocal direction
Fred Balling: band coordinator
John Dembeck: strings
Berul Sugarman: strings
Stanley Solomon: strings
Ronald Lurie: strings
Sam Davis: strings
Vair Capper: orchestral percussion
Milton Barnes: string section direction
Produced by John Mills-Cockell with Eugene Martynec for Windfall Music Enterprises Incorporated
Recorded at Eastern Sound Studios, Thunder Sound Studios, Pathé-Humphries Studios, Bay Recording, Toronto, Ontario
Engineered by Dave Kalunbach, Don Stewart, Bill Roncken
Mastered by Bob D’Orleans at Audio Spectrum, New York City
All arrangements and compositions by Syrinx 1971 Windfall Music
Album art and photography by Bart Schoales
Liner notes by Peter Goddard
Tillicum was originally produced for CTV’s Horle Letterman show Here Come the Seventies.
December Angel was conceived for Pierre Radazzo’s solo dance with Toronto Dance Theatre.
Liner notes:
It was all too perfect, really. An illusion. The very best. The lighting in the art gallery was treated. Woman’s just so. The women moved easily, their bags slingingly everywhere.
And the wall materials were even more impressive, gloomy and bluewashed as an old man’s hands. Definitely posh, in a rare Toronto cocktail sort of way. And, right in the middle of it all, out-there as example and as failure and contrariness were Syrinx, in motion, on the floor, one of the town’s slipper known, drunken audio toys.
And you had to take a dry martini or two, to shake hands with somebody impressive, to know the band, and to say “totally lovely,” or “marvelous,” or that something else. He knew the band, he said. Good boys, weird music and good boys. And does anybody know a girl named Syrinx?
No. Nobody. The cigarette, or to talk anymore, even Kevin didn’t who was the band. But what’s done ends. And what’s left is the record. Or has to stay the record, maybe. Kevin’s not playing, nor Mike, nor John. And there are no amplifiers shattered beyond salvation on the final crashing notes. And Alan Wells recorded the group, and their “first LP” was done, were solemnly mixed up in it.
In the intervening years: percussionist Alan Wells joined the group, and their “first LP” was done, were solemnly mixed up in it. In the intervening years: percussionist Alan Wells joined the group, and their “first LP” was done, were solemnly mixed up in it. In the intervening years: percussionist Alan Wells joined the group, and their “first LP” was done, were solemnly mixed up in it. In the intervening years: percussionist Alan Wells joined the group, and their “first LP” was done, were solemnly mixed up in it.
No-one knew why, really. By this time Syrinx was getting rid of what pop had normally associated with pop. This was music beyond any traditional musical syntax. In fact, much of what was played taped for their planned second album (which a fire in the studio destroyed equipment and tapes for) changed its identity, sometimes going from rock ‘n’ roll to “found” music within a few bars.
And so, inevitably, this record Long Lost Relatives, by Syrinx, had to be something beyond their first LP.
Such music, of course, demands a new form, a new approach both rationally, emotionally, and internally, far beyond “the loss” of intuition, or “the seizure,” as a configuration, and into its relation to other fields, to other arts, to science, and to human understanding itself. For me, we are again searching, and I think Syrinx found a better sense of direction than that region, if only to understand, in our subservience to the total human, that we are not isolated, but a biological function of New Man Music, for yes, and Pop applauds that, if Pop only knew what it was doing, but that’s another story.
It cannot be categorized readily.
We may have begun easy to understand, vis-a-vis Syrinx and its LP Writer to the Listener, but I prefer to see Syrinx as the first Pop Art Group since 1967’s Tomorrow Never Knows, that was beyond its time. It’s almost possible now to regard Pop-electronic sound by Milton Babbitt, while a much-abused cliche, will yield a strange esthetic balance, but limit true musical understanding.
Syrinx, as a goodly piece of ‘programmed music,’ will never quite arrive at a complete esthetic balance. Like much modern jazz, it’s always searching for the justified moment of total unity between its micro-cellular composition (say, “Apparition at Noon”), and that ideal of Pop-functional form, that, in turn, becomes the whole of its esthetic structure.
Not quite collage; not quite piece-determined; but a kind of “instant composition,” that is much more in a consistent method of unity reflected in Miles, Riley, Evans, Weather Report, Ornette Coleman, Joni Mitchell, Lennon, Coltrane, in those words, truth as God is truth. The Word. Or any perfection of His.
But then, perhaps, that’s another story, again, yes. An academic word; study, understanding. Too bad the college people never realize how good Syrinx is.
I . T . J . T . . .
No. All this data cannot be computed to simple answers. There’s a touch here and there of the Columbia-Princeton… kind of theoretic composition in Miles-Colecutt’s training maybe, and, of course, that’s the clue.
On the other hand, Syrinx’s course continues to move toward a more direct, different blending, the cause-and-effect of Pop-electronic, and that’s what Syrinx stands for, the real mix. Mixing City and Country, the social and the mystical… Pringle, Miles, playing “sinc” literally.
But let me caution you. When you’re listening to this L.P., don’t kid yourself you just sitting there, and something’s been done for you, that a record’s a record, and it’s all there. No. Syrinx’s Long Lost Relatives is not a record to “hear,” but a record to be.
That’s not some dumb concept. But a statement of being. Of Birth, and Rebirth, and life and music’s natural sense. No. Each tone, each note, each rhythm, moves in its own defined order. Syrinx’s tones are generated to simulate what might best be defined as the interaction of the human mind, the totality of all its elements, and every “word,” and by definition, its interaction of things human and intellectually somewhere beyond.
Or, perhaps, the DNA molecule of the Heisenberg principles expanded. The new music is that, pos surreal, post plastic, but absolute returning to man. To being. To life only. And it’s not “art,” and it’s not “form.” It’s the total life-structure, and I think that’s what Syrinx is about.
No other group in Canada today (1971) does that better. And perhaps no other group anywhere else, period.
Now, how you listen to Syrinx, or with what set of preconceptions. You’ll listen to it as “that’s hip,” but point. Like the contemporaries of Debussy or the contemporaries of a Javanese Gamelan Wayang, it will seem fully itself or not at all.
No, Nothing else really matters.
PETER GODDARD
No Comments