Information/Write-up
Syrinx was one of the most unusual and forward-thinking albums ever issued on a Canadian major label — a record that arrived from nowhere, shimmering with both serenity and strangeness. The trio of John Mills-Cockell, Doug Pringle, and Alan Wells created something that sounded like no one else in 1970: a seamless fusion of Moog synthesizer, electric saxophone, and hand percussion that bypassed both rock and jazz to find its own quiet universe. It was an LP that didn’t so much declare itself as simply appear — mysterious, self-contained, and curiously beautiful.
Recorded between Vancouver’s Baroka Studios and Bay Recording in Toronto, the album marked the first major statement by Mills-Cockell following the dissolution of his avant-garde multimedia group Intersystems. Having studied under Gustav Ciamaga at the University of Toronto and built one of Canada’s first modular synthesizers, Mills-Cockell approached the Moog not as a novelty but as a compositional tool — a living organism capable of breathing, sighing, and conversing. Pringle’s electric saxophones and Wells’s gongs and hand drums supplied the human counterweight, giving Syrinx’s music its organic pulse. Together they built a sound that was neither entirely electronic nor acoustic — instead, something suspended between worlds.
The album opens with Melina’s Torch, a piece Pitchfork later called “wistful rather than weird.” Its melody glows like candlelight over soft waves of synthesizer, establishing the emotional vocabulary that defines the record. Journey Tree follows, unfolding like a slow sunrise, with Pringle’s sax wandering through gentle percussive patterns. The centerpiece, Chant for Your Dragon King, stretches past ten minutes, a hypnotic landscape where tone and texture seem to breathe in slow motion. Field Hymn closes the first side in just over a minute, a miniature meditation that anticipates the ambient minimalism of a decade later.
Side Two begins with Hollywood Dream Trip, the most cinematic track, balancing warmth and melancholy. Father of Light offers a brief rhythmic interlude before the eleven-minute suite Appalosa – Pegasus, a soaring finale that drifts from ritual pulse to near silence. What’s striking is how little of it feels dated. Even now, over fifty years later, the record’s gentleness, precision, and refusal to rush feel startlingly modern. As Record Collector wrote of the later reissue, Syrinx cultivated “a timeless strain of classically-nuanced psychedelia.”
At its release, Syrinx confounded nearly everyone. It was too meditative for rock radio, too structured for free jazz, too human for electronic circles. Yet among artists, dancers, and filmmakers, it found quiet admiration. Mills-Cockell’s keyboard textures and Pringle’s phrasing influenced an emerging wave of experimentalists who sensed that electronic music could also feel emotional, even spiritual. When modern listeners rediscovered the album through RVNG Intl.’s Tumblers From the Vault anthology, critics noted how Syrinx anticipated ambient, New Age, and world-fusion aesthetics long before those terms existed.
Listening now, it’s clear the trio wasn’t chasing trends — they were following intuition. Syrinx remains an intimate document of musical curiosity: the sound of three explorers learning how to breathe together inside electricity. The record feels both handcrafted and weightless, a gentle collision of invention and atmosphere. It may have begun as an experiment, but it endures as a quiet landmark — a first conversation between man, machine, and spirit that still whispers with life.
-Robert Williston
John Mills-Cockell: Moog synthesizer, piano, organ
Doug Pringle: electric saxophones
Alan Wells: hand drums, gongs
Produced by John Mills-Cockell for Windfall Music Enterprises Incorporated
Recorded at Baroka Studios, Vancouver, British Columbia and Bay Recording, Toronto, Ontario
Engineered by Rollin Newton and Frank Bertin
Mixed by George Simkewat RCA Studios, Toronto, Ontario
Front cover painting by Gerald Zeldin
Photography and art direction by Bart Schoales
All selections written by John Mills-Cockell
Published by Windfall Music Inc.
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