An Electronic Revolution-Tonto's Expanding Head Band 55th: The Echoes Podcast

It has been 55 years since Tonto’s Expanding Head Band first took flight on the 1971 album, Zero Time. Recorded on their electronic array called TONTO, it predated by years the sequencer-driven recordings of Tangerine Dream’s Phaedra, Klaus Schulze’s Picture Music and Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. It was an album of thudding bass grooves, melodic electronic flights and deep ambient expanses, long before any of that became part of the contemporary electronic music vernacular.

You may have never heard Zero Time, but its influence reverberated throughout space music and popular music. Look at the credits on ‘70s albums by Quincy Jones, The Isley Brothers, Minnie Ripperton and many others and you’ll see the names of Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff, the creators of TONTO. But their best known contribution remains Stevie Wonder’s brilliant mid-70s quartet of recordings that began with Music of My Mind. They were all midwifed by Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff along with the TONTO synthesizer.

But it’s the album, Zero Time, that remains their most impressive and groundbreaking release, creating a new form of music that would be expanded upon by the aforementioned German artists, In the Echoes Podcast we hear an interview with Cecil and Margouleff recorded in 1996.

Read John Diliberto’s deep dive into Tonto’s Expanding Head Band.