Mark Shreeve, an English modular synth master who made electronic music for decades, died recently at 65. He’s one of those composers whose work you’ve certainly heard—he worked often with other stars and his library music was regularly used by major broadcasters for segues and BGM—whose own albums (solo and with/as Redshift) are a world unto themselves and well-worth the visit. Early Berlin school-inspired work evolved to perfectly crisp, melodic instrumental synthpop; every other track could be the theme to a 1980s TV show about a ridiculously pimped-out prototype vehicle stolen from the U.S. government.
He was a cassette guy too. Preferred cassettes to vinyl! A man for this very season, but now he’s gone.
Here’s an old retrospective in Sound on Sound. Obituaries at Synthtopia and Echoes. After learning of Shreeve’s death in August, Jarl-Hugo Låstad posted some footage he had of him improvising in 1985.
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